Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

Author’s Note

In writing this book, I took a deep breath and created new characters and incidents in the life of one of the most famous people who ever lived. Famous, but still very obscure. I wanted to bring Buddha out of the mists of time, to fill him out in flesh and blood while still preserving his mystery. Fact blended into fantasy centuries ago in the story of the prince who became a living god. Or is “god” the very thing he didn’t want to be? Was his deepest wish to disappear from the material world, remembered only as an inspiration of perfection?

The Buddha story, as it gathered momentum for two millennia, became chock-full of miracles and gods that got stuck onto its surface. Speaking about himself, Buddha never mentioned miracles or gods. He held a doubtful view of both. He showed no interest in being revered as a personality; none of his many sermons mentions his family life or gives much personal information at all. Unlike Christ in the New Testament, he certainly didn’t see himself as divine.

Instead, he saw himself as “someone who is awake,” which is what the word Buddha means. That’s the person I’ve tried to capture in this book. Here in all his mystery is the principal human being who ever gained enlightenment, who spent his long life trying to wake up the rest of us. Everything he knew, he knew from arduous, sometimes bitter experience. He went through extreme suffering-almost to the death-and emerged with something incredibly precious. Buddha literally became the truth. “Whoever sees me sees the teaching,” he said, “and whoever sees the teaching sees me.”

I wrote this book as a sacred journey, fictionalized in many of its externals but psychologically true, I hope, to what the seeker’s path feels like. In all three phases of his life-Siddhartha the prince, Gautama the monk, and Buddha the Compassionate One-he was as mortal as you and I, yet he attained enlightenment and was raised to the rank of an immortal. The miracle is that he got there following a heart as human as yours and mine, and just as vulnerable.

Deepak Chopra