Buddha’s Son & Related Reflections

by

Mitch Hall

     Further thoughts about attitudes toward children in spiritual traditions were stimulated when I watched the PBS program, The Buddha, on Wednesday evening, April 7, 2010. It led me to reflect more on the theme of abandoning family members for the purpose of a spiritual search.

According to the ancient story about Siddhartha Gautama's origins, his mother died when he was only one week old. Thus, he was essentially, although not intentionally, abandoned by his mom, the most severe loss a newborn can suffer. When he was a young adult at the age of 29, shortly after his son was born, he left his family in what could be interpreted as a repetition of his own primal abandonment wound, now inflicted upon his son and wife. The poet Jane Hirshfield commented about this abandonment, to my mind gratuitously, that "there can be no knowledge without sacrifice." She was speaking only with reference to what Siddhartha Gautama was putatively losing but did not take into account the developmental needs of his new son, let alone his wife's feelings and needs for his support. It has also been told that Siddhartha named his son Rahula, meaning fetter. The name itself conveys ambivalence or even rejection of the basic attachments that we now know support the optimal fulfillment of human potentials and the reduction of the physical and emotional suffering that follow from a lack of secure attachment in the vulnerable beginnings of human life. Also, in the story of Siddhartha's origins was the theme that his mother became impregnated when she dreamt of a white elephant entering her side and subsequently gave birth out of her side. Is this an allusion to a caesarian delivery, or is it a mythological device that dishonors natural vaginal birth for the  future embodiment of spiritual wisdom?

We find the same implicit rejection of natural conception and birth in the myth of the virgin birth of Jesus. Furthermore, in the three Abrahamic religions, in more terrifying imagery, we find the theme of child sacrifice. Abraham's binding of Isaac is praised by followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The patriarch is revered for being so faithful to the voice of God that he would even sacrifice his firstborn son. Such sacrifices were frighteningly widespread in ancient near eastern traditions, as elsewhere. Today, we can interpret Abraham as having had auditory hallucinations, although fundamentalists would find this sacrilegious. The psychologist Julian Jaynes advanced just such a thesis with respect to the numerous descriptions of hearing voices of the gods written about in the Hebrew bible and the Iliad. His bold book of neuropsychological interpretation of cutural history is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). Christianity amplified the child sacrifice theme by proclaiming that Jesus, God's only son, was offered as a sacrifice for redeeming the sins of all who believe in him. This archaic thinking is so irrational, yet has compellingly gripped the imaginations of believers for millennia. I believe that the founder of psychohistory, Lloyd deMause, has explored in his writing the theme of child sacrifice in the origins of religions.

In Buddhist circles, the "sacrifices" of children may be more subtle. I think that considering the developmental needs of children for unconditional love, empathy, support, and connection would be a big step forward in the practice of loving kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), and altruistic joy (mudita). Because parenting is highly demanding in even the best of circumstances, and because it evokes somatically in parents their own developmental story, usually inaccessible to explicit memory, it calls also for the cultivation of equanimity (upekkha) to the extent possible so that parents can be mindfully and compassionately present to their children in the ways that children truly need in order to thrive.