Text Version - Unity of Lehigh Valley

The Mustard Seed Not Found While today’s story is familiar in the Buddhist tradition, it may not be familiar to us. Yet it deals with a topic that arises for all of us, death and loss. This is the topic Westerners feel most taboo about and we treat death as an enemy and somehow a shameful outcome. Yet life is constantly about death. Our cells die every day and we are vitally alive people because of the renewal of life within us. I struggled with the decision to include this story but feel strongly that our faith must support us in all aspects of life, so let us explore the story of Kisa Gotami. Unlike the Buddha, who was born a prince, Kisa Gotami grew up very poor. Her family had little food to spare. She often felt weary, hungry and weak and so was called Kisa, meaning “frail”, Gotami. When Kisa Gotami married, she moved into the house of her husband’s family: the custom in India at the time. But because of her humble background, her new family treated her harshly UNTIL the day she gave birth to a son. Kisa felt proud and her child was the center of her universe. She took delight in his smile, the smooth roundness of his little head and the tight curl of his fingers around hers. But one terrible, tragic day the baby was taken by a sudden illness. His death overwhelmed poor Kisa. She bundled him in warm blankets and crazed with grief she stumbled from house to house, begging for medicine to bring her son back to life. The people mocked her as mad and finally Kisa stood weeping in the middle of the street hugging her baby to her. A kind man passed by and thought, “This poor woman has lost her mind from sorrow. I know the medicine she needs.” He approached Kisa and taking her firmly by the shoulders, he said, “Please let me help you. The wisest of men, the Buddha, resides in a monastery nearby. Let me take you to him.” Kisa stood at the edge of a group of monks and nuns gathered round the Buddha teaching. She shouted, “Teacher, teacher! I am Kisa Gotami and my son needs your medicine.” The crowd parted to allow Kisa to move closer to the Buddha. He looked at the child’s lifeless face. “You did well in coming here for medicine Gotami But before I can save your child you must do something. You must return to the city and find me a single mustard seed and bring it back.” Kisa Gotami’s face lit up for she thought this would be a simple task. Everyone has mustard seed. “Most important of all,” the Buddha continued, “the mustard seed must be from a family in which no one has died. 1

Go make the rounds of the city and ask in every home. Bring me just one mustard seed from such a family.” “Thank you good sir,” Kisa said happily. At the first house she stopped and knocked at the door. An old woman answered. She easily gave Kisa a mustard seed, all India used them in cooking. Just as the seed was placed in her hand, Kisa remembered the Buddha’s final instructions. “Oh, before I can take this I must ask you, has anyone died in this family recently?” The old woman’s face lowered. She fell silent. Tears filled her eyes as she raised her head. “I’m sorry to say the answer is yes. My beloved husband died 6 months ago.” “I am so sorry,” said Kisa Gotami. “Thank you for your kindness but I cannot take this seed.” Next she knocked at a house with children running in and out the door. A young woman saw Kisa standing in the doorway and came to greet her. “Can I help you?” she asked. “I have been sent here to find special medicine for my son. I am looking for a single mustard seed from a household in which no one has died,” said Kisa. “We cannot help you. I am sorry. We lost our mother two years ago,” stated the young woman quietly. “For many months I was so unhappy I didn’t know how to go on.” One of the little boys reached up to hold her hand. “But I knew I had to help my father take care of my brothers and sisters. That’s what my mother would have wanted. I’m sorry we have no such special mustard seed for you.” And so Kisa Gotami continued from house to house, asking for a single mustard seed. But always someone had lost a beloved. After a time, nightfall came. Kisa sat down, resting against a tree. She gazed down at her son in her arms. Studying him closely she felt a gradual change in herself. Many suffered just as she did now. She was not alone. And somehow, her grief lightened just a bit, and she returned home. The next day, at first light, Kisa Gotami readied her son for his funeral. Tears streamed down her face as she said farewell. After the funeral, Kisa Gotami returned to the monastery to speak to the Buddha. The Buddha clearly saw in her face that she had come back to her senses. “Gotami, did you bring me a tiny grain of mustard?” “No teacher, I am done looking for the mustard seed. I know that in the whole city, in the whole world, there is not one person free from the certainty of death. It is the way of all living things—we must at some time leave one another.” “And where is your child, dear woman?” “At last I have said goodbye to him. I felt terribly alone in my grief, but now I know there are many 2

others who have lost what they most cherished. We must help each other, as you have helped me.” Kisa Gotami became a very wise and compassionate woman. It is said that she never left the Buddha after her return to the monastery. And that from her experience, she was able to comfort many others in her lifetime. Bhante Wimala relates this story in his book, Lessons of the Lotus. He first heard of this most famous enlightened Buddhist nun when he was about 8 years old. He says this about the story, “Each time I hear it and contemplate its message of impermanence, death, and the implications that follow, it adds another layer of profoundness to the meaning of life. For this woman, the move from ignorance to complete awareness of the truth of her child’s death brought liberation and enlightenment. We too must train ourselves to awaken to the profound lessons about the realities of life that are hidden within the experience of death. These lessons are waiting to lift us from the grief that is sapping our energy; they are there to nurture us and make our continuing journey and that of those around us, joyous and meaningful. To realize this we need to go beyond the pain of our emotions and let a spark of truth touch our hearts, as it did Kisa Gotami’s. After all, wouldn’t that also be a beautiful gift to give to our departed ones?” The first time I read this story it felt familiar; not because I had heard it before but because I had lived it. I was Kisa Gotami. Not so much frail but crazy with sorrow at the loss of the center of my universe. I had never felt so whole, so complete, so loved as when I held my daughter. Yet only four months later I was in the bright lights of an emergency room, holding her still body and saying goodbye. For a time this loss was more than my mortal mind could process. Grief is a real and personal part of our human experience. I am not going to deny that or to diminish those experiences. But I do want to focus on something Bhante said, “We too must train ourselves to awaken to the profound lessons about the realities of life that are hidden within the experience of death.” I am not sure that anyone still living is an expert on death. But here are four practices I have found helpful in living with the certainty of death. 1. Make peace with the universal nature of sorrow. Whatever we believe about other people’s lives, as Kisa Gotami found, there is no mustard 3

