The charioteer answered that the man had become ill and was not well. Soon, Siddhārtha saw an old man, asked what was wrong with him, and learned that he was decrepit and would soon die or cease to exist. When Siddhārtha returned, he told his father, who was incensed that this was allowed to occur. Once again, he tried to purge the city of these sights, but when Gautama went out again, he saw a dead man on a cremation bed. He learned from the charioteer that people pass on, cease to exist, no longer to live again, that this was the fate of all beings who were born and lived on the earth. This was appalling to Siddhārtha. Once again, he was out for a joyride and this time he saw a monk, wearing robes and walking with a begging bowl and stick. He inquired again, and the hapless charioteer told him that the holy man was escaping life to find the cause of all the misery in the world and to achieve enlightenment. Gautama had now seen all four of the prophesied sights and was appalled that old, disease and death afflicted living beings. He decided at once that he would find the answer to this, the greatest of all riddles, and told his father that he was going to abandon the kingdom and seek truth as a renunciant. He went off in the middle of the night and took only a brief look at his beautiful wife Yashodhara, to whom his father king Suddhodana had married him off at a young age. He peeked around the door frame to her sleeping figure and his young baby but decided that kissing her goodbye would be too much maya (attachment) for him to bear and still abandon them, so he simply looked and left without a word to anyone.
Out in the forest, he starved himself day in and day out, torturing his body in an attempt to see truth through self-mortification. He was close to death when it dawned on him that living a life of extremes was foolhardy, that he had absconded from a life of luxury to a life of extreme deprivation.
