“I remember when a crab-apple was my only daily food. I remember when a single grain of rice was my only grain of food. And my body became extremely thin and lean. Like dried withered reeds my arms and legs, my hips like a camel’s hoof, like a plait of hair my spine. As project the rafters of a house’s roof, so raggedly stuck out my ribs. As in a deep-lying brook the watery mirror beneath appears so small as almost to disappear, so in the deep hollows of my eye-pits my eye-balls well nigh wholly disappeared. As a gourd becomes shrivelled and hollow in the hot sun so did the skin of my head become parched. And pressing my stomach my hands touched my spine, and feeling my spine my hand felt through to the stomach. And yet with all this mortification I came no nearer to the supernatural faculty of clearness of knowledge.”
So for a long time he lay in the borderland of death, and had this been the end—O Light of the World extinguished, O Sun set at dawn!—but it was not to be, and slowly, very slowly, consciousness returned, and his heavy eyelids lifted and once more he beheld the light. And he thought:
“If I could creep down to the river the waters, warm and kindly, would refresh me, and thought would perhaps return to me, and a little rest.”
And painful inch by inch Siddhartha crept down to the river, supporting himself as he went by the extended hands of branches, and in a warm shallow of water, sparkling in green shade he lay, foredone, and it flowed about him gently, bringing healing.
And the five ascetics watching him from far off said to each other:
“He will die now; the ascetic Gotama will die now. It is not possible that a man so worn and exhausted should live.”
And indeed, when he tried to struggle up and leave the kindly water, there was no strength in him and he could not rise. And it is told that a heavenly spirit pressed down a branch that he might reach it and support himself. This it is certain he did, laying hold on a bough which dipped over its own image in still water, and he crept up the bank, dizzily, and seated himself beneath a tree, supporting his weakness against it, with closed eyes.
And now, being refreshed, he had power to reflect, and he said within himself.
“This way of mortification has failed me also. Like other ways I have sought this beats against a shut door and there is no help in it. My body is so broken that it can no longer support the intellect. I will eat and drink and strengthen this tortured body that it may still be the servant of the higher in me, no longer complaining of its own griefs and diverting attention from the goal. For it is possible that what I have already learned has prepared the way to Right Ecstasy and that in ecstasy I may behold the beginning of the Wisdom which in all the methods I have tried has been hidden from me.”
And even as he thought this the strong weakness overwhelmed him again and he could think no more.