The Trauma of Everyday Life

notable both what the Buddha said and what he did not say. He did not tell Kisagotami that this was her karma and that she must accept it. He did not tell her that she must have done something terrible in a past life to deserve such a fate. In a famous sutra, preserved in the collection called
, he explicitly rejected such a naive view of karma. In that sutra, when asked directly whether all of the painful things that happen to a person are a result of karma, he answered in the negative. “That would be overshooting,” he said. “Only one in eight such things are due to karma.”
    “You know the feeling of too much bile?” he asked his interlocutor. That feeling is due to a physical imbalance, not to a negative intention or an unwholesome thought or an unethical action. There are other such imbalances that cause disease and these, too, are outside our control. Similarly, he went on, there are unfortunate things that can occur because of the weather. Floods, earthquakes, droughts, and so on happen according to their own laws—it is not right to suggest that victims of them are in any way responsible or that they somehow created their fate. Other adversities are similarly random. Even acts of violence are not the result of karma, he continued. We often fall prey to them inadvertently, not because of anything we have said or done but simply because we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. 10
    The Buddha said a simple thing to Kisagotami when she returned to him. “You thought that you alone had lost a son. The law of death is that among all living creatures there is no permanence.” 11 He was not lecturing Kisagotami at this point. She was already transformed. Her engagement with the people of the village had developed her empathy. Instead of relating to them solely from a place of her own suffering, she had been inquiring after their own experiences of life and death. In seeing that she was not the only one to undergo such pain, she became more able to see the impermanent nature of everything. The Buddha was acknowledging the reality she had already glimpsed. He did not try to tell her the “truth” before she was ready.
    Later, after having taken the robes of a
bhikkuni
, or female mendicant, Kisagotami was outside on a hillside at nightfall gazing at the village below. She saw the lights in the village dwellings flickering on and off and had a sudden realization, one that consolidated everything that had come before. “My state is like those lamps,” she thought, and the Buddha shot her a vision of himself at that moment to affirm her insight.
    “All living beings resemble the flame of these lamps,” he told her, “one moment lighted, the next extinguished—those only who have arrived at Nirvana are at rest.” 12 Just as he did in the Fire Sermon, the Buddha articulated his central message. The parallel between the Buddha’s approach and that of today’s trauma therapists is clear. Even in this most undeniably painful circumstance, when dealing with the loss of a child,
pain is not pathology
. By creating an inner environment of attunement and responsiveness, even this most unendurable and crushing reality became not only bearable but illuminating.
    I was reminded of these connections recently by another patient, Alexa, an inspiring thirty-five-year-old writer who told me how upset she had been with herself for uncharacteristically losing her temper with her three-year-old son one busy weekday morning. Her story was not atypical for parents of toddlers: Her beloved child was beginning to wear her out. She was trying to get him dressed and fed and out of the house, and he was frustrating her at every turn, not wanting to put on his shoes, taking off pieces of clothing when she turned her back, asking her to play a favorite game with him, and altogether refusing to cooperate with her pleas. Having made it through his terrible twos, she was not yet prepared for how trying his threes could be. Exasperated, Alexa had unloaded on him.
    “You think the world revolves around you, and it doesn’t,” she cried impatiently.
    There was a brief pause in which he gazed at her wide-eyed.
    “It moves, Momma?” he replied.
    His earnest cry cut short her irritation, of course, and rekindled her delight in him. She still remembers the guilt she felt, though. Why would she want to say such a thing? How could she shatter his safe world view in an instant out of anger? His words functioned a little bit like a