The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (24 page)

From the stable spot of his newly recovered implicit awareness, the Buddha was attacked by waves of Mara’s forces. There are many versions of the story, depending on which sutras are consulted, but all contain three essential elements. Mara attempted to defeat Gotama with three basic strategies: “armed attack, assertion of superior merit, and attempt at seduction.”
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The Buddha described this series of encounters as the deepest struggle he ever had to face: more difficult than anything he went through even at the height of his austerities. Yet he had found the perspective that enabled him to survive. Not going out to bother the forces assaulting him, he was able to see them as psychical reflections. “Only when Buddha was able to experience the desires and fears that threatened to overwhelm him as nothing but impersonal and ephemeral conditions of mind and body, did they lose their power to mesmerize him.”
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In most versions of the story, the forces of aggression came first. Mara appeared to the Buddha as a warlord mounted on an elephant commanding a legion of threatening troops.
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He unleashed army after army, ten in all, their psychological equivalents portrayed as the following: sensual desire; discontent; hunger and thirst; craving; lethargy; fear; doubt; restlessness; longing for gain, praise, honor, and fame; and extolling oneself while disparaging others.
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Mara hurled nine storms at the Buddha-to-be—of wind, rain, rocks, weapons, embers, ashes, sand, mud, and darkness—but the Buddha had found an “unconquerable position,” an “immoveable spot”
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from which to experience these assaults, and they rolled off him, as a child’s attacks melt under the indomitable resolve and patient love of his parents. Mara’s arrows of aggression turned to flowers, his rocks to garlands. The rains failed to wet Gotama; the winds failed to ruffle his composure; the embers, ashes, sand, and mud turned to blossoms and incense; and the darkness faded into Gotama’s light. In later versions, developed in Mahayana Buddhism, the “immoveable spot” where Gotama sat became known as the
, or “adamantine throne, in reference to its unshakable stability.”
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The relationship of this diamond seat to the mind of the mother was not only implicit: As the story continued, it became ever more clearly portrayed.

Mara’s next attack was his most devious. It went straight to the heart of the Buddha’s trauma and required him to reach deeply into himself to manifest what his dreams had awakened. In the most famous scene of their encounter, Mara directly challenged Gotama’s sense of self-worth by asking him to prove that he was deserving of enlightenment. “By what right do you claim this seat?” he asked him. Pointing to his own armies, Mara claimed them as witnesses to his own superior standing. He was obviously an important figure, a celebrity in his own right, with legions of followers at his beck and call. “Who will be
your
witness?” Mara demanded. Gotama, who was clearly alone with no one to speak for him, appeared to have no good response. What kind of answer could he come up with when his whole approach had been based on a solitary pursuit? Having abandoned his family and friends and been forsaken by his five ascetic companions, to whom could he possibly turn to testify on his behalf? Mara’s challenge was aimed directly at the most vulnerable aspect of the Buddha’s psychology. If we understand Mara as the Buddha’s shadow, then his question was really the Buddha’s own question about himself. Deep down, the story suggests, the Buddha had unfinished business, even at the very brink of enlightenment. He was still missing something in himself, still grappling with issues of self-esteem, still trying to understand his delicate nature, still suffering from the unworthiness Mara was giving voice to.

The Buddha had another epiphany at this point. He talked about it in retrospect in language that once again evoked implicit relational knowing, as if he had remembered something long forgotten, salvaged something he did not know he had lost. There are many ways to interpret these words of the Buddha, of course, but there is no question his breakthrough involved a resurrection of forgotten feeling, a recovery of an unknown boundless presence at the heart of his aloneness. “Suppose a man wandering in a forest wilderness found an ancient path, an ancient trail, travelled by men of old, and he followed it up, and by doing so he discovered an ancient city, an ancient royal capital, where men of old had lived, with parks and groves and lakes, walled round and beautiful to see, so I too found the ancient path, the ancient trail, travelled by the Fully Enlightened Ones of old.”
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When asked by Mara to produce a witness to his self-worth, Gotama reached out and touched the ground with his right hand. “This earth is my witness,” he replied and, as if in agreement, the earth roared and shook. (“And as the Bodhisattva touched the great earth, it trembled in six ways: it trembled, trembled strongly, trembled strongly on all sides; resounded, resounded strongly, resounded strongly on all sides. Just as the bronze bells from Magadha ring out when struck with a stick, so this great earth resounded and resounded again when touched by the hand of the Bodhisattva.”)
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In many of the early representations of this famous “earth-touching gesture” (or
), the trembling of the ground was given anthropomorphic form. The upper body of an earth goddess, named
or “the Stable One,”
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emerged from the ground and bowed to Gotama with her palms together. As if the symbolism of touching the earth were not enough, the artists who later told the Buddha’s story made it concrete. A mother figure appeared and affirmed her connection to the Buddha, erasing his last vestige of self-doubt, testifying to his inherent worthiness, and frightening Mara away.

