The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (15 page)

The Buddha goes on to describe how emaciated he became. Eating only a handful of food per day, his eyes sunk down in their sockets as if at the bottom of a deep well; his scalp shriveled and withered like a pumpkin left out in the wind and sun; his arms and legs like hollow bamboo stems; his ribs jutting out “like the crazy rafters of an old roofless barn”; his vertebrae resembling corded beads poking through his backside; his hair, rotted at its roots, dropping out in clumps when he rubbed his head; and his body falling over on itself when he urinated or moved his bowels; he was a wreck. His five fellow penitents were rapt in his presence—never before had anyone taken self-mortification to such an extreme. Gotama almost succeeded in squeezing himself dry. He likened himself to a stone breaking a raw clay pot or to a raw clay pot broken by a stone. Breaker and broken were almost one. His five friends’ exhilarated responses notwithstanding, his intrinsic capacity to elicit a thrill of bliss in another was almost extinguished.

At this point in the Buddha’s story something incredible happened. Nothing supernatural, just a momentary thought. As Winnicott once wrote, describing how he had mellowed as a therapist in his later years, “If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy.”
¹⁴
A version of this happened for the Buddha. Unbidden, a childhood memory came bubbling to the surface of Gotama’s mind. Out of the blue, as if from nowhere, a lost moment arose. Stumbling over himself as he urinated, he was transported back to his youth. Barely able to stand on his own two feet after years of self-torture, the Buddha remembered himself as a boy, happily sitting under a rose-apple tree, the sun shining, a warm breeze blowing, his father some distance away working in the fields, and his own mind at peace. In some accounts he also remembered noticing insects, eggs, and worms cut up by the plow. He was overtaken, these accounts assert, by a “strange sorrow, as though it were his own relatives that had been killed,”
¹⁵
and compassion for the hapless creatures arose in his heart. In all the accounts of this memory, young Gotama was soon filled with tenderness and settled into the beautiful day, “and a feeling of pure joy rose up unbidden in his heart.”
¹⁶
Sitting under the
jambu
, or rose-apple, tree, he was suffused with this feeling, as if he himself were the tree with the sap rising within. It is also said in some later versions that the shadow of the rose-apple tree did not move as the afternoon progressed. The shadow remained still, sheltering the young boy as he sat cross-legged beneath it,
¹⁷
marking the moment as a special one.

However peculiar to be suddenly overtaken by this memory at the height of self-mortification, even stranger was the fact that it made him anxious and afraid. “What is this fear about?” the Buddha wondered to himself, summoning the curiosity that was to become a hallmark of his method. “Maybe I should take a look.”

In the self-analysis that followed, the Buddha came to the conclusion that the joy that had arisen under the rose-apple tree could well be something unexpectedly essential to the enlightenment he was seeking. Up until the dawning of this memory, he was driven by the belief that he had to purify himself of all feeling and lift himself out of his human embodiment to connect with something greater than himself. The defense of dissociation was, up to this point, unconsciously guiding his approach. In my analysis, he was also driven by his mother’s inability to tolerate the bliss he brought her, an inability he must have internalized and used against himself, fueling his unworthiness. After investigating the memory, which was in some way a rediscovery of that very bliss, the Buddha changed his mind.

“‘Why am I afraid of such pleasure? It is a pleasure that has nothing to do with sensual desires and unwholesome things.’ Then I thought: ‘I am not afraid of such pleasure,’” the Buddha considered, “‘for it has nothing to do with sensual desires and unwholesome things.’”
¹⁸

This was the Buddha’s critical insight and the pivot point for his entire journey. It was the moment when he began to trust himself, when he stopped being seduced by the appearance of holiness and made himself, in his own words, “a lamp unto himself.” His memory is talked about as the foundation of his Middle Path, the route he found between sensory indulgence on the one hand and self-loathing on the other. It was a new discovery, one that Winnicott was intuitively following in his clinical work, where he was fostering the conditions for self-knowledge by “giving understanding” to that which could not be ordinarily conceived. It was the moment when the Buddha began to chart a novel course for himself, going against the grain of his culture while opening up a new formula for self-investigation. And it was the moment when the defense of dissociation cracked and he arrived at his understanding, in Winnicott’s words, “creatively and with immense joy.”

