CONNECTION

Once a woman came to the Buddha holding the corpse of her dead child, wailing in her anguish and pleading with the Buddha to bring the child back to life. The Buddha said that to do this he would need a rare ingredient: a mustard seed from the household of a family that had never known death. He sent the woman out to find such a mustard seed. But her desperate search yielded no such seed - only many stories of grief as great as and greater than her own. In the end these stories connected her deeply to her own suffering and so she was healed from her anguish.

excerpt from: 'Taking our places' by Norman Fischer