Buddha was born the son of a King. Despite having unlimited luxury, pleasure, sport and power available to him, Buddha felt something was missing. He looked out into the world and saw that people were generally disatisfied and had a distorted relationship to birth, illness, aging and death. He renounced his position as a prince and left the palace in the middle of the night to go on a spiritual search. For years, he wandered in the forest and received teachings from great masters. Though he fully accomplished the practices they gave him, he still felt something missing. As long as he had no answer to the disatisfaction, suffering and confusion of life, he felt compelled to keep searching. Even transcendant blissful states were of no comfort to him. He searched for a way to become free from the five poisonous states of mind. He practiced the severe austerity of renounciation and found that it did not lead him to enlightenment. Finally abandoning spiritual extremes, he sat down to meditate beneathe a bodhi tree, resolving not to move until his quest was fulfilled. That evening he realized that enlightenment is a quality of intrinsic awakeness that is in every one, our un-altered state of being. He understood that because people fall into day-dream like fogs of confusion about who we are, about others, about reality... we depart from this intrinsic state of awakeness. We therefore fall prey to the five poisonous mind states and all the dissatisfaction, suffering and confusion that ensues. He understood that the cause of this malaise is lack of awareness of the nature of mind (and therefore the nature of self, others and all things). He also saw that there was a pathway out of such ignorance. It is his life realization and teaching that became the basis of the wisdom of the MahaSiddha Tradition of Yogic Buddhism.

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