“You see, in the Buddha's own time, roughly 600 years before Christ, one of the main forms of Indian spirituality was the search for liberation through extreme self-mortification.

When Gautama the Buddha himself was a young man, he was the son, as you probably know, of a North Indian tribal king in the clan of the Sakyas. And his father had, at the child’s birth, consulted the soothsayers. And they had foretold that he would either be a great monarch, or else he would be a Buddha. And the father didn't want his son, you know, to get mixed up in this religious business, and did everything to encourage him to follow in his father's way. He surrounded him with luxuries and enclosed him in a palace where he should never see any sight or hear any sound that would make him think about the so-called problem of life.

But the story goes that, by chance, he caught glimpses of suffering, of death, of disease, of poverty. And this so plagued his mind that he just had to find out why such things should happen to human beings.

And the story goes on to say that he finally arranged to escape from the palace, that he cut off his hair, shed all his luxurious garments and donned rags, and became a mendicant. In other words, he followed for seven years those teachers who said that wisdom and peace ultimately lie only through extreme mortification of the desires of the flesh. But after seven years, he found out it didn’t work. It hadn't brought him any peace at all. 

And so, after some time, during which he felt that he really had discovered the secret of the problem, he proclaimed what he called The Middle Way.”

— Alan Watts, Reconciliation of Opposites