z:\ ambedkar\vol 011\vol11 09.indd MK SJ+YS 5 10 2013/YS 18 11 2013 575
HIS HUMANITY
(ii)
Comforting Kisa Gotami
575
Kisa Gotami was married to the son of a merchant of Shravasti.
Soon after marriage a son was born to her.
Unfortunately her child died of a snake-bite before it could walk.
She could not believe that her child was really dead as she had not seen death before.
The little spot red from the bite of a snake, did not look as if it could be the cause of the child’s death.
She, therefore, took her dead child and wandered about from house to house, in such a wild state of mind that people believed that she had gone out of her senses.
At last one old man advised her to go and seek out Gotama who happened at the time to be in Shravasti.
So she came to the Blessed One and asked him for some medicine for her dead child.
The Blessed One listened to her story and to her lamentations.
Then the Blessed One told her, “Go enter the town, and at any house where yet there has been no death, thence bring a little mustard seed and with that I will revive your child.”
She thought this was easy and with the dead body of her child she entered the town.
But she soon found that she had failed as every house she visited had suffered loss in the death of some member.
As one householder told her, “the living are few and the dead are many.”
So she returned to the Blessed Lord disappointed and empty-handed.
The Blessed Lord then asked her if she did not then realize that death was the common lot of all and whether she should grieve as though it was her special misfortune.
VIII