The Trauma of Everyday Life

tarnished by thoughts of impending death.
    Three days later, the Buddha’s mother, Maya, died. The newborn, after exclaiming that he was the one, now suddenly was. The only one. Half of a mother-infant dyad, surrounded by surrogates but cut off from the most important person in his young life.
    How would he have coped? The rest of his family did not abandon him. They gathered round, gave him wet nurses to suckle on, an aunt to care for him, cousins to play with, and servants to attend to his needs. His father immediately entrusted the baby’s care to his wife’s sister, to whom he was already married, and she raised the infant lovingly as her own. But his father was unnerved by all that had happened in the space of the single week. The sudden and inexplicable loss of his beloved wife, on the heels of Asita’s uncanny weeping, had cast a pall over the entire birth. “A shadow of awe and uncertainty” 1 settled over the Buddha’s father, and he resolved then and there to keep his son from abandoning him as his wife already had. He would give him every luxury, indulge his every whim. “If the prince found nothing more to wish for, the king thought, the notion of abandoning the palace would never occur to him.” 2
    The Buddha, some years after forsaking his wife, newborn son, father, palace, and extended family despite his father’s best-laid plans, thought back to what his childhood had been like. His recollection functions as a kind of screen memory, telegraphing meaning beyond its immediate associations. In his reflection, the Buddha described how fragile he had felt as a child, how protected he had been from the basic sufferings of old age, illness, and death, and how at some point the protective edifice around him began to crumble. It is a good description of what today’s child therapists might call the first cracks in his grandiosity or his childhood omnipotence, cracks that usually come around the age of two or three but that, in the story that grew up around the Buddha, seem to have been delayed. In his reflection, we can see him getting a glimmer of disillusionment, realizing in a preliminary way that the world, despite his father’s best intentions, did not revolve around him. The passage links his dawning self-awareness with a nascent capacity for empathy and reveals, from a Buddhist perspective, how each emboldens the other. It was one of the few times in which the Buddha spoke of his own state of mind while growing up, and it hints at the pressures gnawing at him in the midst of his otherwise privileged upbringing.
    Here is how he described himself preserved in the Pali Canon, said by its adherents to contain the complete teachings of the Buddha, preserved in the language they were first written down in, several hundred years after a great council that followed his death. In this passage, recorded in the
Anguttara
, the Buddha reflects on the life his father and aunt created for him and gives a hint of his burgeoning discontent.
I was delicate, most delicate, supremely delicate. Lily pools were made for me at my father’s house solely for my benefit. Blue lilies flowered in one, white lilies in another, red lilies in a third. I used no sandalwood that was not from Benares. My turban, tunic, lower garments and cloak were all made of Benares cloth. A white sunshade was held over me day and night so that no cold or heat or dust or grit or dew might inconvenience me.
I had three palaces; one for the winter, one for the summer and one for the rains. In the rains palace I was entertained by minstrels with no men among them. For the four months of the rains I never went down to the lower palace. Though meals of broken rice with lentil soup are given to the servants and retainers in other people’s houses, in my father’s house white rice and meat was given to them. 3

    It is startling to hear the Buddha speaking of his delicate nature. The images that we have of him—as prince, warrior, forest recluse, and awakened sage—do not correspond. Yet as he makes clear further along in his reflections, he is clearly pointing to something central to his preenlightenment personality. Not only was he spoiled, he was also vain and insecure. Protected from any knowledge of mortality, he was perched on a precarious foundation. Having been led to think of himself as virtually immortal, at his core he felt himself to be as delicate as his surroundings.
    In the rest of this critical and revealing passage, right on