BUDDHA AND THE GIRL

There lived a young girl named Kisa Gotami (“Kisa” means the lean one, nicknamed because of her thinness), in the life-time of Gotama Buddha.  Kisa got married and in due course had a son. In the matrifocal society of the times, her status within the family immediately rose.  Unfortunately, her son died when he was just old enough to run about, leaving her distraught and broken with grief. Kisa Gotami placed the dead body of the child on her shoulder and went house to house asking for medicine to revive her son. People said she has gone mad.  One sympathetic villager sent her to the Buddha as the only person who might be able to help her.  Buddha promised to revive her son through a ritual, the performance of which required a handful of mustard seeds—but the seeds had to come from a house where no one had ever died.  Kisa Gotami ran to the village, knocking every door of the houses.  But she could not find any house in which no one had ever died.  In this way Buddha made her realize that mortality was an inevitable feature of the human condition, that even a Lazarus (a Bible character), once raised from the dead, had to die again.  She cremated the dead child, came back to the Buddha, and asked to be ordained. The verses she uttered upon attaining enlightenment are part of the Buddha canon. Later, Buddhism applied this principle of “skillful means” not just to individuals, but to whole cultures in different parts of the world.

ISRAR HASAN

13 JULY 2014