Great Awakening

When someone asked the Buddha whether he was God, Angel or saint, he replied simply: "I am awake". These words marked the transformation of Prince Siddhartha into Tathagata Buddha. The etymological root of the word Buddha - 'budh' means to awaken and to know. As Huston Smith terms it: "Buddhism begins with the man who woke up".
The story of the Four Passing Sights is symbolic of the existential crisis which engulfed the sensitive prince. The images of disease, decrepitude and death deeply impacted the prince and revealed to him the essentially impermanent character of all things. He resolved to journey out in search of some thing more lasting and fulfilling. In the process, the prince found some simple home truths that he realised most people avoid. He reached out to his audience with these Four Noble Truths in his first sermon after enlightenment in the Deer Park at Sarnath. He reasoned that the kind of life we lead is 'dukkha' or suffering as all things are impermanent, and they leave a trail of pain in their wake. Even so called pleasures and privileges do not last- they actually cause more pain, together with the pathological insecurity of losing those privileges and pleasures.
The cause of this pain, says the Buddha in his Second Noble Truth, is our desires. It is the selfish desire of man to dominate, impose and separate, out of tune with the universal symphony, that causes this dislocation, this existential anguish. Each man, as Ibsen would say, "has shut himself in a cask of self".
The Third Noble Truth points to the need to overcome this limiting, self-created delusion of ourselves, which is causing this anguish, for only then would we "open up to the vast expanse of universal life", beyond our petty selves. It stresses on the human potential to overcome this anguish.
The Fourth Noble Truth chalks out the Eightfold Path as the way out of this self-seeking cycle: a kind of blueprint for a "way of intentional living" which will imbue our lives with meaning and purpose, as opposed to the kind of " random, unreflective lives" that most people lead.
Buddha does not offer any soporifics; he clinically places before one the harsh facts of life underlying the ego, and asks each one to go on the path of Right Mindfulness, which will teach us to distinguish between the abiding elements of life and the trivia which our mind is used to. Buddha's only recommendation for this mind-clutter is self examination.
Vivekananda regarded Buddha as the greatest seeker ever; "he never bowed down to anything, neither Veda nor caste, priest or custom. He fearlessly reasoned as far as reason could take him. Such a fearless search for truth the world has never seen".
And this rationality was ironically accompanied with infinite compassion and love, as the Buddha reached out to all, irrespective of status or creed, to help each overcome. In emphasising the impermanent character of all things, Buddha wished to rid us of all delusions, myths and superstitions. To recount the story of his life is in itself a Call of the Self: a reminder that one needs to separate the abiding principles of life from the trivia. As the Buddha would say: "Be a lamp up to yourself...".