The Saint 53
my destiny? Will sickness befall me as well? Yes, in all likelihood it
will, the servant admits.
And there is worse. Not long afterward, on another foray outside
the palace of enchantments, the palace of Self, the prince sees an
unmoving human form by the roadside. And what is that? It is a
corpse, your highness. The man is dead. He lives no more. And this
too— the prince knows the answer himself by now, no doubt— this
must happen to me? Indeed it will, since your life too must come to
an end, and if your end is like that of most, it will be bitter, terror-
fi lled, and riven with pain.
The last of the prince’s four encounters takes a diff erent form. To-
gether with the servant, the prince sees a lean man with a shaven
head, an alms bowl in one hand, a staff in the other, wearing a
saff ron- colored robe. He encounters a man who has voluntarily as-
sumed some of the attributes of the old man, the sick man, and even
of the corpse. This individual, who could have sought plea sure, as
the prince has done, has apparently sought something like the re-
verse. He has turned away from the satisfactions of the stable life in
pursuit of other goals, and he seems to have made this turn of his
own volition.
And who is this? Gautama wants to know. Why does he look the
way he does? Where has he come from and where is he going? It is
a monk, the servant tells him. He lives without a secure roof over-
head, in an unhoused state, far from the comforts (and the confl icts
and limits) of family. He wanders in the forests and he begs for his
meager food. He is practiced in the art of something called medita-
tion. He seeks wisdom.
What sort of wisdom does he seek? Gautama asks. He seeks some
way to deal with— perhaps to overcome— the sorrows of old age, sick-
ness, and death. He is searching for a way of living that passes
beyond earthly sorrow and delivers him, and perhaps in time will