دانلود کتاب ذن درمان – کشف یک مهربانی پنهان در زندگی

The Buddha, before his enlightenment, was protected by his father from ever seeing old age, illness, and death after the unexpected passing of his mother a week after he was born. Upon marrying and fathering a child of his own decades later, he finally chanced upon a sick person, an old person, and a corpse and, reacting in horror, quickly replicated his childhood trauma by abandoning his own loving family and seeking freedom (or escape) through the available spiritual pursuits of his time. After spending the next several years in the forest searching for meaningful help, the Buddha seized upon the practice of self-mortification as the vehicle of his long-sought awakening. There was already a strong ascetic tradition in ancient India, and the aspiring Buddha, in his relentless search for inner peace, saw austerity as the surest method of detaching himself from his all-too-human body and mind. Filled with disgust and self-loathing, like many a self-hating or shame-filled person of our own era, he tried, for a long time, to remove himself from himself by deliberately renouncing all forms of pleasure. He was better at this than anyone until, at the point of selfextinction (much like modern-day sufferers from anorexia who starve themselves, tragically and heroically, until their organs begin to fail), he had an inkling that something was wrong with his basic approach. An unbidden memory came to his mind of himself as a young boy sitting joyfully under a rose-apple tree while his father plowed the fields in the distance. He was taken by the memory but surprised by how uncomfortable it made him feel. He was afraid of something that the memory brought up, he realized, frightened of the joy he had once felt. Why? he wondered. Why had the memory come at this precise moment, and why did it make him feel afraid? An answer came spontaneously to his mind, an early example of the power of free association. He had been seeking happiness and freedom outside of himself, he grasped, when, maybe, just maybe, it was already in him, the way it was under the rose-apple tree when he was a boy. This possibility nagged at him and he began to entertain it seriously. “Perhaps I’ve been going about this entirely wrong,” he thought to himself. “Maybe I’m trying to tell myself something. Could the enlightenment I am seeking lie in this direction, toward the remembered joy of my childhood? That would go against everything I’ve been thinking, everything I have thought. That’s why the joy frightens me: it’s forcing me to rethink my entire orientation.” Savoring the memory and brightened by his new understanding, the Buddha appreciated that with his body so emaciated, there would be no way of supporting such a joyful feeling. If he were going to take his realization seriously, he concluded, he had better find something to eat.