Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”
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.
You do not stop with these feelings, because that would not be the cessation of suffering:
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 contemplative’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.”
The emotion he felt at this point is termed pasāda. Like saṁvega, pasāda covers a complex set of feelings. It’s usually translated as “clarity and serene confidence”—mental states that keep saṁvega from turning into despair. In the prince’s case, he gained a clear sense of his predicament, together with confidence that he had found the way out.
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