Searching for Mustard Seeds and Flickering Flames: a Guide to Reading As a Mode of Care

Searching for Mustard Seeds and Flickering Flames: A Guide to Reading as a Mode of Care

by Sarah Fleming

Advisors: Charles Hallisey and Naohito Miura

A Senior Paper Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Divinity Harvard Divinity School Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2021

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Chapter 1: Searching for Mustard Seeds

In a well-known Buddhist story, a young mother, Kisa Gotami, goes out searching for medicine for her young dead son. Mad with grief, she wanders from house to house, met with confusion and sometimes scorn. Finally, a wise man, discerning the source of her sorrow, points her towards the Buddha, presenting him as one who will know the medicine she seeks.

Following his directions, Kisa Gotami approaches the Buddha, referred to as the teacher, and asks him how to obtain the medicine. His instructions are simple: get a pinchful of mustard seeds from a house where no son or daughter or, indeed, anyone else has ever died.

With her heart lightened, Kisa Gotami follows his advice and returns to the business of moving about the village from house to house, this time seeking not medicine but mustard seeds.

When she arrives at the first house, she asks if the family has any such seeds. They do. But as they are fetching the mustard seeds, Kisa Gotami remembers the second half of the Buddha’s instructions and asks if, in this house, a son or daughter or anyone else had died. To this inquiry she receives the response, “What are you saying, woman? The living, indeed, are few; only the dead are many.”1 She returns the mustard seeds, stating that they are not medicine for her son, and moves on to the next house.

But there she is met with the same response—and at the next house, and the next.

Evening comes, and she still has not taken mustard seeds from even a single house. Slowly she comes to realize that not only the houses she has visited but all the houses in the entire village have known death. Whereas before, she had thought that her son alone had died, now, she sees

1 DhA 8.13: Kiṃ vadesi, amma? Jīvamānā hi katipayā, matakā eva bahukā. Or, in another version (ThīA 10.1), “In this house, who can count the dead?” All Pali texts accessed through the Vipassana Research Institute’s online database of the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka, https://tipitaka.org/. As Charlie Hallisey reminded me, amma carries familial connotations as well—it serves as a marker (and maker) of kinship, sometimes as “mother” and sometimes as “daughter.” Asking each question in turn lands differently: What are you saying, woman? What are you saying, mother? What are you saying, dear?

Fleming 2 that death knows no bounds—indeed, as she reflects, “in the entire village, the dead alone outnumber the living.”2 With this realization, she is able to accept her son’s death, her heart, once greasy and oozing, now becoming firm as she leaves his body behind in the forest and returns to the Buddha. When he asks her if she obtained the mustard seeds as he recommended, she reports back that she did not, repeating the insight she arrived at through her search: “In the entire village only the dead outnumber the living.” Validating this realization, the Buddha compassionately repeats back to her what she has learned.

This story is frequently shared in condensed form (or creatively expanded into poem or song) on grief forums and blogs, anthologized as a Buddhist “Parable of the Mustard Seed” that offers concrete teachings for coping with loss of a loved one. It is often followed by a lesson:

Kisa Gotami learned, through her inability to find a mustard seed (and thus a house that has not known death), that death is universal.3 This teaching is framed as what allows her to move through grief and accept the fact of her loss.

But it is not just the content of the teaching that enables her to move on—it is also the process, and the relationships that her impossible quest draws her into. Yes, she learns the omnipresence of death, but hearing this lesson alone would not suffice. It is not enough for Kisa

Gotami to hear that her son is dead and that others, too, have suffered similar losses—she has been told this already. As one telling of the story recounts, when she first moves about the village asking for medicine, people scorn her, saying, “Medicine from where?”, but she does not

2 DhA 8.13: sakalagāmepi pana jīvantehi matakāva bahutarā. 3 As a few examples, see, for instance, Hilary Dockray, “Buddhism and the Parable of the Mustard Seed,” Christi Center, August 7, 2017, https://christicenter.org/2012/11/buddhism-parable-mustard-seed/; Jon Katz, “Life, Death, and Grief: The Story of Kisa Gotami,” Bedlam Farm Journal, August 30, 2014, https://www.bedlamfarm.com/2014/08/30/life-death-and-grief-the-story-of-kisa-gautami/; and “The Parable of the Mustard Seed (How to Deal with Grief),” Eat This/Teach That, May 18, 2017, https://eatthisteachthat.com/the- parable-of-the-mustard-seed-how-to-deal-with-grief/.

