The Sermon at Benares
Kisa Gotami and the mustard seed
Explain what Kisa Gotami learnt and how the Buddha taught her.
First journey: asking for medicine. Kisa Gotami's only son died. Mad with grief, she carried the dead child from house to house, asking for medicine. People said: 'She has lost her senses. The boy is dead.' A man sent her to the Buddha.
The Buddha's task. She begged him for medicine. He asked for a handful of mustard seed, but 'taken from a house where no one has lost a child, husband, parent or friend'. He did not lecture her. He gave her a task that would let her find the truth herself.
Second journey: asking for mustard seed. Everyone pitied her and offered seed. But when she asked who had died in their family, they said: 'the living are few, but the dead are many.' There was no house where no beloved one had died.
What she understood. Tired and hopeless, she sat by the road watching the city lights flicker up and go out. She saw that human lives too 'flicker up and are extinguished again'. She thought: 'How selfish am I in my grief! Death is common to all.' This time she understood, because she had seen it with her own eyes.
The Buddha's teaching, in his images.
- 'As ripe fruits are early in danger of falling, so mortals… are always in danger of death.'
- 'As all earthen vessels made by the potter end in being broken, so is the life of mortals.'
- Mortals are carried off 'like an ox that is led to the slaughter'.
- 'Not from weeping nor from grieving will anyone obtain peace of mind.'
- 'He who seeks peace should draw out the arrow of lamentation, and complaint, and grief.'
Practise this lesson
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