The Trauma of Everyday Life

flavor, taste, essence, or emotion of desire 11 —the Buddha was hoping to become free of his human foibles. He was literally attempting to empty himself of the sap that ran through his veins, turning himself into kindling for one of the sacrificial fires so common to the wandering forest ascetics.
    By subjugating his passions, keeping himself walled off from temptation, and deliberately challenging his body, Gotama hoped that he could drain himself of instinct and leapfrog into the divine. With the juice squeezed out, Gotama expected to make himself a pure vehicle, one free of earthly toxins and capable of spiritual sublimation. He was aiming to go directly from solid to spirit through his own personal alchemy of self-deprivation. He was said to make four times the effort of the other recluses, such that he came to be called
Mahashramana,
the “Great Wanderer.” 12 The traditional texts of the Pali Canon are unsparing in their descriptions of his dedicated self-abuse.
I thought: “Suppose, with my teeth clenched and my tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth, I beat down, constrain and crush my mind with my mind?” Then, as a strong man might seize a weaker by the head or shoulders and beat him down, constrain him and crush him, so with my teeth clenched and my tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth, I beat down, constrained and crushed my mind with my mind. Sweat ran from my armpits while I did so.
I thought: “Suppose I practise the meditation that is without breathing?” I stopped the in-breaths and out-breaths in my mouth and nose. When I did so, there was a loud sound of winds coming from my ear holes, as there is a loud sound when a smith’s bellows are blown.
I stopped the in-breaths and out-breaths in my mouth and nose and ears. When I did so, violent winds racked my head, as if a strong man were splitting my head open with a sharp sword. And then there were violent pains in my head, as if a strong man were tightening a tough leather strap round my head, as a head-band. And then violent winds carved up my belly, as a clever butcher or his apprentice carves up an ox’s belly with a sharp knife. And then there was a violent burning in my belly, as if two strong men had seized a weaker man by both arms and were roasting him over a pit of live coals. 13

    The Buddha goes on to describe how emaciated he became. Eating only a handful of food per day, his eyes sunk down in their sockets as if at the bottom of a deep well; his scalp shriveled and withered like a pumpkin left out in the wind and sun; his arms and legs like hollow bamboo stems; his ribs jutting out “like the crazy rafters of an old roofless barn”; his vertebrae resembling corded beads poking through his backside; his hair, rotted at its roots, dropping out in clumps when he rubbed his head; and his body falling over on itself when he urinated or moved his bowels; he was a wreck. His five fellow penitents were rapt in his presence—never before had anyone taken self-mortification to such an extreme. Gotama almost succeeded in squeezing himself dry. He likened himself to a stone breaking a raw clay pot or to a raw clay pot broken by a stone. Breaker and broken were almost one. His five friends’ exhilarated responses notwithstanding, his intrinsic capacity to elicit a thrill of bliss in another was almost extinguished.
    At this point in the Buddha’s story something incredible happened. Nothing supernatural, just a momentary thought. As Winnicott once wrote, describing how he had mellowed as a therapist in his later years, “If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy.” 14 A version of this happened for the Buddha. Unbidden, a childhood memory came bubbling to the surface of Gotama’s mind. Out of the blue, as if from nowhere, a lost moment arose. Stumbling over himself as he urinated, he was transported back to his youth. Barely able to stand on his own two feet after years of self-torture, the Buddha remembered himself as a boy, happily sitting under a rose-apple tree, the sun shining, a warm breeze blowing, his father some distance away working in the fields, and his own mind at peace. In some accounts he also remembered noticing insects, eggs, and worms cut up by the plow. He was overtaken, these accounts assert, by a “strange sorrow, as though it were his own relatives that had been killed,” 15 and compassion for the hapless creatures arose in his heart. In all the