Fleming 3 grasp their speech.4 In another version, people exclaim, “Woman, you’ve grown mad—you move about asking for medicine for your dead son!” Yet still she wanders about, certain that she will find someone who can offer her the medicine she seeks.5 She can be scolded any number of times that her son is dead or that death is universal, but it won’t sink in—she must continue to move about from house to house, stumbling through the sometimes repetitive motions of asking if they have known loss and waiting for an answer. Just as if she were reading a story, she can’t skip ahead to the conclusion; she must wait and listen, gradually realizing through these encounters what she has been told countless times before.

This is to say, then, that it is not the lesson she learns but the process of moving from one home to the next, entering into each family’s narrative and listening to their stories of loss and hardship, that offers her freedom. It is precisely the type of sustained attention required in moving through the narrative of another that allows her to move through her grief. In one version of the story, the repetitive—even monotonous—nature of this process is underscored as she goes to a second house, a third, perhaps even a fourth or fifth, before her mind becomes clear, emptied of the grief-induced madness that had trapped her into the belief that her son alone had died— that she alone had experienced loss.6 Through fumbling through the motions7 of asking the members of each household if anyone in their house had died before, Kisa Gotami cultivates an

4 ThīA 10.1: Sā tesaṃ kathaṃ na gaṇhāti. She did not seize or take up their speech. 5 DhA 8.13: Atha naṃ manussā, ‘‘amma, tvaṃ ummattikā jātā, matakaputtassa bhesajjaṃ pucchantī vicarasī’’ti vadanti. Sā ‘‘avassaṃ mama puttassa bhesajjaṃ jānanakaṃ labhissāmī’’ti maññamānā vicarati. 6 ThīA 10.1: dutiyaṃ tatiyaṃ gharaṃ gantvā buddhānubhāvena vigatummādā pakaticitte ṭhitā. Having gone to a second house, a third, standing established in clear mind emptied of grief by the power of the Buddha. 7 This fumbling offers hope—we need not necessarily enter the process of reading with the right intentions. We can try to read for a particular purpose, as Kisa Gotami enters the house seeking mustard seeds, only to have that purpose subverted by the story itself. This model of reading emerges vividly in The Platform Sutra, where a monk is dispatched to report back on the teachings of a rival Zen master, Hui-neng. In other words, he is to listen primarily as a spy. But when the monk arrives and hears the master speak, he immediately “understands and grasps his original mind,” announces himself, and confesses that he was a spy but is now no longer (Red Pine 2006, 35). The very act of listening transformed him from spy to student, and he emerges with more than he bargained for. Like the words of Hui-neng, stories can snap us out of our preconceived notions of why we are reading them, sometimes in startling ways.

Fleming 4 attentiveness that allows her to see outside herself—to see the suffering of another, both of the particular people she meets and of the world as a whole. As she notes after setting aside the body of her dead son, the fact of impermanence holds true not only for a single house or a single village but for the entire world.8 While this certainly enables her to see that she is not alone, it also offers her a new way of moving through the world as she continues to learn through the relational act of attending to others’ narratives and being more present to their suffering.

Perhaps, then, reflecting on the story of Kisa Gotami can teach us how to read—how to enter into narratives in ways that not only teach us truths about ourselves but also prepare us to be more attentive to those around us. In the context of spiritual care, we can take up Kisa

Gotami’s story as a method for learning how to read stories with an eye toward the task of caregiving. We might see her as an unwitting chaplain in training, moving from door to door and inviting those she encounters to share their stories of loss, both bearing witness to their grief and learning about herself and the world around her in the process.9

And the lessons Kisa Gotami’s narrative offers in how to read continue, as the story doesn’t stop there.10 Her tale goes on after she learns the far-reaching spread of death: she then asks the Buddha permission to go forth and become ordained. He sends her into the company of the nuns, where she becomes known as Kisa Gotami Theri. One day, when it reaches her turn to light a candle in the meditation hall, she begins to notice the flickering of the candle flame,

8 ThīA 10.1, quoting Apa. Therī 2.3.82. The way that this teaching suddenly becomes real for her offers a model of reading as well, as what she sees in front of her kicks up a passage she had previously encountered as mere abstraction. What was discourse has become speech; what was a decontextualized teaching now enters into the world before her. 9 In this vein, the scorn she is sometimes met with, too, may not be unfamiliar, at least to this chaplain—knocking on doors uninvited, whether in a village or in a hospital ward, can sometimes be met with disgruntlement or confusion. This, too, is part of the process. 10 It doesn’t begin there either. Kisa Gotami’s familiar mustard seed quest emerges quite late in the story as told in the commentary, following either a series of tricks and burning transformations or a nun’s aspirations for high standing, depending on the telling. We’ll get to these pre-stories in all their richness and complexity in Chapter 5.