In a fascinating account of the role of the earth goddess in Buddhist iconography, the scholar Miranda Shaw traced the evolution of the deity’s representations in Buddhist art. She pointed out that in some versions of the story, the earth mother appeared not once but twice. In her first appearance she bore witness to the Buddha’s virtue and scattered Mara and his armies. They then regrouped, and she emerged for a second time, now with a thunderous roar, threatening gestures, and a powerful quaking. Thus, two complementary aspects of the mother were embodied: In one she was a nurturing figure and in the other she displayed her aggression. In addition, Shaw pointed out how intertwined the mother and the Buddha’s seat of enlightenment were. The base of the Buddha’s throne intersected her womb in the first sculptures to emerge in Buddhist culture. She
was
the “stable platform”
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of his awakening. Over later years she was portrayed as wringing rivers from her hair, washing away the forces of Mara with great cascades of water pouring down from the top of her head. She could also be seen offering the Buddha a spherical vessel in her outstretched arms, a symbol not just of fertility and abundance but also of the pregnant void of Buddhist emptiness.

Mara’s third intervention involved his seductive daughters. While they were sometimes reduced to personifications of lust, his offspring were actually goddesses who Mara insisted use their “thirty-two kinds of feminine wiles”
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to divert the Buddha from his course. But this, too, was to no avail. The almost-Buddha found that he could experience not only his aggression but also his desires as reflections his mind did not need to go out and bother. In the words of the contemporary Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor, “this does not mean that Buddha was either unaware of these thoughts and feelings or that they no longer occurred for him. Rather than deleting them, he discovered a way of being with them in which they could gain no purchase on him.”
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The daughters of Mara, unsuccessful in their attempts to seduce the Buddha, became transformed by his presence. Just as the arrows of aggression became flowers and the rocks garlands, the forces of seduction lost their edge. The daughters returned to their father and yielded their places to eight goddesses who sang the Buddha sixteen verses of praise. Even desire could not divert the Buddha from his course.

The Buddha’s enlightenment unfolded in the three watches of the night following upon his defeat of Mara. In the first watch, it is said that he remembered all of his previous existences, hundreds of thousands of them, recalling his name, race, parents, and caste, the food he ate, the length of each life, and the happiness and unhappiness he knew. The entire spectrum of his personal continuum came into view. While his awakening was also an awakening into selflessness, this did not mean that he lost the sense of his own subjective individuality. In fact, as his sense of personal trauma dissolved, as he connected with the maternal energy his implicit memory had unknowingly kept him apart from, his own existence across time became clear. The present became thick with the past and his sense of “stretching along between past and future,”
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the “unifying thread of temporality,”
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returned. While the traditional accounts are redolent with his recovery of past lives, in psychological terms the recovery of the first watch of the night speaks of the Buddha’s recognition of just that sense of subjective knowing that I was attempting to communicate to my father on his deathbed. From the stable spot of self-observation under the Bodhi Tree, with the earth mother as his witness, the Buddha was able to see things as they were. First and foremost, this involved seeing the vast horizon of his personal subjectivity. His individual flow of personhood revealed itself without obstruction.

In the second watch of the night, the Buddha understood what the therapist Robert Stolorow has called “the unbearable embeddedness of being.”
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He viscerally grasped the “inescapable contingency” of everyday life and began to formulate his theory of karma to explain it. “Moved by compassion,” one of his biographers has written, the Buddha “opened his wisdom eye further and saw the spectacle of the whole universe as in a spotless mirror. He saw beings being born and passing away in accordance with karma, the laws of cause and effect.”
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This vision, held in the compassionate embrace of his mindful awareness, helped guide the Buddha toward his final goal. Attuned to all of the unbearable affect of the relational world, he had no need for any kind of defensive fortifications in the face of it. As Stephen Batchelor has written, “When the stubborn, frozen solidity of necessary selves and things is dissolved in the perspective of emptiness, a contingent world opens up that is fluid and ambiguous, fascinating and terrifying. Not only does this world unfold before us with awesome subtlety, complexity, and majesty, one day it will swallow us up in its tumultuous wake along with everything else we cherish. The infinitely poignant beauty of creation is inseparable from its diabolic destructiveness. How to live in such a turbulent world with wisdom, tolerance, empathy, care, and nonviolence is what saints and philosophers have struggled over the centuries to articulate. What is striking about the Buddhist approach is that rather than positing an immortal or transcendent self that is immune to the vicissitudes of the world, Buddha insisted that salvation lies in discarding such consoling fantasies and embracing instead the very stuff of life that will destroy you.”
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