one story, a mother has gone mad after the death of her baby and begs the Buddha for medicine to revive her child.63 The Buddha agrees, with one condition: she must procure a mustard seed, a cheap Indian spice, from a family in which no one has died. Elated, the mother begins knocking on doors. By the end of the day, though, she realizes that no houses are free of death. The mother comes to see her grief as part of a universal problem of existence. She finds solace in generalizing her hopelessness from herself to the world.
