The Trauma of Everyday Life

While he stressed that most parents protect their children as best they can from such feelings, he also implied that such anxieties were always lurking. Like the relational therapists who followed in his wake, he was attuned to the “enduring, crushing meanings” unbearable affect states could evoke. His insights help explain a hidden and powerful aspect of the therapy the Buddha devised. Whether or not the historical Buddha actually suffered from the kind of primitive agonies Winnicott expounded upon, the meditations he taught in the aftermath of his awakening “hold” the mind just as Winnicott described a mother “holding” an infant. In making the observational posture of mindfulness central to his technique, the Buddha established another version of “an auxiliary ego-function” in the psyches of his followers, one that enabled them, to go back to his metaphor of pulling out an arrow, to tend to their own wounds with both their minds and their hearts. Far from eliminating the ego, as I naively believed I should when I first began to practice meditation, the Buddha encouraged a strengthening of the ego so that it could learn to hold primitive agonies without collapse.
    A friend of mine who spent years in India with a great teacher from the ancient forest tradition tells a moving story that, to my mind, makes the same point. Years after his beloved teacher had died, he was back in India staying at the home of his guru’s most devoted Indian disciple.
    “I must show you something,” the disciple said to my friend one day. “This is what he left for me.” My friend was excited, of course. Any trace of his teacher was nectar to him. He watched as the elderly man opened the creaking doors of an ancient wooden wardrobe and took something from the back of the bottom shelf. It was wrapped in an old, dirty cloth.
    “Do you see?” he asked my friend.
    “No. See what?”
    The disciple unwrapped the object, revealing an old, beat-up aluminum pot, the kind of ordinary pot one sees in every Indian kitchen. Looking deeply into my friend’s eyes, he told him, “He left this for me when he went away. Do you see? Do you see?”
    “No, Dada,” he replied. “I don’t see.”
    According to my friend, Dada looked at him even more intensely, this time with a mad glint in his eyes.
    “You don’t have to shine,” he said. “
You don’t have to shine
.” 13 He rewrapped the pot and put it back on the bottom shelf of the wardrobe.
    My friend had received the most important teaching, one that had its origins in the Buddha’s revolutionary approach. He did not have to transform himself in the way he imagined: He just had to learn to be kind to himself. If he could hold himself with the care Dada showed while clutching the old pot, it would be enough. His ordinary self, wrapped in all of its primitive agony, was precious too.

3
    Everything Is Burning

    T he Buddha did shine, of course, as his erstwhile friend Upaka could not help but notice. One of the names he was called in the ancient sutras was “”: he who shines brilliantly, while emitting multicolored flames, or rays of light, from his body. 1 It might be hard to reconcile the Buddha’s shining countenance with what my friend learned in India about leaving his unpolished flaws alone, but the two are actually related. The Buddha shone because the fires of his own attachments blew out. He was not trying to shine: It happened when he stopped fighting with himself, when he became able to hold his anguish as tenderly as Dada held that old aluminum pot his guru had left for him.
    The Buddha began to talk about this almost immediately after his enlightenment. Newly awakened and finding the voice that came to be called his “Lion’s Roar,” he began to put words on his breakthrough. He followed up his first sermon, the one on the Four Noble Truths given to his five former friends on the outskirts of Benares, with his next-most-famous teaching, known colloquially as the Fire Sermon. While the first teaching had been given almost privately to his five former companions, this one had an audience of a thousand matted-haired, fire-worshipping ascetics, drawn like moths to a flame.
    News of the Buddha’s attainments had spread fast. Camps of wandering sadhus coalesced around him, curious to see what he was made of. The Buddha, as was his wont, engaged them by focusing on what they were most attached to and most interested in. In a rare exercise of his miraculous