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Bhagwan Buddha
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his experience and to increase the bulk of his progress. Physical torture had no place so far in his formulary and technique. It is but inevitable to subject the body to pain as one has to remain in an erect position throughout the period of meditational practices but there is nowhere any mention of a fast. Having followed both the teachers so far as meditational way of life is concerned, Buddha felt that he has not got the aduequate quantity of knowledge and enlightenment which he ought to have. Then he gave up meditational way of life in favour of fasting and starts a search for another teacher as is found in his biography. He fasted and fasted, so much so that any one who saw him could not ascertain whether he was a living body or dead. He was reduced to a mere skelton. These penances were mere pepanees unaccompanied by meditation. His teachers made no secret of it that physical mortification is the only surest way that led to salvation. This is why he replaced the former by the latter. But here he failed in the sense that he could not fatten bis spirit, with the prospect of thinning his body. Having been finally disappointed beyond limit, as he was bound to be, he gave up the way of physical torture also and again resorted to his former plan and programme of contemplative life. He now emphatically declared that the way of extinction did not lie at least in bodily mortification.
After these discussions we are now in a position to say that Buddha, having undergone mental disciplines, then physical and thereafter mental again, came to a conclusion that mere physical disciplines had no meaning and utility. The theory of simple physical mortification has had an inherent limitation of its own, meaning thereby that it is not an end in itself but only a means. Losing sight of this main fact, Buddha adopted physical disciplines as the only instrument with which to work out salvation. It was because of this only that he failed horribly. But Buddha would not have to experience. disappointment which he did had Buddha, like Mahāvira, not given the same weightage to physical disciplines which he ought to have taken as merely helpful in the manner of Mahavira. Thus, the statement made by Buddha to the effect that the way of liberation is not constituted of mere physical disciplines is, in a way, true because physical torture as he believed was the main item of external penance. Mahāvira's findings were just the reverse of this, meaning thereby that Mahavira accommodated it in his spiritual armoury as a mere adjunct to mental and spiritual exercises. This is why Mahā vira has raised it in a due, deserving manner and Baddha has denounced it outright. In sum, Buddha in the beginning took physical torture as the sine qua non of spiritual salvation but later gave it up so disparagingly that he went in the opposite direction and declared that meditational way and not the physical disciplines as he said earlier was the
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