saṁvega

Think back for a moment on the story of the young Prince Siddhartha and his first encounters with aging, illness, death, and a wandering forest contemplative. It’s one of the most accessible chapters in the Buddhist tradition, largely because of the direct, true-to-the-heart quality of the young prince’s emotions. He saw aging, illness, and death as an absolute terror, and pinned all his hopes on the contemplative forest life as his only escape. As Aśvaghoṣa, the great Buddhist poet, depicts the story, the young prince had no lack of friends or family members to try to talk him out of those perceptions, and Aśvaghoṣa was wise enough to show their life-affirming advice in a very appealing light. Still, the prince realized that if he were to give in to their advice, he would be betraying his heart. Only by remaining true to his honest emotions was he able to embark on the path that led away from the ordinary values of his society and toward an awakening into what lay beyond the limitations of life and death. This is hardly a life-affirming story in the ordinary sense of the term, but it does affirm something more important than living: the truth of the heart when it aspires to a happiness that’s absolutely pure. The power of this aspiration depends on two emotions, called in Pali saṁvega and pasāda. Very few of us have heard of them, but they’re the emotions most basic to the Buddhist tradition. Not only did they inspire the young prince in his quest for awakening. Even after he became the Buddha, he advised his followers to cultivate them on a daily basis. In fact, the way he handled these emotions is so distinctive that it may be one of the most important contributions his teachings have to offer to our culture today. Saṁvega was what the young Prince Siddhartha felt on his first exposure to aging, illness, and death. It’s a hard word to translate because it covers such a complex range—at least three clusters of feelings at once: the oppressive sense of dismay, terror, and alienation that comes with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it’s normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complicity, complacency, and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. This is a cluster of feelings that we’ve all experienced at one time or another in the process of growing up, but I know of no single English term that adequately covers all three. Such a term would be useful to have, and maybe that’s reason enough for simply adopting the word saṁvega into our language. But more than providing a useful term, Buddhism also offers an effective strategy for dealing with the feelings behind it—feelings that modern culture finds threatening and handles very poorly. Ours, of course, is not the only culture threatened by feelings of saṁvega. In the Siddhartha story, the father’s reaction to the young prince’s discovery stands for the way most cultures try to deal with these feelings: He tried to convince the prince that his standards for happiness were impossibly high, at the same time trying to distract him with relationships and every sensual pleasure imaginable. Not only did he arrange an ideal marriage for the prince, but he also built him a palace for every season of the year, bought him only the best clothes and toiletries, sponsored a constant round of entertainments, and kept the servants well paid so that they could put at least a semblance of joy into their job of satisfying the prince’s every whim. To put it simply, the father’s strategy was to get the prince to lower his aims and to find satisfaction in a happiness that was less than absolute and far from pure. If the young prince were alive today, the father would have other tools for dealing with the prince’s dissatisfaction—including psychotherapy, mindfulness retreats, and religious counseling—but the basic strategy would be the same: to distract the prince and dull h