The Trauma of Everyday Life

into the Four Noble Truths. At first, postenlightenment, he was a bit tongue-tied. It is said that in the immediate aftermath of his nirvana, he was convinced that no one would be able to understand him. “This world is anguished,” he affirmed to himself, “and even that which we call self is ill. No one will ever see what goes against the stream, is subtle, abstruse, deep and hard to see.” 1 People were too entangled in their tangles to open in the way he now knew was possible. Trying to articulate his expansive vision in the face of their disbelief would be tiresome, he thought to himself; it would be wearying and troublesome. “I saw vexation in the telling,” 2 the Buddha reminisced later, and he relented, it is said, only after the pleading of Brahma, highest of the gods, who implored him that there were a handful of people “with little dust on their eyes” who would be grateful for the chance to hear his teachings.
    Still, the Buddha was not immediately successful in articulating himself. He scoured the universe with his divine eye after Brahma’s intervention, searching for the two major teachers of his preawakening years. They had shown him how to control his mind, although they had not been able to free him completely from his pain. They were wise, learned, and discerning, the Buddha thought. They had little dust on their eyes. They would be ones who could soon understand him. But, as if to accentuate the unpredictable nature of reality, the Buddha saw that both men had recently died. One had passed away the week before and one the previous evening. At a loss, the Buddha set out to find five old friends he had recently spent time with in the forest doing self-punishing spiritual practice. On the way, the first person he encountered was another acquaintance from his days as a forest ascetic, a wandering Ajivka named Upaka. Upaka was immediately impressed with the Buddha’s radiant complexion but was suspicious of his claims of enlightenment.
    “Your faculties are serene, friend; the color of your skin is clear and bright! Who is your teacher?” the friend exclaimed. The Buddha responded with a long description of his accomplishments, proclaiming that he had no teacher, had freed himself by virtue of his own wisdom, and had peered deeply into the blissful nature of reality. He challenged Upaka’s ascetic worldview right from the start by affirming that nirvana was present in the here and now and not dependent on self-mortification.
    “I am an All-transcender, an All-knower,” he explained. “In a blindfold world I go to beat the Deathless Drum.” 3
    Upaka would have none of it and shrugged the Buddha off, unimpressed with his poetry. Deeply immersed in the prevailing ideology of his time, Upaka believed that painful experiences needed to be accentuated in order to yield their purifying effects. Everyday life was not nearly traumatic enough for him; he was out for something much more punishing. He had known the Buddha when both of them were engaged in torturing themselves as a spiritual pursuit. By subjecting themselves to extremes of hunger, thirst, pain, and physical discomfort, ascetics of their time hoped to liberate their spirits from the prisons of their flesh. To see the Buddha looking so healthy was one big shock—to hear him describing the blissful nature of reality while proclaiming himself fully liberated was more than Upaka could bear. Concluding that the fresh-faced Buddha’s realization was only skin deep, he walked on by.
    Upaka’s rejection of the newly liberated Buddha was instructive. It helped the Buddha to frame his teachings in the manner that we now associate with him. There was no point describing his liberating vision off the bat; it was better to begin with suffering. From that point on, this was the Buddha’s tactic. There is enough trauma in daily life to awaken the desire to be free, the Buddha taught. It is right here, already a part of us, already an underlying feeling in our lives. Painful experiences do not have to be cultivated specially—they do not have to be sought after or induced—there is already more than enough to go around. A willingness to face the feelings we already have is much more valuable than trying to escape from them (as the yoga practitioners of his time intended), exaggerate them (as the ascetics attempted), or minimize them altogether (as the materialists and laypeople tended to).
    The Buddha applied this logic to both pleasure and