The Trauma of Everyday Life

always shied away from this tale because of its implicit condemnation of sensual desire and the way it disparages the women, making caricatures of them. I understand the ostensible teaching that lust disappoints, that beauty fades, and that addiction to sexual excitement becomes a misery, but I have a hard time, in many of the story’s iterations, with the disgust the protagonist feels upon seeing the slobbering sleepers. It comes too close to the widespread male fear of female sexuality, or to male disparagement of sexuality in general, to make me comfortable. In many versions of the story, for example, the artists take great delight in rendering the attendants as prostitutes, painting them lasciviously while having the virtuous male protagonist stalk off. The judgment involved has always seemed to me unworthy of a Buddhist fable.
    It was not until I actually started reading the sutras for myself that I discovered that the common renderings of this story are not the original ones. The level of subtlety in the sutras is much greater. The Buddha, upon hearing Yasa’s panicked exclamations, did not support them. While he, too, during his phase of self-mortification, might once have responded similarly, he moved Yasa in a different direction. In an intimate conversation with the panic-stricken merchant’s son, the Buddha began to articulate his own unique understanding of the importance of curiosity, even in the face of the worst.
    “This is not fearful,” explained the Buddha, “this is not horrible. Come, Yasa, sit down. I shall teach you the Dhamma.”
    Yasa was immediately relieved. “‘This is not fearful, it seems, this is not horrible,’” he repeated, “and he was happy and hopeful. He took off his gold slippers and went to where the Blessed One was.” 2 Then, according to the text, the Buddha laid out a sequence of teachings. He took Yasa through a condensed version of what would eventually come to be called Buddhism. At the core was an effort to reorient Yasa, to teach him an attitude toward the world that was not frightened or judgmental but was, instead, at once realistic and hopeful. The seeds of this attitude lay in the Buddha’s own transformational journey, in which he moved from a similar tendency toward dissociation to a stance based in relaxation, investigation, and curiosity, in which he abandoned the extremes of self-indulgence and self-judgment (and self-torture) and embraced the joyful kindness essential to human nature. As the text describes it, Yasa sat down to the side of the Buddha.
    “When he had done so, the Blessed One gave him progressive instruction, that is to say, talk on giving, on virtue, on the heavens; he explained the dangers, the vanity and the defilement in sensual pleasures and the blessings in renunciation. When he saw that Yasa’s mind was ready, receptive, free from hindrance, eager and trustful, he expounded to him the teaching peculiar to the Buddhas: suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. Just as a clean cloth with all marks removed would take dye evenly, so too while Yasa sat there the spotless, immaculate vision of the Dhamma arose in him: All that is subject to arising is subject to cessation.” 3 This image of Yasa as a clean cloth taking the dye evenly is important. It suggests, in allegorical rather than psychodynamic language, that he was no longer dissociating aspects of himself. There was no longer a split between his ego and his unwanted feelings; there were no wrinkles or tangles to obstruct the fluidity of the Buddha’s insights. And with this as a foundation, Yasa was able to tolerate the traumatic truth: All that arises is subject to cessation.
    Yasa’s first response, that his vision was fearful and horrible, speaks to the traumatic nature of his insight. He saw something that broke through one of his core “absolutisms of daily life” and made him sick at heart. Perhaps he had the sudden understanding that the sensual pleasures he was relying on to support his ego were inherently insubstantial. Or maybe he was confronted with the pain of his own addictive craving. A careful reading of the sutra suggests that Yasa’s crisis was an existential one. It was as if he saw through the props he was using to avoid the traumatic underpinnings of life. His vision of his female attendants in disarray opened him briefly to the unstable nature of reality, but he could not sustain his insight. It frightened him and he