Over the Edge with Kisa Gotami – Part 1
by Dan Nussbaum
Let’s start with an image from an early Buddhist story. A thin young woman holds the corpse of her child. No one can make her let go of her dead boy. She begs each person she encounters to give her some potion to bring him back to life. I imagine her lifting up the lifeless body up for all to see, its head drooping to one side. The people she meets recoil. She’s mad.
This image comes from the story of Kisa Gotami who later on will be told by the Buddha that he can give her help if she brings him a mustard seed from a house that has never known death. Kisa Gotami finds out that death has visited every house. An understanding of impermanence brings her back to her senses. At last she’s able to put down the body and bury her child.
An anthology could be made of the many versions of this story that can be found online. I appreciate the way that writers have made it personal, imagining details that aren’t in the canonical version, changing others. We hear the child is an infant and a year-and-a-half and old enough to run around by himself; that she carries the body as she goes door-or-door and that Buddha has her leave the corpse with him before she goes on her quest; that people in the town scorned her and that they offered her kindness. If you’re interested in how texts change, a search online offers up a lot to savor.
Most interpretations of this tale say that Gotami comes to know the pervasiveness of suffering, that everything born must die. And certainly her story is about coming to terms with grief. But that phrase - coming to terms with grief – sounds flat, which goes along with my feeling that most readings could go deeper.
One writer sees it this way:
The story of the Mustard Seed is well known in all Buddhist Sects. It is a monument to the idea of practice in the face of loss and suffering. The Four Noble Truths have as their base the idea that change is constant, and that we will always lose everything we are attached to. The Mustard Seed story illustrates this well. Through the suffering of Kisa Gotami we are reminded of our own, and how we are all connected in that suffering. All who live suffer.
I did come across one breath-grabbing exception to the conventional: http://tinyurl.com/a9hzecb. In an essay about her anguish after giving birth to a stillborn baby, the writer Angie Yingst plunges so far into the Kisa Gotami story that we see her differently as she comes out the other side. It’s writing that shows us how immersed reading changed her at the same time it’s writing that offers us the chance to change by reading it.
Mothers do go mad with grief. Annie Yingst tells us she went to the brink. The image of Kisa Gotami shows someone over the edge. Yet what’s usually presented as Gotami’s insight doesn’t come up to the intensity of her struggle to reach it. Everyone dies? Is that it? Did we really need a Buddha who only comes along once in an aeon to tell us that?
In a later post I will suggest another reading of the story which stays with the desperation of Kisa Gotami clutching the corpse of her child.
Dan, I’m very glad you posted this. It speaks to me, as my own mother died when I was a child and my younger brother died before reaching the age of 41 (in the exact same brain-tumor fashion as my mom).
I think the real issue is the ‘how’ of death. Yes, death and illness come to everyone, but for most they come in a natural ordering of things. Death comes in (relative) old age; illness is transient until it isn’t. As well, intangibles such as quality of life during dying etc., greatly influence (I contend) our reaction to death’s visit.
I agree that to simply say ‘death visits each house’ doesn’t really do justice to the details of that visit, which matter greatly in the scheme of things. All things are simply *not* equal in that sense. The best we can hope for is that those lucky enough to experience a relatively normal ordering to life realize their luck and make it their cause to help those not so fortunate.
The conditions surrounding a death matter a great deal, as you point out. It’s not just “death.” There’s a tragedy usually when a mother dies and leaves behind young children as happened unfortunately to you. And that’s not abstract at all. It’s what you went through.
As sad as it is when adult children have to bury their aged parents you’re right to suggest that they’re lucky that their parents didn’t have the miserable task of burying them.
Thank you, Neal. I’m glad to know the post spoke to you.
Hi Dan–the story is also included in my book Kindness: a Treasury of Buddhist Wisdom, published by Skinner House Books. People can find it on Amazon or through Skinner. Many beautiful illustrations and other classic Buddhist tales.
Kindness: A Treasury of Buddhist Wisdom for Children and Parents (This Little Light of Mine)
It’s good to know this, Sarah. You’re welcome to post the story or an excerpt in this thread.
Hey Dan again–
I’m probably guilty of not making my audience feel the true anguish of the story too in my book. My excuse would be that I was writing it for parents to read to their children, in order that they could gauge how far to go with the grief.
But that sounds really sensible. After all your book is called Kindness, not Traumatizing Buddhist Stories for Young Readers.
Dan, Thank you for sharing my piece of Kisa Gotami here. Interestingly, I wrote that piece two months after my daughter’s death. It was easy for me to relate to Kisa Gotami in this story, to move past my suffering and feel hers. I hadn’t reread that piece in a long time. Thank you for that opportunity and for your words on my piece. I appreciate it.
Here’s something ironic. I was reading posts online about Kisa Gotami that distilled the story down to the lesson that everyone suffers. But the way some authors wrote gave the impression that they never had.
Your post is so different. It takes us through your heart and your thinking. You show us how the pain of people you knew became so tangible for you after Lucy’s death that the problem of suffering could never be just a nice Buddhist lesson we’re supposed to get. You didn’t set out to make yourself compassionate, the feelings just became inescapable. And you tell us that came from the way you engaged with Kisa Gotami’s tragedy when looking at your own. So it’s also a declaration of the importance of literature. Did you intend to say that, too?
It makes me wonder how you’d write about the changing experience of seeing your friends over time. The intensity would have to have subsided. Do you still feel traces of the feeling you had those days? More than traces? Have you written about this already?
Dan, I think it is easy to confuse sympathy with compassion. Certainly, my daughter’s death evokes a strong sympathetic response in people. There was pity, but true compassion was rare. The Kisa Gotami story was one I had heard throughout my adult life studying and reading about Buddhism. I loved the story. It is brilliant and pithy, but when I suffered the same fate as Kisa Gotami, I had compassion in a way. I know her suffering. It was my starting point. I would have loved to have deeply understood how little I knew about compassion before Lucy’s death. I didn’t intend on it to be a declaration on literature, but I am such a reader and lover of literature, can I claim that everything I write has that metatext?
I can tap into that intensity here and there. When the intensity of feeling each person’s suffering subsided, I was left with a secondary loss. One I couldn’t identify until I saw my therapist again. A practicing Buddhist. When I told him the story of my daughter’s death, and the experience of Kisa Gotami and then the subsequent loss of that connection to all people, he said, “Ah, so you lost your daughter, then you lost your enlightenment?” It was so humbling to walk through the world that way, but when it was gone, I felt so isolated and alone. For years.
In the last few years, I have taken up tonglen meditation, which my therapist suggested as a way to touch that place of intense compassion in early grief again. I practiced slowly at first. I have incorporated tonglen into my painting meditation practice. I paint mizuko jizo, a bodhisattva for stillborn, miscarried and aborted babies. I have painted hundreds of them for grieving mothers all around the world, all in tonglen. I give them a way a few times a year. Here is a video I created describing what I do and who I am. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MRIdfC63iI&feature=share&list=UUX3QquQUs_20BogrJLQL4Qw
Thank you, Angie, so much for writing more about your experience after your daughter’s death. There was an intense experience of connection with others, followed by a loss of that intense feeling and then a long period of feeling alone, followed by finding painting mizuko jizo as a practice and tonglen as a practice, which allows you to reconnect with the important experience of seeing others’ suffering. And by watching the youtube and reading some of your blog I understand how your practice has connected you with so many people and the comfort you give to so many parents. On one level it’s just so interesting how one thing leads to another in such unexpected ways.
And I loved the hokey pokey video!