The Pali Canon's Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the Discourse on the Noble Search, preserves one of the earliest surviving accounts of the awakening attributed to the Buddha's own telling: a search that passed through two teachers whose attainments he judged incomplete, a period of extreme asceticism he came to regard as equally mistaken, and finally a night of meditation that ended in the realization the tradition calls enlightenment or awakening.
Later texts, composed generations afterward, elaborate the account considerably, adding the temptation and assault of the demon Mara, who is said to have sent his daughters to seduce the meditator and his armies to frighten him before the moment of awakening, and the earth-touching gesture, bhumisparsha mudra, in which the Buddha touches the ground to call the earth as witness to his right to attain enlightenment, an image that became one of the most common poses in Buddhist art. This entry treats the elaborated material as later devotional and artistic development built on an earlier, sparer core account, not as an independent historical record in its own right. The early text itself describes the realization in terms of specific insights rather than a single undifferentiated flash of understanding: an account of dependent origination, the chain of conditions the tradition holds gives rise to suffering, and the recognition summarized afterward as the four noble truths, both of which later became the doctrinal core the rest of the tradition builds on.