Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed

In the city of Savatthi, long ago, there lived a young woman named Gotami.

She came from a poor family, and she was so thin that people called her Kisa Gotami, "Gotami the thin". When she married into a wealthy household, her husband's family looked down on her. They whispered about where she had come from, and they did not let her forget it.

Then she had a son, and everything changed.

The little boy

Now she was the mother of the family's heir. The whispers stopped. People smiled at her in the courtyard. And Gotami, who had never had much of anything, poured her whole heart into her child.

He grew into a busy, laughing little boy. He learned to walk, and then to run, and he ran everywhere, with Gotami never far behind.

Then, when he was still very small, he fell ill. It happened quickly. Within a short time, he died.

Medicine for my son

Gotami could not accept it.

She would not let anyone take the little body from her. She lifted her son onto her hip, the way she had carried him every day of his life, and she walked out into the streets of Savatthi.

She went from house to house. At every door she asked the same thing: did they have medicine for her son? He was sick, she said. Surely someone, somewhere, had a medicine that would help him.

People looked at the child in her arms and stepped back. Some turned away. Some spoke harshly to her. Some simply shook their heads, because they did not know what to say.

At last she came to a man who looked at her with pity, and spoke gently. He did not have any medicine, he told her. But there was someone who might. The Buddha was staying near the city. She should go to him.

One mustard seed

Gotami carried her son to the place where the Buddha was teaching. She pushed through the people gathered there, and she asked him, as she had asked everyone, for a medicine for her child.

The Buddha did not turn her away. He did not tell her she was foolish, or that the child was dead. He looked at her with great kindness and said he could help.

He told her to go back into the city and bring him a few grains of mustard seed.

Gotami's heart leapt. Mustard seed was the commonest thing in the world. Every kitchen in India had it.

But there was one thing more, the Buddha said. The seed must come from a house where nobody had ever died.

House to house

Gotami hurried back into Savatthi, her son still on her hip.

At the first house, she asked for mustard seed, and the woman of the house went at once to fetch it. Then Gotami remembered. "Has anyone ever died in this house?" she asked.

The woman looked at her strangely. Of course they had. Her husband's father had died there, only last year.

Gotami thanked her, and did not take the seed.

At the next house, it was a grandmother. At the next, a baby, years ago. At the next, a brother, a wife, a son. Everyone wanted to help her. Everyone offered the seed. And everyone, when she asked the question, had someone they had lost.

She walked all day. Rich houses and poor houses, big and small. The answer was always the same.

The evening

By evening, Gotami was tired. She stopped in the street and looked at the lamps being lit in the windows all around her, one after another, house after house.

And she understood.

She was not the only one. She had never been the only one. Behind every one of those doors, someone had sat where she was sitting now. The living, she saw, are always fewer than the dead. Death had come to every one of these homes, as it had come to hers.

The tellings say that something in her heart grew quiet then. She carried her son out of the city, to the place where the dead were laid, and she said goodbye to him there.

Then she went back to the Buddha, with empty hands.

He asked her if she had found the mustard seed. She said that she had not, and that she no longer needed it. She had learned what he had sent her to learn.

About this story

Kisa Gotami became a Buddhist nun, and the tradition remembers her as one of the wise women of the early community. Her own verses are kept in the Therigatha, the ancient collection of poems by Buddhist nuns, and her story is told in the old commentaries on the Therigatha and the Dhammapada. Details vary between the tellings. This version is a shortened, simplified retelling.