The Mustard Seed — Kisa Gotami's Story

In the time of the Buddha, there was a young woman named Kisa Gotami. She had married into a wealthy family, and after the years of difficulty that often follow a young marriage, her life had begun to settle. She had given birth to a small son. She loved him, as mothers love.

The boy began to walk. He died, suddenly, of an illness, in his second year.

Kisa Gotami could not believe it. She refused to believe it. She picked up the body of her son and carried him through the streets, asking everyone she met for medicine that would bring him back to life. The villagers, seeing her, knew there was no medicine. They turned away from her, embarrassed by her grief.

One man, more compassionate, said: "Kisa Gotami, the only one who can help you is the Buddha. He is in the forest grove."

She went to the Buddha, holding the body of her son. She knelt and asked: "Please, sir, give me the medicine that will make him live again."

The Buddha looked at her gently. He did not say he is dead or let him go or any of the things she would have refused to hear.

He said: "I will help you. To make the medicine, I need a single mustard seed. But the seed must come from a household that has never known death — that has not lost a child, a parent, a husband, a wife, a friend."

Kisa Gotami left, hopeful, the body of her son still in her arms.

She went from house to house. The mustard seed itself was easy — every kitchen had it. But the second condition was impossible. At the first house, an old man told her of a wife he had lost, fifty years ago. At the second, a young woman told her of a brother. At the third, a child told her of a grandfather. House after house. No family had been spared.

By evening, she sat in the road with the body of her son. She had been all over the village. The mustard seed was not coming.

She understood, then, what the Buddha had been telling her. Not that her grief was wrong. Not that she should not love her son. Just that loss is the price of love, and that everyone she had ever met was paying it, in their own way.

She buried her son. She returned to the Buddha. She asked to be his student.

What the story is for

The story is two thousand five hundred years old, and it has not aged. Almost everyone who reads it recognizes it.

It is not a story about getting over grief. It is a story about being met in grief, about discovering that you are not alone in it, about finding — slowly, against your will — that the loss you thought singular is, in fact, universal.

The Buddha did not preach to Kisa Gotami. He did not tell her to let go or find peace. He sent her on an errand. The errand did the teaching.

This is wise teaching. We learn most slowly through speech, more quickly through experience, most quickly of all when an experience reveals what we already suspected but had refused to believe.

A small reflection

If you are in a grief now — fresh, old, a small one or a large — know that the houses around you all have their own. Not as a competition. As a quiet companionship.

Everyone you walk past today is missing someone. The grief is the cost of having loved someone — and looking around, you can see, every house has paid it.

This does not make your grief smaller. It makes it less lonely.

That is, in the end, the gift the story has been giving for two thousand five hundred years.