The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (10 page)

But monks, if you think that
death was due to the birth of the Boddhisattva, you are wrong. That is truly not the way to see it. And why not? Because she had reached the end of her life. With Bodhisattvas of the past also, seven days after their final birth, their mothers have died. And why? Because if a Bodhisattva were to grow up, his faculties fully developed, at the moment he left home, his mother’s heart would break.
³

This is the most common explanation for Queen Maya’s death, the one that is generally repeated in Buddhist circles when her name is brought up: This is what happens to all Buddhas’ mothers. In Buddhist cosmology, Buddhas arise in every age, just when the world has forgotten the last vestiges of the former one’s teachings. In every case, it is said, the mother dies after the child’s first week of life. Were she to live, the various commentaries assert, her heart would be broken when her son renounced his family and fled to the forest to pursue his spiritual quest. It’s better, it is said, for her to die early, to be spared the unbearable pain of abandonment. It would be too cruel to subject her to such anguish.
⁴

With great compassion for the mother, the various commentaries gloss over the effects on the child. It is left to the Buddha to put the pieces together himself. There is no evidence that as an infant he suffered in any material way from his mother’s sudden death. Nor was there any hint of neglect or abuse on the part of the aunt toward her nephew. One can only imagine that the young child took her for his own mother and bonded with her as such. It is likely that the infant, while having lost the opportunity to feed from his own mother’s breast, would have been fed by well-practiced wet nurses and doted on by the extended family of the Sakya clan, and it is even possible, had his mother lived, that his feedings would have been the responsibility of the same relatives or servants. He was certainly not in the classic position of an orphaned baby left alone in a less-than-optimal institutional setting, nor was he like the son of the poet Sylvia Plath, one year old at the time of his mother’s suicide, whose father, Ted Hughes, perhaps anticipating the boy’s own suicide forty-six years later, wrote of how his eyes “became wet jewels/The hardest substance of the purest pain/As I fed him in his high white chair.”
⁵

But the Buddha, we can infer from his own remembrances, did not escape entirely unaffected. “I was delicate, most delicate, supremely delicate,” he recounted, without saying, and without necessarily knowing, why. He was “shocked, humiliated and disgusted” when confronted with old age, sickness, and death, and he was under intense pressure from his family to keep all three at arm’s length throughout his first twenty-nine years of life. Unsettled by the forces that whisked away his mother, he and his family dealt with the trauma of her loss in the usual way. They dissociated the pain, allowing themselves to go on, but in a compromised state. The Buddha’s delicacy speaks to this compromise. Without language for illness and death, with the whole thing cut out of his experience, there was a fragility in him that reflects the effort involved in keeping such an intense event away from his consciousness. As he himself reported, when he was exposed, as if for the first time, to the instability underlying his life, he suddenly realized he was “not safe.”

A hint of the Buddha’s dissociation comes in one of the verses of the first literary biography of the Buddha, the
Buddhacarita
, an epic Indian poem of the first century CE by Ashva·ghosha, whose title means “Life of the Buddha.” Written in Sanskrit by a learned scholar who had converted to Buddhism,
Buddhacarita
wove the facts of the Buddha’s life—his birth, awakening, philosophy, and death—into a lyrical celebration of his teachings directed at the cultural and literary establishment of the day, to whom the Buddha’s teachings, six hundred years after his death, were still something of a novelty. In this particular verse, the young Gotama exclaims in horror at his first glimpse of old age on his second trip outside the palace. Here he can be heard describing the ravaged soul he has just seen:

His belly swollen, his body heaves as he pants;

his arms and shoulders droop,

his limbs are thin and pale;

Leaning on someone, he cries “Mother!” piteously;

tell me, who is this man?
⁶

In some way, of course, at least metaphorically, the Buddha must have been peering at his own reflection. The old, sick man crying for his mother might just be a disguised version of his week-old self, weeping inconsolably for his suddenly departed mother. Belly swollen, body heaving, arms and shoulders drooping, limbs thin and pale; the description certainly fits a bereft child as much as it does a sickly old man. And Gotama’s puzzlement at the sight has all of the hallmarks of a contemporary therapy patient struggling to make sense of a split-off aspect of his own self. Teetering precariously at the edge of his seat, such a patient, estranged from his emotional self, is likely to feel a bit confused when his true feelings start to dawn.

“Tell me,” said Gotama while staring at this vision of himself, “who is this man?” That is the question that came to preoccupy him over the next six years. Having woken up to the reality of death, sorrow, and loss; having seen his delicate nature; having a beginning inkling of the dissociated remnant of primitive agony lurking within, Gotama was poised to confront the harsh truths of existence, truths that, for him, included the inexplicable absence at the heart of his early life.

