The Trauma of Everyday Life

CHAPTER ELEVEN: REFLECTIONS OF MIND

When my father was dying from his brain tumor, I realized that I had never had a conversation with him about anything spiritual. He was a scientist and, while he was proud of my success as a writer, he never expressed any real interest in the kinds of things I was thinking about. I was reluctant to engage him in too much discussion, knowing that he was not interested, and that seemed fine with him. When it became clear that his malignant brain tumor was inoperable, however, and that his days were severely numbered, I began to wonder if I shouldn’t try to talk to him about what I had learned from Buddhism. This was a challenge, not because of his tumor, which was deep in the right side of his brain and had not affected his cognitive abilities, but because I needed to find of way of talking to him in plain language, without recourse to concepts he did not believe in. I called him on the phone from my office, not knowing that several days later he would slip into a coma from which he would never emerge, an unintentional infection from a brain biopsy several weeks previously taking its iatrogenic toll.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, my father, although a physician, successfully avoided the subject of his own mortality for much of his life. This is not an uncommon strategy for dealing with death and there are many sutras in the Buddhist canon that show the Buddha confronting it with whatever persuasiveness he can muster. In one such sutra, known as the Simile of the Mountain, the Buddha asked a local ruler, King Pasenadi, how he would feel if a huge mountain were to come bearing down on him from the East, crushing all living beings in its path. He conjured the mountain expertly, making the king imagine a gigantic mass moving inexorably toward him, rolling over all things. Then he repeated the question but had the mountain coming from the North, then the South and finally the West. By the time he was finished the poor King, ostensibly secure behind his four-fold fortifications of elephants, chariots, cavalry and infantry, was being crushed from all sides. This is what death is like, the Buddha trumpeted. It’s coming, you don’t know from which direction, and you are powerless to stop it. He seemed almost gleeful. 

Why was this such a profound teaching for the King? Even now the words retain their threatening power. Don’t we know all this already? Is death really such a surprise? The Buddha suggested that we do not really know it, even though we may mouth the words. The tendency toward denial runs very deep. We don’t actually think it can happen to us. Or, rather, we can’t actually imagine it happening to us. The Buddha’s incantation brought the reality home, at least for an instant, for King Pasenadi. The King inclined his mind toward the truth, brought it into his explicit awareness, and became receptive to the Buddha’s teachings.

One of the most obvious reasons for avoiding the reality of death is that we do not know how to deal with it. The Buddha, in making King Pasenadi see the impotence of his fortifications, was making this very point. We think we have to erect barriers to it, or find weapons to fight it, but this does not work very well. The Buddha discovered a softer approach, one that he was urging the King toward. In his recovery of implicit relational knowing, as personified in his five great dreams, he found the key to navigating the inevitable traumas of life, including that of death. 

My father already had the mountain on top of him. He had worked until he was 84, until he got lost one day driving the same ten-minute route home from work he had taken for the past forty years. The mountain, in the form of the tumor, was already inside his brain. Not used to facing a challenge he could not overcome with his intelligence, there was an air of resignation hovering over this, our last conversation. 

“You know the feeling of yourself deep inside that hasn’t really changed since you were a boy?” I began. “The way you have felt the same to yourself as a young man, in middle age, and even now?” 

My father voiced his assent. I was trying to summon the place of intrinsic relational knowing for him. It is there, in our own subjectivity, although it is difficult to describe. We know ourselves from the inside: we have an intuitive feel for ourselves that is outside of thought. And we relate to other people, indeed to the world, from this place. Most of the time, in our busyness, we gloss right over it, but it is there in the background and we return to it in our private, unscripted, moments: when listening to music, taking a walk or going to sleep, for example. In my mind I was remembering one of my Buddhist teachers asking me to find “what” (not “who”) was knowing the sounds I was hearing when I was meditating. “Can you find what is knowing?” he would often question, as I turned my attention to the sounds of the meditation hall. The very effort to find ‘what was knowing’ (although it was impossible to find) opened up a peaceful oasis of calm awareness in which I learned to abide. “Even though we can’t find what is knowing, knowing is there,” my teacher would say. This affirmation was a traditional Buddhist way of bringing implicit relational knowing into explicit awareness. “Knowing is there.” It was impossible to refute. 

My father, as best as I could gather, seemed to understand what I was getting at. 

“It’s kind of transparent, that feeling,” I went on. “You know what it is, but it’s hard to put your finger on it. You can just relax your mind into that space, though. The body comes apart but you can rest in who you have always been.” Death is like taking off a tight shoe, I wanted to tell him, but I wasn’t sure he would believe me if I went that far in the conversation. Yet I thought, with his scientist mind, he might just sense the possibility of investigating what I was suggesting. If the Buddha was to be believed, there was a place of lucidity from which even dying could be observed. 

“Ok, darling, I’ll try,” he replied. I wondered for an instant if he was being patronizing but decided he was not. He often called me darling, and I was glad for it, in the end.