Fleming 5 taking its arising and breaking up as her meditation object. As she watches the flame flickering, she sees her own experience in its movement, thinking that in exactly this way living beings arise and are destroyed. In looking at the flame, then, she recognizes something of her own experience. The candle flame functions almost like a story within the story: it reaches out and grabs her in the same way that her own narrative might grab us.11 In this way, it offers her a mode of recognition, redescribing something she perhaps knew about herself and her world but didn’t yet have words for.

This reaching out becomes explicit as the Buddha, seated far from her in his own fragranced hut, radiates his presence to reach her and speaks as if having sat down face to face with her.12 Just as before, he repeats what she has said and builds upon it, layering it with lessons and verses tailored directly to her. After being spoken to in this manner, Kisa Gotami attains arhathood exactly where she is seated.

This, too, offers an internal instruction manual of sorts: through reading stories as Kisa

Gotami reads the candle flames, we might come to make sense of our own lives. This process is like being spoken to directly—like sitting face to face with the story itself as it presents itself to us. So much hinges upon this small detail of face to face: it implies that the story not only reaches out towards us but turns to us, adjusting its whole body so as to face us directly. You— precisely you—are being addressed, and there is no escaping it.

11 Much of my language of stories as reaching and grabbing I’ve inherited from Charles Hallisey, where the expression is often accompanied by a hand gesture akin to that of a Dickensian child snatcher. And this process of grabbing alters not only the reader but the story as well, as the mind of the reader becomes its occasion to “catch up to the present.” For more on the mutual transformation that reading stories can set in motion, conveyed through similarly visceral images of momentary possession by ghosts making their way into the present, see Charles Hallisey, “Reimagining Buddhist Scripture,” The Wisdom Podcast, May 21, 2019, https://wisdomexperience.org/wisdom-podcast/charles-hallisey/. 12 DhA 8.13: tassā sammukhe nisīditvā kathento viya; like he was speaking having sat down face to face with her.

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In this pair of momentary encounters, first with the flame and then with the Buddha, we see the dance between distance and proximity that stories can provide—the ways that they can be far off enough to let us see ourselves and our world anew (perhaps askance, by way of a detour) but simultaneously close enough to address us deeply and personally, as if made for the particularities of our lives, our needs, our losses, and our shames. A good story, Kisa Gotami’s narrative shows us, is one that has the power to bridge gaps across time and space as they, like the Buddha, spread their radiance and speak to us as if having sat down right next to us, face to face.

It can be easy to get lost in the extravagance of Kisa Gotami’s story—to pick out the details that place it in a world that appears far from our own, or a depth of despair almost out of a fairy tale. You may be tempted to mythologize it, to treat it as a distant folktale as its tricksters, transformations, and quests leap out at you. But it is closer to our world than you might think.

While it moves through the extremes of human experience, it also speaks to the mundane—to the everyday losses we undergo or encounter and how we might make sense of them. This is a story about grief, and extreme grief at that, but it is also a story about stories, and a story about how engaging with stories offers us a lens through which to view and move through the world. In the context of spiritual care, we might view it at once as an instruction manual on how reading stories with care might render us better present to patients and ourselves and as a site of practice—an opportunity to train our attention and, perhaps, to be spoken to.

This guide takes up these two questions in tandem: first, how can we read so as to become more attentive to the needs of those around us, particularly in the context of patient encounters, and second, how can we read so as to support ourselves through this work? And

Fleming 7 what can the story of Kisa Gotami teach us about how to read with an eye towards both of these intentions?

The following three chapters meander through Kisa Gotami’s story with an eye towards these questions, picking out moments that open up space for interpretation—moments that may harmonize well with the daily life of a chaplain (or CPE student). You can think of these moments as entryways, invitations into the story—and into the ways that the stories within this story are taken up as modes of cultivating attention, tools for meaning making, and sites of recognition. But because the best stories often operate through gaps and ambiguities, questions left open and unanswered, this guide remains open ended, offering inklings toward interpretation and resources along the way but leaving you to finish the job. It is up to you to see where these entryways lead and to see how this story mixes with your own.

You’re welcome, of course, to skip ahead and first read the story in full, returning to the intervening chapters only after you’ve found your own sticking points and entrances to meaning.

But if you’d prefer a more guided approach, you can follow Chapters 2–4. Each takes up a particular moment in Kisa Gotami’s narrative: her search for seeds, her recognition in the flames, and her attempts to tell her own story. Each of these moments gestures towards how we might read stories so as to become better caregivers and so as to be better cared for.

