The Trauma of Everyday Life

there, and assumes he is the tree god incarnate. In this version, the Buddha is recognized as having transformed from a dry piece of kindling into the essence of the tree itself. A psychoanalytic reading of the story would, of course, focus on the image of the breast.feeding of
to the Buddha, in support of his childhood joy, evokes the short-lived mother-child union that drove his mother into retreat.
    The Buddha, in the aftermath of his meal, did not swing back to an embrace of luxury. He actually resolved something. There was a middle way, he decided. While he did not have to be driven by his feelings, by his body, or by his thoughts, he did not have to eliminate them either. His understanding deepened and his tolerance for ambiguity soared. His whole approach to meditation took a radical turn. Instead of seeking to break his mind with his mind, he let the joy of his childhood memory and the curiosity it evoked infuse and inform his technique. He let it become the platform for his awakening. While not forsaking the self-inquiry he had already begun, he let up on himself. He noted that his pleasure-driven thoughts and feelings, if carefully observed, did not provoke him to act. Like bubbles in a stream, they would come to the surface of his mind and pop. By not identifying with them, by not being caught up in their content, he could have access to a deeper joy, one that bore a stark resemblance to that which he had stumbled upon, and then forgotten about, in his childhood under the rose-apple tree and one that went all the way back to the thrill of bliss he had evoked in his mother at birth. Later, after his enlightenment, he called this new way of relating “mindfulness.”
    The Buddha’s discovery empowered him. In a short time, after walking to the site of the present-day Indian village Bodh Gaya and sitting under a large fig tree by the banks of the Neranjara River, he was filled with a rush of realizations. Primary among them was a fundamental shift in the way he approached himself. As one of his biographers, Karen Armstrong, has described it, he no longer had to pounce on his failings but could use his reflective awareness to become acquainted with how his mind worked, in order to “exploit its capacities.” 23 His days of dissociation were over. In its place was a newfound ability, one very similar to that discovered by Winnicott when he broke himself of his need to show off his intelligence to his patients and learned to wait for the joy of their self-discoveries. “I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever,” 24 wrote Winnicott. The Buddha found something similar. In enjoying his joy, he allowed his mind to unfurl. In a carefree gesture long celebrated in Buddhist traditions, upon finishing his milk rice the Buddha tossed his bowl into the river. It floated upstream, signifying the change in direction the Buddha now embraced, and then sank to the bottom of the river, nestling on top of the bowls of the three previous Buddhas from different eras, all of whom had had similar awakenings at the same spot. The clinking of one bowl striking the others was said to awaken the
naga
, or serpent, king dwelling there, alerting him to the proximity of yet another Buddha. This waking of the unconscious, as personified by the rousing of the serpent at the bottom of the river, was another way of describing the return of the Buddha’s dissociated affect. No longer plagued by a feeling of not fitting in, and no longer tortured by the belief in his own intrinsic badness, the Buddha-to-be embraced the thrill of bliss that had driven his mother to distraction. With this joy as his support and his humanity restored, his journey to enlightenment gathered momentum.

8
    Feelings Matter

    T he Buddha once gave a teaching in response to his followers’ repeated requests to explain the mysteries of the universe to them. Known to possess a “divine eye,” the Buddha was asked over and over again to talk about how everything really worked. Okay, he finally cried. I give up. You want to know about the world? I’ll tell you. The world that matters is what you experience. The world is your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, and mind; your sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations, thoughts, and feelings; the visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic, and intuitive consciousnesses that accompany them. Like a contemporary neurobiologist, the Buddha explained how each of his disciples was