by Tang Huyen

The moment he tried it the first time, he awoke.
There was no other requirement. It was so to speak
the default, but nobody thought of it.

That's what the Buddha discovered that night.
He had spent six years in exhausting, unyielding
Jaina self-mortification and self-starvation, and
was just days from final success, namely death
by starvation, when he realised that it had been
a huge error. He took milk again, regained some
strength, remembered that in his youth he had
entered the form meditation, so now he entered
it again, in calm and peace, and at that point he
had found nothing in his mind that had withstood
questioning. He had strenuously chased every
option known to his contemporaries, from
unrestrained self-gratification at home in his
harem to self-mortification and self-starvation
as a Jaina monk living in the open, to every
form of meditation and speculation accessible in
the Gangetic basin, and found all of them wanting.

The only option left that he had not explored
was to give up control, to give up volition, to
give up thought, to give up imposition — he had
just spent six years in extreme imposition in
Jaina self-mortification and self-starvation,
during which he openly revolted against nature,
his human nature in toto, and tried to beat it
down across the board by sheer will — to give
up accumulation — he had amassed all the
worldly and presumably supra-worldly knowledge
accessible in his Indian milieu — and simply
to let go of all. Boom, he awoke. He became
Buddha (it means awakened).

In less esoteric terms, all he left himself with
was mere consciousness of what happens,
without any interpretation on top of it to detract
from it. He simply opened himself up to what
happened, without any norm and mold to fit it
into. In all his years of wandering as a homeless
beggar (bhikkhu means beggar) he had never
heard of such a teaching. It was so simple that
he had never even thought of it on his own. Any
norm and mold that one tries to fit what happens
into no longer leaves what happens to be just
what happens, but bends it the way of said norm
and mold, imposes said norm and mold on what
happens. The most severe form of such imposition
was the exhausting, unyielding Jaina
self-mortification and self-starvation that he
had just pursued diligently for six years, but all
the other forms of pursuit that he had explored
involved imposition, and he had never heard or
thought of absence of imposition, pure
non-resistance, the leaving what happens to be
just what happens — and not what one wants it
to be or thinks it to be. The moment he tried it
the first time, he awoke. There was no other
requirement. It was so to speak the default, but
nobody thought of it.

Colophon

Written by Tang Huyen and posted to
talk.religion.buddhism on 29 May 2006, in reply
to Jimi's account of questioning his mind and
finding nothing that withstood the questioning.
Tang Huyen responds by tracing precisely that
experience back to the historical night of the
Buddha's awakening: the moment after six years
of failure when he chose the one option he had
never tried — to stop imposing entirely, and
let what happens be just what happens.
Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen was a regular contributor to
Buddhist Usenet groups through the 2000s,
distinguished by rigorous citation of Pali,
Sanskrit, and Chinese canonical sources
alongside Western scholarship. This post gives
his clearest historical account of the Buddha's
awakening — stripped of metaphysics, told as
a story of a man who tried everything and
finally stopped trying. The "default nobody
thought of" is Tang Huyen's most pithy
formulation of the Buddhist discovery.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the
Good Work Library by the New Tianmu
Anglican Church, 2026.
Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

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