A Visit To The Buddha
One day the Buddha was visited by a young woman. Her face was wet with a constant flow of tears, and in her arms she carried a small, tightly wrapped bundle. As she approached the Buddha, she held out the bundle and revealed to him the face of a tiny child. The child was dead.
Through sobs, the woman begged the Buddha to restore life to her only son who had succumbed to a fever in the night. She believed, as did many in India at the time, that the Buddha was a wonder-worker, a saint who could perform miracles, and even bring the dead back to life.
The Buddha, to the astonishment of his surrounding disciples, consented. The woman’s weeping came to a halt, and she gazed at the teacher with eyes of gratitude and wonder. The Buddha, however, continued to instruct the woman as to the method of resurrection: he would need a single mustard seed from a family that had not experienced a loss. The woman, buoyed by the mission and its simplicity - what was more common than a mustard seed in India? - rushed off to fulfill her task.
The story is a predictable and yet poignant one. The poor woman dashed from house to house, knocked on the doors and begged the families she met for a single mustard seed. At once each person who answered readily agreed - of course, and do you need anything else? - until she continued to ask whether they had grieved anyone in the household.
The faces she met would drop, and they would recount losses distant and recent: oh, my father passed away last year. My grandmother died a while ago, that shrine is to her memory. My second born daughter succumbed to an illness years ago. My wife, my husband, my uncle, my aunt, my son, my grandfather…
The woman spent a full week scouring the city for a mustard seed from a household that escaped having brushed with death, but alas, she returned to the Buddha empty-handed.
Yet as she arrived at his monastery and bowed at his feet, her face shone in a new light and her eyes expressed a profound understanding. She did not come to ask for a new life for her son, but to prepare the funeral pyre. The Buddha smiled in compassion and handed the swaddled corpse of her child back to her.
The Buddha, of course, was unable to bring the child back to life or to remove the pain of loss from the grieving mother. What he was able to do, however, was to offer the woman the perspective to see her heart-wrenching experience as part of the universal condition of life itself.
Without trying to convince her of anything, he just pointed to how the world works, and how her life was not an exception. Most compelling, however, in the woman’s journey from denial to acceptance, was the confronting of this inescapable reality of life and death. Her loss was not so much comforted by the losses of all those she met during her week sojourn, but she renewed the essential connection we have with all others in the most basic sense of being in this life temporarily. If others experienced losses just as intimate she did, then their pain too is similar; just as they did not beat death but struggle with its inevitability, so must she.
Universal Pain
If there is one way in which we are all similar, and deeply connected, it is in dealing with the reality of death which inexorably presses in on our lives. The very pain of loss becomes a point of essential connection.
It is not absurd to say that most of us have a lot in common with that poor Indian woman from millennia past. If we lost our darling child we would wail and give anything to have her returned to us in life. Furthermore, though we all in an abstract way accept that we ourselves are mortal, when death actually approaches we are generally caught by surprise and enter a fight-or-flight state of being.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t, as Dylan Thomas admonishes, “rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” but there is a most important lesson to be grasped from the oldest of all great teachers, death itself. It is the message of compassion. We are all in this together: birth, aging, sickness and death.
Compassion For All
If death is both the greatest certainty in life, and its timing the greatest uncertainty, then we can come to view others and ourselves with much compassion. The woman who sold you the milk this morning may have suffered a recent loss, or may suffer one soon. The man who cut you off in traffic may be rushing to say a final goodbye to his dying mother in the hospital, or may be distraught at his own results in a blood test. The person you walk by on the street may die in fifty years, or later today.
This awareness of the absolute impermanence of our and others’ lives awakens a natural and unrestrained compassionate attitude: may we all live and die well.
The Dalai Lama said that every day he contemplates his own death for several hours, and with a big laugh added that, when the time finally comes, he’s afraid that he’ll blow it and loose his cool! He is considered an embodiment of compassion by his followers, and the way he treats all others attests to his realization. There must be something connected between his contemplation of death and his ability to love all other beings.
While death is the great leveler, at the same time it is the great unifier of life. To gaze upon someone, no matter how difficult that person may be, and consider the losses they have endured, will endure, and their own end, is to find a wellspring of compassion which overcomes all barriers.
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