seed from a household that has not experienced loss. And while this is something we may intellectually embrace, to make peace with it, I had to understand it emotionally, as Kisa did, going house to house. Grief is isolating and we tend to only know our own pain. Because each one grieves differently, even two parents may judge one another’s grief as less than their own or even lacking. Because our society does not talk about it or treat it as an integral part of life, we are forced to seek out others to share experiences. Our remembrance service in December is powerful, in part perhaps, because it is an opportunity to hear the loss of others and to comfort one another. For me, making peace with the universal nature of sorrow meant opening my heart to compassion. Kisa became a Buddhist nun to help others. I made peace with the universal nature of sorrow through work in infant loss grief support. Make peace with the universal nature of sorrow. 2. Make peace with the impermanent nature of our world. The impermanence of our world challenges us is so many ways, constantly. Not only in the loss of lives but in every natural disaster, homes and businesses and landmarks gone in an instant. We grieve and build monuments. A treasured cup, dropped and shattered. We grieve as if the loss of the thing takes away the memories of experiences it represents. In our humanity, we attach to everything. Jesus taught over and over, to follow the Way, to find our eternal nature, we must let go of everything. What if it really means EVERYTHING. We must learn to value what we have, to be good stewards of what we have and yet understand that what we possess, even our bodies, are impermanent. Ego resists every effort to let go of our physical identity to melt into a deeper understanding of oneness and our divine nature. Identifying with our bodies is a kind of survival thinking in our human understanding. To learn to hold it all with an open hand is to begin to make peace with the impermanent nature of all we can see. 3. And the divine paradox to the impermanence of our physical world is to make peace with the eternal nature of love. “God is love.” This was the “spark of truth that touches our heart” that Bhante spoke of for me. This was the truth that healed my grief. It was an understanding I came to 4

many months into my process. One of the things that happened around Sarah’s death was that I found Unity. And I stayed. I took classes with Max Lafser. I was studying “Discover the Power Within You” and one day the truth that “God is Love” just filled every atom of my being. My mind immediately began to work, as human minds tend to try to make sense of our intuitive experiences. If God is Love, then each of us is Love, made in that image and likeness. If Sarah is Love, then her life could only have been an expression of love. And if God is eternal energy, as I understand it, then the fact that Sarah had released her tiny body did not mean that the love that was her essence was gone. I understood that any love I have experienced can never be destroyed. I did not stop experiencing the presence of my father when he died. As I reflected on the truth that had sprung up in my consciousness, I recalled ways that I had experienced Sarah’s love in the days and months after her death. It was as if a huge weight had lifted and a great darkness had been illumined. Embracing the impermanence of the physical does not exist in a vacuum; it exists in tandem with the eternal nature of love. And your spark of truth may not take on those words or those words may not feel healing to you but I do believe that within our experiences of death, there are lessons for our living. 4. One last practice: Make peace with what is. Byron Katie calls it “loving what is”; in loss I prefer to say, “making peace with what is”. It is our nature to have opinions about how life ought to be. Infants should not die; grumpy people should not live forever; no one should experience pain; humans should not take the lives of other humans. This simply is not how life is. If sorrow and pain are certainties in our lives, then we consciously add layers on top of it by choosing to be in a struggle with what is. Please don’t confuse this to mean I recommend passively surrendering to conditions we have the power to heal and change. Quite the opposite. The pain of grief is real and often manifests in very physical ways. One way to approach that pain is to say, “I would not have this pain if only my child had not died.” “My life would be so different if she were alive.” 5

In this approach I have trapped myself in not only the pain of grief but a new pain of struggle that is doomed because my life can never be the “if only” way. Another way to approach that pain of grief is to say, “I loved my child and now I have a life to live with a legacy of her love in my heart. How do I heal the pain of my grief to live the life I have?” As I reflected on making peace with what is a thought arose, “What if a part of my human self thinks that accepting my life as it is means I am glad my child died?” That thought, buried in my subconscious, may keep me from making peace with what is. However, making peace never feels like judging or valuing one thing above another. Sarah died; I found Unity; I chose to be a mom again by bringing two wonderful lives into my life; I became a Unity minister. Would all the things that happened after Sarah’s death have happened otherwise? I do not have to imagine and I do not have to choose. It is my life. I am at peace with my life as it has unfolded, every struggle, pain and loss included. The subtitle to Bhante Wimala’s book is “Practical Spiritual Teachings of a Traveling Buddhist Monk”. The Fillmore’s called Unity teachings, “Practical Christianity.” Is it practical to struggle with a certainty of life that touches us all? Whatever loss you have experienced or are in the midst of, be gentle with yourself. And at some point I invite you to open your heart to making peace with the universal nature of loss; making peace with not only the impermanent nature of what we possess but with the eternal nature of love; and finally making peace with what is. Namaste.

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