The implications of the Buddha’s discovery are relevant even in our time. There are certainly people, even today, who are torturing themselves with self-hatred or self-denial in an attempt to shake themselves free. Anorectic patients, for instance, refuse food with as mighty an intensity as the Buddha mustered, and it is often the case that they are refusing feelings as well, substituting an obsessive need for control for their more volatile emotional lives. There are less obvious variations on this theme. A recent patient of mine, a speechwriter in his late forties with a longstanding but private interest in Eastern spirituality, came to me for guidance in learning about Buddhism. He was surprised when I urged him to relax into his conscious awareness of whatever arose in his mind or body. “I thought the point was to get rid of that awareness,” he said. Like the Buddha before his childhood memory, he wanted an escape from himself, imagining that the release of meditation was akin to a good rest. He was disoriented at first when he found that meditation, more than anything, made him more alert to the natural world. Walking in the forest with his young daughter, he was touched by how alive everything began to seem. The rest he was seeking came as a heightening of awareness, not a diminishment of it.

The Buddha’s rejection of the extremes speaks to another tendency in our culture. In our flight from the traumatic underpinnings of everyday life, we have become the opposite of the abstemious Buddha. As I was prone to do with my toast on my retreat, we look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want, and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets. We are attached not only to our possessions and our passions but to our smart phones, our tablets, and our devices, obsessively consuming connection while, in the words of MIT professor Sherry Turkle, “avoiding conversation.” This is another manifestation of the rush to normal that the Buddha warned against. We want to be like everybody else. We don’t want to have to feel dis-ease. We are wary even of the more subtle joys that arise unbidden when we get out of the way of ourselves. As Professor Turkle wrote recently in the
New York Times
, we want to be digitally in touch but often do so at the expense of a deeper conversation with one another and with ourselves. “I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod,” she wrote, “and for decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices. So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.”
¹⁹

The Buddha would have agreed with Sherry Turkle. In the moment of his childhood memory he looked up from his smart phone and unhooked himself from his obsessive self-preoccupation. He, too, was trying to be like everybody else, or at least like the very best holy man he could imagine. But, lucky for him, he had a spontaneous experience that surprised him. He felt the fear that often provokes a phobic response, but his curiosity protected him. He looked at his fear and it did not make sense. He began a conversation with himself that continued for the next several weeks and that culminated in his enlightenment. And he continued that conversation for many more years, with Yasa as one of his first contacts.

While the Buddha erred on the side of self-denial, not self-indulgence, his core understanding pertained to both. Up until his childhood memory, the Buddha had not recognized that the seeds of liberation were already present within. The spontaneous arising of his memory provoked a recalibration of his psyche. It resolved his conflict over how to relate to himself. If the joy he remembered under the rose-apple tree was not a result of the blind pursuit of pleasure, if it had nothing to do with sensual desires, then it must be intrinsic to the Buddha’s own nature. If it was intrinsic to his nature, then there was no need to turn himself into a stone or a dry, sapless piece of wood, no need to erode the physical and mental substrate of his being. If this joy was a key to enlightenment, then his approach had to change. How could he use this remembered joy to guide him on his path? He could investigate it rather than trying to wipe it out: He could engage it in conversation.

The first thing the Buddha decided was that if he wanted to sustain his joy, he needed to eat. “It is not possible to attain that pleasure with a body so excessively emaciated. Suppose I ate some solid food—some boiled rice and bread?”
²⁰
At this point in the story, a maiden appeared, a young village woman named
, who brought him some porridge or rice pudding called
. The five ascetics who had been cheering him on grew disgusted when they saw him with her. They thought he had gone soft, lost his edge, become a convert to some other guru, the way we might feel when a respected professor suddenly discovers the New Age. “The monk Gotama has become self-indulgent, he has given up the struggle and reverted to luxury,”
²¹
they cried. They left him and wandered on, searching for new inspiration. In the legends that have grown up in Buddhist culture over the years, this incident has taken on special meaning. As if to drive home the relationship between the Buddha’s childhood memory and the return of his lost mother,
is described in one famous text as having been the Buddha’s mother in five hundred previous existences.
²²
In another text she is remembered as a village girl who prayed to a local tree deity that she might give birth to a son. When her wish comes true, she brings an offering to the tree, sees the Buddha there, and assumes he is the tree god incarnate. In this version, the Buddha is recognized as having transformed from a dry piece of kindling into the essence of the tree itself. A psychoanalytic reading of the story would, of course, focus on the image of the breast.
feeding of
to the Buddha, in support of his childhood joy, evokes the short-lived mother-child union that drove his mother into retreat.