There is no doubt in my mind that the Buddha was neurodivergent.
The man loved his lists, didn’t he? And there was only one true dhamma. One way which is right, with all others being wrong.
But he is right, and so were Jesus and all the other neurodivergent religious founders. Their way was the only way, because their way was the way of quieting the mind, transcending worldly pleasures, stabilising dopaminergic tone, decreasing suffering, and regulating your endocrine system.
They all taught the same thing. Walk. Pray. Meditate. Bow and go through rites and ensure that you stay regulated so that your mind does not get tangled in the maze of phasic valleys left by your environment.
But focusing on the Buddha - I believe his father shielded him from the world for so long because he was a highly sensitive person; common in both asd and adhd. There are reports of him hyperfocusing and entering trances while gazing at apple trees as a child.
When he grew he became restless and rejected that life. He bucked all expectations from his royal birth and went out into the world to do the exact opposite of what was expected of him.
He devoted his entire life to ending personal suffering. He reports that ‘if there is a sacrifice to be made, I have likely made it’, which implies he had tried all the approaches of the Brahmin elite while he still lived at the palace.
After encountering sickness, old age and death on leaving the palace, he went from the extreme of indulgence to the extreme of asceticism. He went through many teachers, mastering their approaches to the point where he was lauded as their equal, but each of these schools he found lacking. He entered the ultimate meditative trances and always returned to a mind which had a propensity for pain.
So he found his own way. He tried everything. Sleeping with corpses. Secluding himself and fleeing from every sound. Holding his breath to cause excruciating pain. Forsaking food to the point where he was emaciated as a corpse, with ligaments like thin strings holding his wretched limbs in place, buttocks like a camel’s hoof, declaring ’this is the greatest suffering possible for a human; suffering beyond this cannot exist’.
He travelled through the heavens and the hells and found them to be transient and temporary. And then, in his emaciated state, on the door of death, he was given a bowl of rice and decided ‘enough’, before sitting under a tree and using everything he had learned to break the bonds of suffering forever.
This level of hyperfocus and determination is hardly typical of the bell curve. This is the extreme of the extreme. Putting diagnoses aside, he was most certainly not mister-normal. But his lessons, being about the underlying human nature we share, apply to every single one of us. It just might be that neurodivergent demographics can benefit more because they suffer more.
Why would you put yourself through such effort and pain unless you already suffered exquisitely?
So any neurodivergent folks struggling to get a foot on the ladder: don’t worry. The ladder was built by one of you. All you need is an on-ramp.
The focus of higher practice may well be sitting meditation, but you can’t see the rocks at the bottom until the water calms down. I broke my trauma of self using knife-polishing, writing and walking. Only now am I moving on to the sitting practices, and boy are they easy and enjoyable compared to before.
There is a good chance that the Buddha broke his own trauma of self long before sitting under the bodhi tree. The fact that he talks about 4 encounters with nibbana to achieve arahantship suggests that he himself went through that very process. He may even have broken the self using his own intuitive techniques in the palace, with the clarity that came afterward being the impetus to leave. We will never know.
But there sure weren't many cars back then so he was probably an avid walker.
That very hyperfocus and obsessive learning which causes us pain will become our greatest tool once we see how the path can walk itself after the first few steps have been taken.
Maybe getting started is as simple as stepping outside for a walk?
/jb202509291320