Why did the Buddha take 7 years to attain Nirvana?
Since he was a pure-hearted person who had never sinned, why not a shorter time?
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Sign up to join this communitythe nirvana Gotama sought was a permanent nirvana.
being without sin will not stop suffering from hunger, heat & cold, sickness, etc
the only permanent nirvana is the complete eradication of self-view
it is not easy to comprehend the hallucination of self-view, let alone discover self-view is suffering
for example, the self-instinct of gotama was searching for nirvana therefore it appeared illogical or counter-intuitive to find the self searching for nirvana was the actually obstacle to finding nirvana
therefore it took gotama seven years to find nirvana because 'self' is a strong instinct in people