The Trauma of Everyday Life

However we interpret the stories of his growing up—whether we imagine him protected behind the palace walls from any knowledge of death, illness, or old age, or whether we see him caged by conceit so that he could not relate to others who were suffering—it is clear that he was raised to not have to think about unpleasant things like the death of his mother. He was protected, as much as humanly possible, from the traumatic underpinnings of life. For a long time, he accepted this as the status quo and felt entitled to it. He liked his lily pools, his sandalwood, his Benares silks, and the white sunshade held over him. But at some point, the unreliable nature of material comforts began to reveal itself. Death, old age, and illness began to intrude, and the conceit he had grown up with began to seem objectionable. Gotama had a rather violent reaction. He left everything, in what has come to be called his “going forth,” and set out to destroy his attachments.
    A famous story in the Pali Canon about one of the Buddha’s first followers, a rich merchant’s son from Benares named Yasa, explores this very theme. Yasa’s story, like that of the Four Messengers, has, over time, melded into the Buddha’s own biography, so that many people think the events described happened to the Buddha rather than to him. But the Pali Canon is very clear about it. Soon after giving his first discourse on the Four Noble Truths and just before his famous Fire Sermon, in the first flush of his enlightenment, the Buddha had a pivotal exchange with Yasa. Their encounter was a spontaneous one, the first he was to have with someone from the merchant class, and similar to one a contemporary therapist might have with someone suffering from panic attacks or phobias. It grew out of a sudden crisis in Yasa’s mind, an anxiety attack that eventually brought him face to face with the Buddha. Their exchange sheds enormous light on the revolution in the Buddha’s own thinking. For Yasa was struggling with something the Buddha had also wrestled with—and resolved.
    Yasa, like the Buddha, was raised in privilege and delicately brought up. Like the Buddha, his family also had three houses, one for the winter, one for the summer, and one for the rains. For the four months of the rainy season, he never went down to the city, staying in his country house where he was entertained nightly by female minstrels. He had quite the life. One evening, Yasa and his attendants fell asleep early. While it was dark outside, an all-night lamp burned dimly in their room. Before dawn, Yasa awoke and saw the women sleeping all around him in various states of disarray, their images partially distorted in the shadows created by the burning light. One woman was sleeping with her lute under her arm and another with her tambourine under her chin, while a third had her small drum nestled beneath her. “The hair of one had come unfastened, another was dribbling, others were muttering. It seemed like a charnel ground. When he saw it, when its squalor squarely struck him, he was sick at heart, and he exclaimed, ‘It is fearful, it is horrible.’” 1
    Yasa went running out of his house, the dire images of the beloved female musicians disgusting him so. Not quite ready to abandon all vestiges of luxury, he paused as he was going out to put on his gold slippers and then proceeded to walk to the city’s edge, to the deer park at Isipatana, where the Buddha was camping with his five ascetic followers, newly enlightened after hearing his first discourses. The Buddha had risen before dawn and was pacing back and forth in the park, getting his blood moving while doing his walking meditation. When he saw Yasa approaching in the distance, his golden slippers shining in the early-morning light, he sat down and waited for his arrival. As Yasa approached the Buddha, he called out, once again, “It is fearful, it is horrible!” Obsessive rumination had taken root in his mind.
    Over the years, I have seen references to this story many times. It is depicted in countless works of art and described, with various embellishments, in many versions of the life of the Buddha. Most often, though, it is told as if it were Gotama waking in his palace and seeing his own allegedly desirable attendants in a ghastly light. The episode is commonly portrayed as the immediate instigation for his abandonment of his wife and child, the Buddha’s first glimpse of the underside of carnal desire. I have