A mustard seed

The House Without Loss

The sun was already high over Savatthi when Gotami stood at yet another door, her little son on her hip. His head rested against her shoulder, as if he were asleep.

‘Do you have medicine for him?’

The woman in the doorway looked at the child and shrank back. ‘Girl… he’s dead.’

‘He’s sleeping,’ said Gotami. ‘He just needs medicine.’

Behind her, people laughed. Someone called out that skinny Gotami had lost her mind. She walked on.

At the end of the street an old man sat in the shade. He looked at her for a long time. ‘I have no medicine,’ he said softly. ‘But I know someone who might be able to help you. Go to the Buddha.’

The Buddha was sitting under the trees of the Jetavana grove. He didn’t look away, as the others had. He looked at the child, and then at her.

‘I can help you,’ he said. ‘Bring me a handful of mustard seed.’

Gotami’s face lit up. Mustard seed! Every kitchen had it.

‘But,’ he said, ‘it must come from a house where no one has ever died.’

She ran back to the city. At the first door a woman gave her a handful straight away.

‘Has anyone ever died here?’

The woman looked at her in surprise. ‘My father. Last winter.’

Gotami handed the seed back. At the next house it was a daughter. Then a husband. A grandmother. A baby, not yet a week old.

‘The living are few,’ said an old woman. ‘The dead are many.’

When the lamps were lit, Gotami stood still in the street. She didn’t have a single seed. Her son lay heavy on her hip. And for the first time she saw the lights behind the windows for what they were: in every house lived someone who was missing someone.

She carried her child to the place outside the city and laid him down.

When she came back, the Buddha asked: ‘Do you have the mustard seed?’

‘It’s no longer needed,’ she said.

After the Dhammapada commentary and the Therīgāthā, Buddhist tradition.

About this story

The source

The story of Kisā Gotamī is one of the best-known stories in Buddhism. Its fullest version is found in the commentary on the Dhammapada, at verse 114: ‘Better a single day lived seeing the Deathless than a hundred years without seeing it.’ That commentary was written down in Sri Lanka around the fifth century CE, but it draws on much older oral tradition. Gotamī’s own words are in the Therīgāthā (10.1), the ‘verses of the elder nuns’: one of the oldest surviving collections of poems by women anywhere in the world.

Origin and culture

The story is set in Sāvatthī, capital of the kingdom of Kosala in northern India, in the fifth century BCE. Gotamī came from a poor family; kisā means ‘lean’ or ‘thin’ in Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts. In her husband’s family she was only respected once she had borne a son. So when the boy died, she lost not only her child but also her place. The Jetavana grove, where the Buddha sat, was a monastery garden given to him by the wealthy merchant Anāthapiṇḍika. After this day Gotamī was ordained as a nun. According to tradition she reached awakening, and the Buddha named her the foremost of the nuns who wore rough, worn-out robes.

The mustard seed

In India mustard seed was an everyday kitchen spice; every household had some. That is why the task seems so easy, and exactly why it works. The Buddha gives Gotamī no explanation and no comfort from outside. He gives her a search, in which, door after door, she discovers for herself what no words could have told her: that loss is not her punishment, but something everyone shares with her. Buddhist teaching calls this anicca, impermanence: everything that arises also passes away.

The mustard seed travels

The mustard seed turns up in many traditions as the smallest thing there is. In the Talmud, ‘the size of a mustard seed’ is the measure of the smallest conceivable amount. And in the Qur’an it stands for the smallest deed that is still weighed: ‘even if it be the weight of a mustard seed, We will bring it forth’ (Surah 21:47, see also 31:16). Perhaps that comes closest to the question in the column: whether everything we do is somehow kept on record.

Further reading

Pick a seed

You can't tell what's inside. That's exactly the point.