Some Jyotish on the Four Sights of Buddhism

 A student and I were discussing the charts of birth, renunciation, and enlightenment for the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. These charts are amazing and worthy of many blog posts, a goal for another time. They are sourced from Buddhist Astrology, a really excellent book.

Perhaps I can just say for now that witnessing a Great One's chart is like They are right there, in front of you.

What I want to focus on here is the Jyotish of the Four Sights. I can not do the topic justice, but I would like to add a bit to the discourse.

The basic idea is that Shrii Gautama saw as a young man four sights, "four holy messengers", that led to his enlightenment: 1. an elderly man, 2. a sick man, 3. a dead man, and 4. a saddhu (holy man/monk), in that order.

Some say he saw them all at once, a day before renunciation. Others say that he saw them at different times. Based on the birth chart of the Buddha, I am inclined to think that the sights happened at different times and also not right before the renunciation chart took place. The order of the sights also makes sense from the birth chart.

Rather than showing you about that, I want to show you here the more important themes raised by the sights themselves. Let's begin by seeing where the themes of one through four are in anyone's chart:

Some interesting patterns immediately emerge.

First, these four stages of spiritual development are all squares, at ninety degrees,  to each other, and if we use the Buddha's Virgo lagna as the ascendant of the chart, all of the four houses are the tamasic fixed signs.

Moreover, they represent the four aims of life which I have written about before: dharma, artha, kaama, and moksha (but interestingly, not in that standard order and not in the order of fire, earth, air, water like the zodiac).

Only the dharma bhava (ninth house) is not a dussthana.

Perhaps in the Gautama's super-high awareness, He saw that if we are tamasic, fixed, in some way, and we are, that the four aims of life could indeed still be fulfilled, but in the order of the sights, by being aged, sick, then dead, then a saddhu, or one could go straight to the latter, to dharma, straight to being a renunciate where age, sickness, and death (all three of which He experienced in that order and at the proper periods according to his birth chart) are for another day.

Just some additional thought structure from the Buddha's amazing life and appropriately amazing charts.