In the forest, Siddhartha studied yoga – meditation – with the best teachers he could find. With each he learned quickly what they had to teach, mastering their disciplines and matching their austerities, and discovered that they had not found the goal he sought. Siddhartha then struck off on his own. For six years he wandered in the forest, subjecting his body to all kinds of mortification. Perhaps, he reasoned, his teachers had not been austere enough to reach the goal. Perhaps through starvation he could break his identification with his body, winning detachment from its ultimate fate.
