The Trauma of Everyday Life

experience deeply, with attunement and responsiveness, and you may come to agree with me. Like the glass, this world is already broken. And yet when you drop your fear and open your heart, its preciousness is there too.
    The implications for daily life are manifold. With broken selves in a world on fire, trauma is everywhere. Bob Dylan, on his weekly satellite radio show, once quoted Richard Gere quoting the Dalai Lama quoting the eighth-century Indian Buddhist Shantideva, author of the classic
Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life
, on this point.
    “If you want to be happy,” Dylan hissed, “practice compassion. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.” Only Dylan could manage to make the word compassion sound sinister, although I think he was channeling something of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon when he did. If everything is burning, the compassionate gaze of a parent is a natural response to the flames that engulf us. There is sorrow in samsara, indeed, but also bliss.

4
    The Rush to Normal

    T he Buddha did not always know that the world was on fire. Nor did he always have a feel for its bliss. He lived his first twenty-nine years in a kind of protective bubble, not looking too much beneath the surface of things. There was a deliberate agenda on the part of his family to keep him sheltered from the outside world, much as overprotective parents of our own time try to insulate their children from the pressures they fear will overtake them, but he was also compliant with their agenda, up to a point. He had a luxurious life, with all of his needs taken care of and only the vaguest hint of unease. It is generally accepted that, apart from his infantile experience of loss, the young Buddha-to-be made it to his twenty-ninth year without ever seeing death, sickness, or decrepitude. As the story is told, only when journeying outside the palace walls in an unusual expedition with his faithful groom did the Buddha catch glimpses of a corpse, a sickly person, a stooped and aged one, and a forest recluse. So startled was he said to be by these “Four Messengers” that he resolved to leave his privileged life to seek one of wandering austerity.
    As safe and protected as he may have been throughout the first third of his life, the earliest days of his infancy were tumultuous. There was trouble from the start. Strange omens accompanied his birth, and the strangeness continued into his first week of life. His mother, Maya, said by legend to be a local queen, dreamed of being nuzzled by a white elephant on the night of his conception and delivered her baby from her side exactly ten months after her nocturnal vision. Standing in a fragrant grove of fruit-laden trees called Lumbini, a half day’s journey from the town of Kapilavatthu, where she lived, she steadied herself by grasping a low-hanging limb of a
sala
tree with her uplifted right arm and gazed at the sky as her child was drawn through her right side from her womb. According to legend, he was placed, standing on two feet, on the ground, where he precociously took seven steps to the north, lifted one arm, pointed his finger to the sky, and proclaimed something on the order of “I’m the one!”
    One early collection of Buddhist stories, the
, describes how the Buddha and his mother were honored in the immediate aftermath of his birth by two showers of water, one warm and one cool, descending from the sky onto their bodies. And shortly after this heavenly bath, a wise man named Asita, one of those mountain
rishis
, or recluses, who populate the Indian landscape, had a vision while in retreat that a great being had been born. He found his way to the family and, recognizing a series of signs and marks upon the infant’s body, prophesied to his parents that the child would become either a great monarch or a renowned spiritual leader. The joy he felt at discovering such a child was soon tempered by grief as he recognized that he, already old, would be dead before this great being would begin to teach or lead. As Asita began to weep uncontrollably at his realization, the young Buddha’s father became frightened.
    “What’s wrong?” the father implored him. “Will something terrible come to pass?”
    “No, no,” Asita reassured him, “there will be no misfortune. But a person of this caliber is unlikely to settle for the role of great monarch.” Tears streaming down his face, Asita took leave of the family, the birth of the infant already