Prince Siddhartha’s or Gautama’s search for enlightenment introduced him to many teachers. He also made five friends who had also given away the life of luxury and all of them practiced the ascetic life for six years. He practiced fasting and meditation to gather wisdom. Prince Siddhartha lived on one grain of rice every day. After some years, he stopped eating. He became thin like a bamboo stick and his eyes sank inside and with all the fasting, he looked like a living skeleton. But his desire to attain moksh (salvation) and enlightenment was so strong that he suffered his pain and hunger but did not break his fast and meditation.

Prince Siddhartha would also hold his breath for a long time and many a times he fainted. He would meditate wherever he would roam in the forest and was not even scared of the wild animals. After six years, he realized that this pain and suffering was not giving him the desired wisdom and he then decided to visit the villages and beg for alms.

When Gautama was travelling from one village to another, there is a famous story associated with him becoming Buddha (which means the enlightened one). A rich girl called Sujata wanted to marry and one priest told her to go to certain banyan tree near the Neranjara river and pray to the tree-god. Sujata acted on this and got married and also was blessed with a son. As the tree-god had fulfilled her wish, she made a delicious rice kheer from the milk of her cows and went to the tree. There she saw the Gautama meditating and took him to be the tree-god. She was delighted that the tree-god had come in person to accept her food which she had carried in a golden bowl.

When she came closer to the tree, she realized that Gautama was a saint who was in meditation. She bowed with respect and requested him to accept her rice kheer. Gautama ate the kheer and then threw the golden bowl in the river. He said, if I have become a Buddha, the bowl will go upstream. And when the bowl was thrown, exactly the same happened. That is how the ascetic Gautama became Gautama Buddha.