Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers?

 There is a wonderful book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by the scientist Robert Sapolsky, who spends his time partly at Stanford University in California and partly living among troops of baboons in Kenya. He has spent a lot of time with baboons in the last few decades. Much of his book is about baboon life and politics, and he gives all his baboons wonderful biblical names – Rebecca and Obadiah, Ebenezer and Hepzibah. 

The thesis of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers is that if you are a zebra, you are on the menu for the average lion out on the savannah. When you see a lion coming towards you, you need stress and you need to get stressed fast. You want your heart to start beating, you want that adrenalin to go pumping, you need to get lots of energy to your legs and you want to start running. And you want maximum stress as the lion starts to chase after you. You need to get your system cranked up as much as you possibly can in that stressed situation. You need to have your anxiety levels very, very high. You need to become afraid, because fear is what is going to save you. The zebras who are nonchalant about lions are the ones who end up as breakfast. The ones who have high levels of anxiety survive.

So zebras need to be afraid. They need to move quickly. They can shut off their digestive and reproductive functions, get as much sugar into the system as possible, get the heart beating rapidly and pump the whole system with adrenalin, so they can move as quickly as possible. And within a couple of minutes one of two results will have happened: either they will have got away or they will have been caught and killed. So they only need to stay stressed for a couple of minutes, and if they get away they don’t need to keep the stress reaction going, because the lion has given up and gone after somebody else – somebody else is currently being turned into breakfast and so the worries of Zebra #1 are over. There is no need to sustain the stress reaction because the worst has just happened to someone else. There is no need to be afraid any more, so the stress switches off. 

Sometimes on television wildlife documentaries you will see an animal such as a zebra get caught by lions. Its guts are ripped open and the lions are chewing on it. Meanwhile three or four other zebras are happily grazing nearby, just casually glancing over: ‘Oh, look – there’s cousin George being eaten.’ It’s quite disturbing, isn’t it? You think, ‘Don’t they care? How can they be so callous?’ But it’s because they know that if cousin George is being eaten, they are not being eaten, so they don’t worry about it. And because they apparently can’t project into the future, they never think, ‘Tomorrow that could be me.’ They don’t make a problem out of it. Hence zebras don’t get ulcers.

As human beings, however, we have the capacity to reflect: ‘Ooh – George got it yesterday, and if you do the statistics, how much longer is it going to be until I’m on the menu?’ We human beings can remember the past and we can imagine a future, so we don’t get that stress reaction going for just two minutes – we can keep it going for a couple of months or years, so we get ulcers. The stress reaction is sustained through our papañca, through our conceptual thought and our capacity to remember and imagine. Memory and thought are useful things, and the imagination and the ability to project into the future have their purpose, but when these abilities overspill their boundaries and we start incessantly imagining, or we can’t let go of painful things that have happened in the past or stop anticipating painful or difficult things that might happen in the future, we create ongoing anxiety. Humans maintain the stress reaction hour after hour, day after day, week after week. We make ourselves ill with anxiety, restlessness, rage, rapacity and depression, the different ailments which beset society.

So if you want to avoid ulcers you need to work on papañca. Papañca is the habit of buying into our thoughts, believing in them and creating images of past and future, and going off and inhabiting them – building castles in the air and going to live there. That is what causes us so much distress. 

This conceptual proliferation, papañca, is actually not the end of the whole sequence described in the sutta. The last part of the sequence is what’s called papañca-sanñā-sankhā – ‘the multiplicity of thoughts and perceptions that the mind produces and which beset the heart’. That is a brief translation. Papañca-sanñā-sankhā is the whole array of thoughts and perceptions which are prone to prolixity. So by the time you get to the end of the process and have reached papañca-sanñā-sankhā, there is ‘me here and the world out there’, and the state of tension between the two – either tension with something I want which I haven’t got, or something I’m afraid is going to get me and want to get away from. There is a duality. And that subject-object duality is rigidly fixed into place, ‘me here’ and ‘the world out there’, and there is the state of tension and dukkha arising from that. 

This whole process, from the beginning with the simple perception through to the end with ‘me here’ and ‘the world out there’, happens very quickly. So learning to track this process and seeing how it begins requires the development of mindfulness and wisdom. The mind has to be trained not to follow the habitual pathways of papañca. 

When you see the mind has wandered off into some kind of conceptual labyrinth, into trains of thought and association, take the trouble to follow it back. This is the practice I described earlier of following the string of thoughts and associations back to its origin. It might not seem a terribly fruitful exercise, but in my experience it is very revealing. Over and over again we realize that the mind gets caught up in excitements or fantasies, fears and anxieties, or gets lost in rewriting the past, and that all this is completely void of substance. 