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第十一章：心境的倒影

　　當我的父親因腦瘤過世後，我才驚覺我從來沒有跟他好好聊過。我在寫作方面得到的成功，身為科學家的他也深以為傲，但他卻不曾對我的思想表示過一點興趣。我不願與他多做討論，我知道他不感興趣，他似乎也覺得這樣挺好的。當他腦中的惡性腫瘤日趨惡化、剩下的日子屈指可數時，我開始猶豫我是不是應該跟他談談我在佛學中體會到的種種。這是一項艱鉅的挑戰，但不是因為他腦中的腫瘤，他腦中的腫瘤並未影響他的認知能力，而是因為我必須用最簡單的用語和他談論這些他原本不以為然的思想。我從我的辦公室裡撥了電話給他，不是因為我知道幾天之後他將陷入昏迷不醒的狀態，雖然幾週前，所費不貲的腦部切片檢查早已預告了這點。

　　如同我在本書一開始就已經提到過了的，我的父親是一名醫生，在他行醫的數十年間，他救活了許多人，所以他從不覺得死亡的陰影將籠罩在自己身上。這樣面對死亡的態度其實稀鬆平常，佛教經典中也有不少契經描述佛陀用他的智慧闡述這些事情。在《山之比喻經》中，佛陀問波斯匿王：當東方有一座巨山朝此摧枯拉朽而來，波斯匿王感覺如何。佛陀用這個比喻成功地讓波斯匿王想像有一樣勢不可擋的事物，吞沒所有生物朝著自己席捲而來。佛陀隨之把東方改為北方、又把北方改為西方、再把西方改為南方，用同樣的問題問波斯匿王。最後才告訴波斯匿王，雖然波斯匿王覺得在戰象、戰車、騎兵、步兵固若金湯的防禦之下，沒有什麼能夠傷害得了自己，但如果是這種情形，再滴水不漏的防禦也無法保得住波斯匿王的周全。佛陀說，死亡就是這樣的東西，你不知道它會從什麼方向來，你也無力阻止它的到來。佛陀說完，波斯匿王歡喜隨喜，作禮而去。

　　對於國王而言，這不啻是一記當頭棒喝。即便是今天，這些言語仍然如此撼動人心。我們不都早就知道了嗎？每個人都會面臨死亡。佛陀說，儘管我們能夠用嘴巴說出死亡二字，我們卻很少了解它。因它的到來往往無聲無息，我們總不覺得死亡有一天會降臨在我們身上，或說，我們無法想像我們面臨死亡的時候會是什麼樣的光景。佛陀的言語讓這樣的情景栩栩如生，至少對波斯匿王是這樣。波斯匿王自那之後面對了不知何時會降臨的死亡，悉心聽聞佛陀的說法。

　　而我們拒絕接受死亡的另一個顯而易見的原因則是因為我們不知道該如何面對它。佛陀讓波斯匿王知道自己引以為傲的銅牆鐵壁其實脆弱不堪，這點相當重要。我們以為可以將死亡拒之於門外、以為可以找到武器與它相抗衡，但事實上這些努力都是徒勞無功的。佛陀找到了一個以柔克剛的方法，而這也是波斯匿王步上的道路。在他的醒悟中，他找到了面對生活中必然的創傷，甚至是面對死亡的方法。

　　我的父親已經攀上了他人生的頂峰。直到八十四歲，他都一直在工作，直到有一天，他在走了四十年、開車僅需十分鐘的回家路上迷失了方向。做為創傷的一種形式，這座頂峰已經在他的大腦中生根。就算竭盡他的智慧，他也無法面對這個挑戰，放棄的念頭充斥在他週遭的空氣中與我們之間最後的對話。

　　「爸，你知道嗎？在你的內心深處，有一種感覺從你還是個孩子的時候就未曾改變過。」我說：「無論你是年輕、中年或甚至現在，這個感覺都是一樣的。」

　　　父親「嗯。」了一聲表示同意。我試著喚起與他之間的內在關係。我很主觀的知道它就在那裡，只是難以形容。我們從內在觀看自己：在思考之外，我們對自己有一種直觀的感覺。而我們也從這個地方與他人、與世界建立起連結。在大多數的時候，我們因為繁忙的腳步而對其視而不見，但它還是在那裡，等待我們在獨處、不需要按照劇本來走的時候回到它的懷抱，像是聽音樂的時候、散步的時候、睡著的時候。我記得我的一個禪學老師問我：我在冥想的時候聽到了什麼？「你覺知了嗎？」當我從冥想中結束，讓意識回到靜心堂的時候，他經常這麼問我。努力打開「覺知」的門（但那是不可能的），會讓我們在擾攘的沙漠中，找到一條通往平靜的綠洲的道路。「雖然我們無法覺知，但是它就在那裡。」我的老師如是說。讓潛在的認知進入外在的意識就是傳統佛教徒確認這一點的辦法。「覺知就在那裡。」而這無庸置疑。 

　　在我盡全力的整合之下，父親似乎終於對它有了一點頭緒。

　　「這種感覺是無形的，」我接著說：「你知道那是什麼，但你卻無法觸及，不過你可以放鬆心靈讓自己進入那個空間。你會覺得自己的身體很遙遠，但你可以在原來的你之中盡情休息。」死亡不過就是掙脫了一雙太緊的鞋子，我很想這樣跟他說，但是我不確定他有沒有辦法吸收這麼多。我想，在他的科學家心裡大概升起了探知我所說的事情的可能性，如果佛陀被信仰了這麼久，應該真有一個地方在人死後容納這些靈魂。

　　「好吧！親愛的，我試試。」他這麼回答我。我懷疑有那麼一瞬間他想擺出高高在上的姿態，但他並沒有。他常常叫我親愛的，而我也為此感到高興，在他生命的尾聲。

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懶懶的…= =a

《The Trauma of Everyday Life》，作者是Mark Epstein，國外一樣在今年的八月問世囉。不過台灣似乎還沒有出版社有出版這本書的打算，想看繁體中文版的讀者們可能要再等等了。