A mustard seed

A City Full of Seeds

The monk was young, and he was in a hurry. He had meditated and fasted for months, and he still didn’t know how long all of this would take. So one afternoon in the Jetavana grove, while the Buddha sat under the trees, he knelt down.

‘Lord, how long is an aeon?’

The Buddha looked at him. ‘Long, monk. Too long to count. Not in years, not in hundreds of years, not in thousands or hundreds of thousands.’

The monk shifted impatiently. ‘Can’t you put it in an image, then?’

‘I can.’ The Buddha picked up a handful of earth and let it run through his fingers. ‘Imagine a city with iron walls. A day’s march long, a day’s march wide, a day’s march high. And that city is filled to the brim with mustard seed.’

The monk pictured it: an endless sea of tiny golden grains.

‘Once every hundred years,’ the Buddha went on, ‘someone comes along and takes out a single seed. One. And then he leaves again, for a hundred years.’

It went quiet.

‘That city would be empty,’ said the Buddha, ‘and the aeon would still not be over.’

The monk said nothing. He thought of his own impatience, of his few months of fasting.

‘And it isn’t one aeon,’ said the Buddha. ‘There are so many you couldn’t count them. No beginning to this wandering can be found. All that time we have known pain. Known loss. So much that the burial grounds are full of it.’

The monk bowed his head. ‘That’s… a lot, lord.’

‘Yes,’ said the Buddha, and he smiled. ‘Enough to stop. Enough to let go. Enough to be free.’

The monk stood up. It was still afternoon, the birds were still singing. But he was no longer in a hurry.

After the Sāsapa Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 15.6, Buddhist Pali canon.

About this story

The source

This story comes from the Sāsapa Sutta, ‘the discourse on the mustard seed’: Saṃyutta Nikāya 15.6. It belongs to the Pali canon, the oldest complete surviving collection of Buddhist texts. For centuries they were passed on by word of mouth, and around the first century BCE they were written down on palm leaves in Sri Lanka. The sutta itself is very short: a question, an image, a conclusion. The retelling above colours in the scene around it a little.

Origin and culture

The sutta is part of chapter 15 of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, called Anamatagga: ‘without discoverable beginning’. All the texts in that chapter are about saṃsāra, the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth, and look for images to convey its dizzying length. In the text before it (15.5) the image is a mountain of solid rock, brushed with a silk cloth once every hundred years: the mountain wears away before the aeon is over. Buddhism shares the idea of aeons (kalpas) with Hinduism and Jainism. The ‘day’s march’ in the story is a yojana, an old Indian measure of distance: roughly how far an ox cart travels in a day.

The mustard seed

Here the seed is not a symbol of growth but a unit of measure: the smallest thing there is, used to measure something immeasurable. And the Buddha doesn’t do the sums to discourage the monk. In the very realisation that so much has already been suffered lies the invitation to stop waiting and to let go. In Buddhism, karma (kamma) keeps that cycle turning: intentional actions have consequences, in this life and beyond. Liberation (nibbāna) is the end of it.

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.