Thanks Bhantebkmudita wrote: ↑Tue Aug 13, 2019 4:20 pm Why the Buddha left his family life to pursue a samana's life? Because he saw the dukkha of human life, which is bounded by cycles of death and rebirth. Within it, he saw the ultimate unsatisfactory and painful nature(that is dukkha) of life in this samsāra world. He wanted to seek deathless. And he thought he found the path toward deathless. So he wanted to help those likeminded.
So the answer is, he taught what he perceived.
Correct me if i am wrong, but at the outset he had no direct knowledge of the cycles of death and rebirth. What he saw was sickness, old age, death and an ascetic. Knowledge of his previous lives came at a very late stage of his enlightenment, so his initial search for the truth had nothing to do with rebirth as far as i know.
I am also not sure if he went to seek deathless but to understand why there is suffering. His knowledge of the deathless came after his enlightenment.
He might have taught what he perceived (not sure) but the truth of what he taught is not simply by virtue of him perceiving it. In MN1, he described associating certain perceptions with the ultimate truth as lack of understanding.
The end of suffering seem to be a by-product of superior knowledge (certainty). If the mark of samsara is deception, true knowledge has to be undeceptive, not partial and reliable (the opposite of worldly knowledge).
But is the fact that suffering is the necessary entry point to certainty completely accidental? I remember Ven Dhammanado saying that the Buddhist view of the universe is that it has no teleology, but how enlightenment is then possible? Is the whole thing ultimately a pure chance?