15 Facts About Great Renunciation

Great Renunciation traveled to the river Anomiya with his charioteer Chandaka and horse Kanthaka, and cut off his hair.

Great Renunciation is described as intelligent, eager to learn and compassionate.

Great Renunciation was shocked by this, and found no happiness in the palace life.

Great Renunciation had been the witness to the departure from the start up until the transformation into a mendicant, which was exactly what he was required to see, to make the palace understand the transformation was irreversible.

Great Renunciation renounced his life in the palace in order to find "the good" and to find "that most blessed state" which is beyond death.

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The story of the Great Renunciation is therefore a symbolic example of renunciation for all Buddhist monks and nuns.

Great Renunciation is not only a part of the biography of Gautama Buddha, but is a pattern that can be found in the life of every single Buddha, part of a pre-established blueprint that each Buddha must follow.

Great Renunciation related these motifs to the association of the Buddha with the cakravartin, which would have made most sense during the rise of the Maurya empire.

Great Renunciation was partly motivated by the First Meditation under the tree when the prince was still a child.

In scenes of the Great Renunciation Departure, there often is a figure depicted standing next to Prince Siddhartha holding a bow.

In Gandharan art, the Great Renunciation is the most popular episode of the Buddha's biography, together with the Buddha's birth.

The scene of the Great Renunciation Departure is often depicted in such art with the sun and the moon positioned opposite one another, and a Taurus symbol, which scholars of iconography Katsumi Tanabe and Gerd Mevissen argue is indicative of the event happening at midnight during the full moon.

Some Gandharan frontal depictions of the Great Renunciation are likely to have been influenced by Greco-Bactrian images of the god Helios and the Indian counterpart Surya.

Borges saw in the Great Renunciation the anti-thesis for the realist novel: a story in which mythological motif is more important than psychology of character, and authorial anonymity is a key factor.

Comparative literature scholar Dominique Jullien concludes that the story of the Great Renunciation, the widespread narrative of the king and the ascetic, is a confrontation between a powerful and powerless figure.