Between the Sala Trees: A Novel of Siddhartha Gautama

By DANIEL GALLANTINE

Siddhartha Gautama is the thirteenth life in the Ancient Civilisations series. He left a wife, a son, and a throne to ask one question that had occurred to almost no one privileged enough not to have to ask it, and spent the next forty-five years answering it for anyone willing to listen, prince and beggar alike.

Born a prince of the Shakya clan and raised in deliberately constructed comfort by a father determined to shield him from anything that might incline him toward renunciation, Siddhartha Gautama married Yasodhara in a union tradition consistently describes as genuinely affectionate, and lived a full, contented royal life until a sequence of encounters (with old age, sickness, death, and a wandering ascetic) opened a question his privilege had, until then, allowed him to avoid entirely. On the same night, by the most widely told account, that his only son Rahula was born, Siddhartha left the palace for good, a departure this novel renders with the genuine emotional complexity the earliest Buddhist texts themselves preserve, including the detail that his family may have known of his intentions rather than being secretly abandoned.

Years of training under two historically attested meditation teachers gave him real skill without the complete liberation he sought, and a subsequent period of extreme self-mortification brought him to the edge of death before his pivotal acceptance of basic nourishment, scandalizing the five ascetic companions who abandoned him, believing he had given up the spiritual struggle entirely. That moment of accepted food marked the discovery of the Middle Way, the foundation for his sustained meditation beneath a bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, his confrontation there with Mara, and his awakening at dawn into complete and perfect understanding.

Forty-five years of subsequent teaching carried him across the Gangetic plain to kings and beggars alike, founding a monastic community that would survive internal crisis, including his own initial, documented reluctance to ordain women, and a serious schism led by his cousin Devadatta, while spreading further than any single teacher of his era could have anticipated. This novel addresses each of these episodes with full historical honesty about where documented tradition gives way to later devotional elaboration, maintaining throughout the careful balance between reverence and accuracy this founder of a living world religion requires.

This novel follows Siddhartha from a sheltered princely youth through the Great Renunciation, years of extreme asceticism and the discovery of the Middle Way, the awakening beneath the bodhi tree, and four and a half decades teaching across every level of ancient Indian society, through to his death at Kushinagar in 483 BC, surrounded by devoted, grieving disciples, his final recorded teaching urging diligence in light of the impermanence at the center of everything he had spent his life trying to help others understand.

A reverent, historically careful reconstruction of the sheltered prince whose confrontation with universal human suffering produced a teaching that would eventually reach hundreds of millions of people who would never know his given name.

Between the Sala Trees is the thirteenth novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HFC9WB3Z
• ISBN13: 9798191752617
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"