The Tree of Enlightenment

not removed by means of wisdom, attachment and aversion are
liable to arise again.
e principal instrument through which wisdom may be
gained is meditation. Again, there is an event early in the
Buddha’s life in which his precocious skill in concentrating
the mind is evident. According to the accounts of the life of
Shakyamuni, immediately after witnessing the unhappy incident
involving the worm and the bird at the plowing ceremony,
the prince sat under a nearby rose-apple tree, and there spontaneously
began to meditate, achieving the first level of meditation
by concentrating his mind on the process of inhalation and
exhalation. In this event we have evidence of a very early experience
of meditation in the life of the Buddha.
Later, when he renounced the life of a householder and went
forth to seek the ultimate truth, one of the first disciplines he
developed was that of meditation. e accounts tell us that the
ascetic Gotama (as he was known during his six years of striving
for enlightenment) studied under two renowned teachers of
meditation, Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta. Under the
tutelage of these teachers he studied and mastered the various
techniques of concentrating the mind. In Chapter 2 I mentioned
that there is evidence which suggests that the origins of meditation
go back to the dawn of Indian civilization, to the golden
age of the Indus Valley civilization. It is very likely that the two
teachers mentioned in the biographies of the Buddha were exponents
of this very ancient tradition of meditation, or mental concentration.
And yet, remarkably, the ascetic Gotama left the two teachers
in question because he found that meditation alone could not
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