I used to be very fond of rewriting how things might have been in the past. I spent an amazing amount of time in my early monastic life re-scripting how things could or should have been. Often it would be fifteen or twenty minutes before the wisdom factor would wade in and say, ‘But it didn’t actually happen that way. That didn’t happen, it wasn’t that way, so there is no need to get upset, there is no need to get excited, no need to get worried. It didn’t happen, and it was ten years ago that it didn’t happen!’ 

But our mind does that, doesn’t it? We go back and revisit mistakes we made, glorious moments, or things which were memorable or painful – we re-inhabit them and bring them to life. Whenever we are aware that the mind is caught up in a proliferation, we need to take the trouble to catch that process like netting a butterfly. Catch that thought. Actually, a butterfly is a very appropriate symbol, since the Greek word ‘psyche’ means not just ‘the mind’ but ‘butterfly’. So a psychologist is someone who studies this very butterfly nature.

So we catch that particular fluttering piece of papañca, and then we follow the sequence of thoughts and associations back to where they came from. Every time we will notice that it was started by just a random thought that popped into the mind – there was a smell from the kitchen which triggered the memory of a particular food, or the sight of somebody’s shawl triggered the memory of Aunt Matilda’s dress. Following it back, we realize that it was just a smell, just a sound, just a random memory. That is all. When we get to the source, the origin, it is utterly unburdensome, uncomplicated. 

The string of the papañca-sanñā-sankhā leads to ‘me here’ and ‘the world out there’, and there is a solidly, definitely divided experience. The further you trace it back to the source, the less there is a sense of a ‘me here’ and ‘the world out there’. There is just hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. ‘In the heard there is only the heard’, in the hearing there is only the hearing. The same with seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. There is no sense of self embedded within that. It is just the world as it is experienced.

There is a great master of the Korean Buddhist tradition called Chinul who developed this method. The English translation of the Korean term he used for it is ‘tracing back the radiance’. There is a book of Chinul’s teachings, translated by Robert Buswell, which bears this title. The book is a very helpful guide to using the quality of mindfulness and careful attention to unpick the tangles of papañca, and to keep bringing the mind back to the simplicity of knowing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and then acknowledging how the world feels. What is the experience of the world when it is simply this way, when the heart is simply open to sense perception? 

When we do this, when this is carried through, there is a wonderful simplicity, an easefulness and a sense of integration. So I would really encourage this straightforward exercise. It also reveals the tracks down which the mind moves. You can become familiar with your own mental habits: whether you are a greed type or an aversion type, or whether you are a really good complainer. You realize how even a pleasant feeling or a pleasant sound can lead to criticizing, complaining or grumbling if you are that type. Or if you are a greed type, even a painful feeling can lead to something you are fantasizing about acquiring. So this simple process can help us get to know the patterns in which our mind moves, the patterns of conditioning; and by becoming familiar with those patterns we can free the heart from them.

We tend to think, ‘I am in here, the world is out there, and I am perceiving the world.’ But I find extremely helpful to keep recognizing that we don’t experience the world – we experience our mind’s representation of the world. This is something that the Buddha pointed to (e.g. at S 2.26, S 35.116): ‘That in the world by which one is a perceiver of the world, a conceiver of the world – this is called ‘the world’ in the Noble One’s discipline. And what is it in the world though which one does that? It is with the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body and the mind.’ That is ‘the world’ in terms of the Buddha’s teaching. Obviously we can talk about this planet as being the world, or the stars and galaxies and space being the world. In some ways that usage of the term is fair enough. It is reasonable. But it is important to recognize that when we are trying to live in the reflective way, develop the qualities of wisdom and understanding and free the heart, the most helpful way of understanding the world is just exactly as I have been describing – the world is sights, sounds, smells, taste, touch. That is the world because that is the world as we know it. 

I’m not saying that the whole world is an illusion conjured up by us as individuals. There is a substrate. There is a basis on which our perceptions are formed. But what we know about the world is constructed from the information that our senses weave together. That is the coordinating capacity of the mind. The mind is the sixth sense which draws the first five senses together and coordinates them. The world the mind creates is the world that we know. The world is put together by our minds. These perceptions are all we can know. All we have ever known has been through the agency of this mind. 

This shouldn’t be seen as a limitation. But we should recognize that this is the programme, this the world we live in and the world from which we learn. And that world is formed, coloured and shaped by the language we have learned and the experiences that we have had.

I feel that Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers should be required reading.

The Breakthrough

Buddhist Meditation as a Means of Liberation

Ajahn Amaro