The Trauma of Everyday Life

fully developed, at the moment he left home, his mother’s heart would break. 3

    This is the most common explanation for Queen Maya’s death, the one that is generally repeated in Buddhist circles when her name is brought up: This is what happens to all Buddhas’ mothers. In Buddhist cosmology, Buddhas arise in every age, just when the world has forgotten the last vestiges of the former one’s teachings. In every case, it is said, the mother dies after the child’s first week of life. Were she to live, the various commentaries assert, her heart would be broken when her son renounced his family and fled to the forest to pursue his spiritual quest. It’s better, it is said, for her to die early, to be spared the unbearable pain of abandonment. It would be too cruel to subject her to such anguish. 4
    With great compassion for the mother, the various commentaries gloss over the effects on the child. It is left to the Buddha to put the pieces together himself. There is no evidence that as an infant he suffered in any material way from his mother’s sudden death. Nor was there any hint of neglect or abuse on the part of the aunt toward her nephew. One can only imagine that the young child took her for his own mother and bonded with her as such. It is likely that the infant, while having lost the opportunity to feed from his own mother’s breast, would have been fed by well-practiced wet nurses and doted on by the extended family of the Sakya clan, and it is even possible, had his mother lived, that his feedings would have been the responsibility of the same relatives or servants. He was certainly not in the classic position of an orphaned baby left alone in a less-than-optimal institutional setting, nor was he like the son of the poet Sylvia Plath, one year old at the time of his mother’s suicide, whose father, Ted Hughes, perhaps anticipating the boy’s own suicide forty-six years later, wrote of how his eyes “became wet jewels/The hardest substance of the purest pain/As I fed him in his high white chair.” 5
    But the Buddha, we can infer from his own remembrances, did not escape entirely unaffected. “I was delicate, most delicate, supremely delicate,” he recounted, without saying, and without necessarily knowing, why. He was “shocked, humiliated and disgusted” when confronted with old age, sickness, and death, and he was under intense pressure from his family to keep all three at arm’s length throughout his first twenty-nine years of life. Unsettled by the forces that whisked away his mother, he and his family dealt with the trauma of her loss in the usual way. They dissociated the pain, allowing themselves to go on, but in a compromised state. The Buddha’s delicacy speaks to this compromise. Without language for illness and death, with the whole thing cut out of his experience, there was a fragility in him that reflects the effort involved in keeping such an intense event away from his consciousness. As he himself reported, when he was exposed, as if for the first time, to the instability underlying his life, he suddenly realized he was “not safe.”
    A hint of the Buddha’s dissociation comes in one of the verses of the first literary biography of the Buddha, the
Buddhacarita
, an epic Indian poem of the first century CE by Ashva·ghosha, whose title means “Life of the Buddha.” Written in Sanskrit by a learned scholar who had converted to Buddhism,
Buddhacarita
wove the facts of the Buddha’s life—his birth, awakening, philosophy, and death—into a lyrical celebration of his teachings directed at the cultural and literary establishment of the day, to whom the Buddha’s teachings, six hundred years after his death, were still something of a novelty. In this particular verse, the young Gotama exclaims in horror at his first glimpse of old age on his second trip outside the palace. Here he can be heard describing the ravaged soul he has just seen:
His belly swollen, his body heaves as he pants;
his arms and shoulders droop,
his limbs are thin and pale;
Leaning on someone, he cries “Mother!” piteously;
tell me, who is this man? 6

    In some way, of course, at least metaphorically, the Buddha must have been peering at his own reflection. The old, sick man crying for his mother might just be a disguised version of his week-old self, weeping inconsolably for his suddenly departed mother. Belly swollen, body heaving, arms and shoulders drooping, limbs thin and pale; the description