Death comes with a 100% guarantee.
Most of us cower at the thought of death for ourselves and our loved ones. But it’s an inescapable reality that arrives unannounced.
Yet, it’s hard to come to terms with it.
The legend goes that an inconsolable woman approached Siddharth (Gautam Buddha), gripped in grief over the untimely death of her young child.
She begged the enlightened one to use his skills to revive her child back to life. Buddha understood her suffering and tried explaining, in the gentlest manner, the fact of life’s impermanence. It fell on deaf ears.
Eventually, he relented and said he would revive her child to life only if she could bring him some mustard seeds from a family that had never experienced death. This triggered a spark of hope in the mother. She searched day and night for such a family and came back empty-handed but wiser.
Gautam's Teachings on Buddhism are based on the 4 inevitable sufferings of every life — Birth, Aging, Illness, and Death.
His last 10 years of Buddhist Teachings culminated in the Lotus Sutra which aims to awaken our latent Buddhahood and accept life’s sufferings with wisdom and compassion.
