The Trauma of Everyday Life

well, it is likely that there were never words about it, even as the child matured. Having been let down, the young Buddha was given a very early, if momentary, taste of aloneness. His mother’s disappearance would have become part of him, and while it would be premature to assume that he took her abandonment personally (since there was very little of a person present yet to take it that way), it is fair to wonder whether his personality would have been conditioned by his mother’s sudden absence. Her inability to sustain the thrill of bliss he brought her would have stayed with him, in one form or another.
    Maya’s predicament mirrored one that the Buddha would confront over and over again in his adult years. People could not believe in their own Buddha nature. Even Gotama himself, in his preenlightenment years, could not believe in his inherent perfection. He thought he had to extinguish himself to find transcendence. His mother acted out of a similar belief. Unable to stay with the thrill in her human embodiment, unable to believe that her physical body could bear her joy, Maya was forced to take refuge in her celestial bliss body, the only one that could hold the feelings evoked by her child. In so doing, the Buddha’s mother acted out an inadequacy that many a mother—like many a lover—is vulnerable to, an inadequacy fed by thoughts of doubt and fear that erode confidence and corrode connection. Doubting the capacity of her physical form to sustain the thrill of her motherhood, Maya was compelled to seek a self-state that split her off from her child. Like an infant forced to disconnect from his ruthless self when his mother fails to receive it, Maya could endure only by dissociating. Forsaking her body and her child, she survived by departing her physical form.
    While the main Buddhist commentaries emphasize Maya’s altruism in bearing the infant Gotama and then fulfilling her preordained role as a future Buddha’s mother by dying when she was supposed to, this other dynamic deepens her connection to the Buddha’s awakening. Many years later, after a six-year struggle and one of the world’s great self-analyses, the Buddha attained his enlightenment. Although he has become known for his proclamation of the universality of suffering, the Buddha’s most radical statement was not about suffering at all; it was about joy. The actual nature of life is bliss, the Buddha said, but this bliss is too often obscured by our habitual misperceptions. It is the egocentric life that is suffering, the Buddha realized, the life conditioned by conceit that needs a self to be built up and protected and separated out, in its own version of dissociation, from the rest of the universe. The Buddha’s discovery was not of suffering but of freedom. He did not need to discover suffering: Its existence was already obvious to everyone. What the Buddha found was that suffering was not irredeemable, that it is dependent, not only on the way things are but on the way we think and react. In uncovering the defense of dissociation, the Buddha spoke to his own mother’s dilemma, to the conundrum or conflict that his birth had forced on her but that she was unable to process. The thrill of bliss
can
be sustained in a human body, he proclaimed, once this bliss is understood as an expression of the compassionate connection that binds us all the way a mother is naturally connected to her baby.
    No one doubts, as today’s therapists like to remind people, that mothers suffer. But mothers (and fathers, too), through their identifications with their babies, do not ordinarily let their suffering be the last word. Love lifts them out of self-preoccupation and connects them to a joy greater than that obtainable through the satisfaction of egocentric desires. The Buddha’s mother glimpsed this truth but, to fulfill her function as the mother of a future Buddha, she worried about her ability to sustain it. The Buddha, in his awakening, saw the potential for boundless compassion inherent in everyone and realized that it need not make us afraid. Early in his teaching career, during the three-month period of the Indian summer monsoon, the Buddha, according to legend, traveled to the heaven realm where his mother had taken refuge to acknowledge the truth of the bliss she had felt when he was born. He taught her the basics of his psychology, as if to enlighten her about her own true nature. He had an obligation to the mother who had borne him and