We now use words like “estrangement” and “dissociation” to describe the coping mechanisms people use to deal with trauma. But in the Buddha’s time such concepts could only be inferred. And although it has not often been recognized or acknowledged, the psychological teachings of the Buddha
do
suggest this phenomenon. For in order to become a Buddha, Gotama had to remember what he had never entirely understood and reexperience what he had only temporarily known. His task was different from
. Her losses occurred when she was an adult, and she could summon both her love and her grief when it became safe enough to do so. His loss occurred in an infantile and preverbal state. He had no way to remember his mother and no way to process his loss. And yet, before he could complete his journey, the trauma that configured his self had to be brought into awareness, experienced as if for the first time, and transfigured. The split that the young Gotama endured needed to be healed. The Buddha had to invent a therapy for himself and apply it. As one of today’s leading experts on developmental trauma, Philip Bromberg, has put it, “No matter how great the pain of being trapped within one’s internal object world, and no matter how desperate the wish to break free, it is humanly impossible to become fully alive in the present without facing and owning all of the hated, disavowed parts of the self that have shaped and been shaped by one’s earliest object attachments.”
⁷

For some reason, therapists writing about early intimate relationships between infants and caregivers like to speak of “objects” instead of “people.” The idea, I believe, is that babies are incapable of relating to whole persons, that they relate, instead, to objects (like the breast) or functions (like feeding, holding, or soothing). They become attached to these objects or functions or traumatized by the lack of them. If they are hungry, for instance, they do not yet know they are hungry; they are moved by a physiological and biological urge to cry out. It is up to the parents, the “objects” of the baby’s subjective experience, to respond to the baby’s cry. When a therapist writes about being “trapped in one’s internal object world,” he is writing about being trapped by primitive agonies, about the constraints dissociated traumas put on the mind. While the Buddha’s story is traditionally related in metaphorical, not psychological, language, a careful examination of it reveals a similar psychological process underlying it. Just as described above, the Buddha could become “fully alive in the present” only by engaging with the “hated, disavowed parts of the self” that were configured by his earliest relationships. He found a method of dealing with dissociation before there was even a concept of it. In so doing, he not only awoke to his own Buddha nature but also came to understand it as a reflection of his lost mother.

Therapists today have a language for trauma’s impact on the mind. They recognize that the mind’s primary defense against agony is dissociation and that the primary motivation for dissociation is stability. Especially in situations in which unbearable emotions are stirred up, the self’s only choice is to wall itself off from whatever is threatening it, to remove itself from what it cannot regulate. My friend whose parents were both alcoholics with violent tempers became a person who was always most eager to please. Her parents used to have terrible arguments, smashing furniture while she cowered with her siblings under the bed. Yet she showed not a trace of her anger or fear to anyone as she moved into her adulthood. She was ultracapable but suffered, in her thirties, from what seemed to her to be irrational bouts of intense anxiety about her children’s safety and well-being. This capacity for dissociation is a survival mechanism. It allows us to go forward with our lives but in a compromised condition. The shock of trauma sits outside awareness like a coiled spring. The emotions aroused—which by their very “unbearable” nature cannot be imagined—are left unexplored. The self that moves forward is restricted by its failure to integrate the traumatic impact, by its failure to process its unbearable feelings. In its attempts to “ensure that what has already happened is unlikely ever to be repeated in the same way,”
⁸
the defense of dissociation splits the self into a fiefdom of incompatible states. “The price for this protection,” says Bromberg, “is to plunder future personality development of its resiliency and render it into a fiercely protected constellation of relatively unbridgeable self-states, each rigidly holding its own truth and its own reality ‘on call,’ ready to come ‘on stage’ as needed, but immune to the potentially valuable input from other aspects of self.”
⁹
One of the consequences of this defense is that the self is depleted of emotional depth and fluidity. “Dissociation shows its signature not by disavowing aspects of mental
contents
per se, but through the patient’s alienation from aspects of
self
that are inconsistent with his experience of ‘me’ at a given moment. It functions because conflict is
unbearable
to the mind, not because it is
unpleasant.
”
¹⁰

In the second chapter of Ashva·ghosha’s
Buddhacarita
there is a single verse about the demise of the future Buddha’s mother that speaks directly to the defense of dissociation. Written in Sanskrit, the verse was recently translated as follows:

But when queen Maya saw the immense might

of her son, like that of a seer divine,

she could not bear the delight it caused her;

so she departed to dwell in heaven.
¹¹

I was startled when I first came upon this verse. “The immense might” of the infant! His mother’s inability to “bear the delight it caused her”! The verse seemed to support Winnicott’s descriptions of the merciless way an infant loves his mother, the way he beats her like a drum with a mix of what we in hindsight would call need, hunger, love, aggression, and entitlement but that in an infant comes all in one package, undifferentiated, like a force of nature. As Winnicott explained in an early paper, “The normal child enjoys a ruthless relation to his mother, mostly showing in play, and he needs his mother because only she can be expected to tolerate his ruthless relation to her even in play, because this really hurts her and wears her out. Without this play with her he can only hide a ruthless self and give it life in a state of dissociation.”
¹²

The translation of the Buddhist verse hints at a very similar psychodynamic. What kind of message did the infant Buddha receive from Maya when she died? Did he need to hide his ruthless self in deference to his mother’s reaction? Was this what his father covertly demanded of him by structuring his subsequent life to have no reference to old age, illness, or death? Is this what made him feel so delicate? If Winnicott’s musings apply, in what later state of dissociation would he have been able to give life back to his ruthless self? As we shall see, there is evidence to suggest that his six years in the forest after leaving home provided him ample opportunity to dwell within just the sort of dissociated state Winnicott envisioned.