learned, beginning with the breath, to calm the beat of his heart,
leaned to reduce the beats of his heart, until they were only a few and
almost none.

Instructed by the oldest if the Samanas, Siddhartha practised
self-denial, practised meditation, according to a new Samana rules.
A heron flew over the bamboo forest--and Siddhartha accepted the heron
into his soul, flew over forest and mountains, was a heron, ate fish,
felt the pangs of a heron's hunger, spoke the heron's croak, died a
heron's death. A dead jackal was lying on the sandy bank, and
Siddhartha's soul slipped inside the body, was the dead jackal, lay on
the banks, got bloated, stank, decayed, was dismembered by hyaenas, was
skinned by vultures, turned into a skeleton, turned to dust, was blown
across the fields. And Siddhartha's soul returned, had died, had
decayed, was scattered as dust, had tasted the gloomy intoxication of
the cycle, awaited in new thirst like a hunter in the gap, where he
could escape from the cycle, where the end of the causes, where an
eternity without suffering began. He killed his senses, he killed his
memory, he slipped out of his self into thousands of other forms, was an
animal, was carrion, was stone, was wood, was water, and awoke every
time to find his old self again, sun shone or moon, was his self again,
turned round in the cycle, felt thirst, overcame the thirst, felt new
thirst.

Siddhartha learned a lot when he was with the Samanas, many ways leading
away from the self he learned to go. He went the way of self-denial
by means of pain, through voluntarily suffering and overcoming pain,
hunger, thirst, tiredness. He went the way of self-denial by means of
meditation, through imagining the mind to be void of all conceptions.
These and other ways he learned to go, a thousand times he left his