..续本文上一页roviding a useful term, Buddhism also offers an effective strategy for dealing with the feelings behind it — feelings that our own culture finds threatening and handles very poorly. Ours, of course, is not the only culture threatened by feelings of samvega. 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 arranged 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 strategy was to get the prince to lower his aims and to find satisfaction in a happiness that was less than absolute and not 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 and religions counseling── but the basic strategy would be the same: to distract the prince and dull his sensitivity so that he could settle down and become a well-adjusted, productive member of society.
佛教不仅提供了这个有用的词汇，更提供了对治它表达的感受的有效策略——我们的本土文化觉察其威胁性，却素无良方。当然，并非仅西方文化受厌离感的威胁。在悉达多的故事里，面对王子的新生情绪，父王的回应代表着多数文化的应对方式: 他试图说服王子，他的快乐标准高不可及，同时试以婚姻关系与各样感官极乐转移其注意力。父王不仅替他安排了一桩理想婚姻，还为他盖起宫殿，每季各居一处。不仅为他购置华服美饰，还使他的周围娱乐不断; 受到优待的仆役们极尽能事，奉承王子的一应兴致。其策略简单说，是令王子降低目标，从远离绝对、远非清净的世俗生活中觅得快乐。如果年轻的王子活在今日，那位父王对付王儿的不满情绪则另有其招──其中会包括心理疗法与宗教咨询──不过基本策略不变: 分散注意力，麻醉敏感度，使他安定下来，成为适应社会、有事生产的一员。
Fortunately, the prince was too eagle-eyed and lion-hearted to submit to such a strategy. And again, fortunately, he was born in a society that offered him the opportunity to find a solution to the problem of samvega that did justice to the truths of his heart.
所幸的是，王子有着鹰眼狮心，未曾屈从此计; 更有幸的是，他出生的社会为他提供了寻找厌离感的解答与求证心灵真谛 的机会。
The first step in that solution is symbolized in the Siddhartha story by the prince”s reaction to the fourth person he saw on his travels outside of the palace: the wandering forest contemplative. Compared to what he called the confining, dusty path of the householder”s life, the prince saw the freedom of the comtemplative”s life as the open air. Such a path of freedom, he felt, would allow him the opportunity to find the answers to his life-and-death questions, and to live a life in line with his highest ideals, "as pure as a polished shell."
在悉达多的故事里，那个解答的初步象征，正落在王子离宫出游时遇见的第四人──丛林游方者时的反应上。较之被他称为“局限多尘”的世俗生活，王子视这位行者的人生如天空般辽阔。他感到这条自由之道将令他有机会求解生死问题，同时过一种符合自己最高理想的生活，“如磨光的珠贝般纯洁。”
The emotion he felt at this point is termed pasada. Like samvega, pasada covers another complex set of feelings usually translated as "clarity and serene confidence" ──mental states that keeps samvega from turning into despair. In the prince”s case, he gained a clear sense of his predicament, together with a confidence that he had found the way out.
这个时刻他感受的情绪，便称为清净(pasada)。如同厌离感，该词也包含一组复杂的感受，通常解作“清明而安详的信心”──这类心态使厌离感不至沦为绝望。在王子的故事里，他对自己的困境有了清晰的了解，同时又对找到超越老、病、死的出路升起了信心。
As the early Buddhist teachings freely admit, the predicament is that the cycle of birth, aging, and death is meaningless. They don”t try to deny this fact and so don”t ask us to be dishonest with ourselves or to close our eyes to reality. As one teacher has put it, the Buddhist recognition of the reality of suffering — so important that suffering is honored as the first noble truth — is a gift, in that it confirms our most sensitive and direct experience of things, an experience that many ot…
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