Chapter 5 transitions into Kisa Gotami’s story itself, as found in the commentary to the

Dhammapada and the Therīgāthā, respectively. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes with a week of prompts and creative exercises for engaging with this particular story—a mosaic of invitations that emerge from the moments and guidelines laid out in the preceding chapters and from the story itself. This is where this guide most explicitly becomes your own: it depends upon your participation and exploration. It is yours to make of what you will. And, as an invitation to

Fleming 8 further reading, the appendix offers a few general guidelines for how to approach stories with an eye towards caregiving work—entryways informed by this story but not bound to it.

A caveat on what this is not: a full exegesis of the Kisa Gotami story; a definitive and exhaustive guide on how to read; an authoritative text on what Buddhism says about grief or death (or, for that matter, what Buddhism says about anything).13 What this aspires toward: an open invitation to the delights of reading, with the hope that you might learn something about how to care for yourself and those around you in the process. Don’t hold back—have fun with it.

Chapter 2: Reading for Others

As Kisa Gotami moves from house to house, asking if each family has suffered loss, she unknowingly learns how to listen—how to follow the narrative of another. She is drawn into relationship with each household she enters, coming to turn her attention towards their stories of loss. Here she might offer us a helpful model of how to read and, in the process, how to care for another: how to be led by narrative and follow with our attention.

This model of reading finds harmony with Toni Morrison’s vision of reading as a dance— an “intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another’s.”14 Reading—and reading stories in particular—requires us to inhabit the mind of another, following it closely and attending to its nuances, twists, and turns, just as we might follow a dance partner. It is first of all relational, a dance that cultivates our imaginative faculties and draws us into relationship not only with the mind of the author but with that of each and

13 For the first, the Pali commentary itself is likely the best bet (though less likely to be translated into English). For the second, Harold Bloom is a great place to start, particularly the aptly titled How to Read and Why (New York: Touchstone, 2001) and Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). For an attempt at the last (at least within the Theravādin world), see Bhikkhu Anālayo, Mindfully Facing Disease and Death: Compassionate Advice from Early Buddhist Texts (Cambridge: Windhorse Publications, 2017). 14 Toni Morrison, “The Dancing Mind,” National Book Foundation, November 6, 1996, https://www.nationalbook.org/tag/the-dancing-mind/.

Fleming 9 every character therein. Stories are messy by nature, incorporating a multiplicity of voices and perspectives and forcing us to move among them. They set our mind in motion, hurtling between perspectives and encouraging us to see things differently as we learn the art of sustained attention.

This is to say that a good story is one that refuses to be pinned down, impertinently irreducible to any one meaning or condensation. It cannot be captured by a description of its plot or a catalogue of its cast of characters or any such attempts at flattening, bucking up against our desires to reduce anyone—or anything—to just one narrative or just one attribute.15 And in its ambiguities and gaps, in everything left unsaid, we must put in the work of learning to attend to the narrative of another, acknowledging that we are operating always by inference and can never arrive at a definitive reading. This dynamic is at the fore in Theravādin literature, like the Kisa

Gotami story, where ambiguities in language and (often unlabeled) changes in perspective or speaker force us to train our attention and to inhabit spaces of unknowing. With no easy takeaways, we must do the work and watch as the story expands our imagination of what is possible.16

We see Kisa Gotami move through this process of training her attention as she goes about asking, hurtling from one house to another and hearing each family’s account of their loss. She asks and she asks and she asks again, first requesting the mustard seeds and then inquiring about the loss the house has known. Curiously, she is never given the answer she seeks; instead, she must occupy a space of unknowing and continue on with faith and trust that her journey is

15 In other words, to borrow language from Amia Srinivasan, a good story refuses to be spoken about “in the third person, from a position of evaluation and judgment, as an object of study, a fungible thing to be weighed, compared, categorised.” It is never just anything and in its very structure demands to be treated as dynamic, ever in motion. 16 As Hallisey and Hansen write in “Narrative, Sub-Ethics, and the Moral Life,” it is precisely in our attempts to work through a story’s possibilities that “our own horizon of values and expectations is altered” (311).

Fleming 10 nonetheless worthwhile (she has been instructed, after all, by the Buddha). Through the paired acts of listening attentively and waiting faithfully, an answer does begin to emerge—one conveyed precisely through the non-answers, through the gaps and silences and stories to which she has now become attuned. In following the narratives of those she meets—both what they state explicitly and what is left unsaid—she comes to realize how loss has touched each of their lives and how she herself, swept up in her own grief, had been previously unable to see. “I thought, ‘My son alone has died,’” she reflects, “but in the entire village, the dead alone outnumber the living.”

This process of waiting and listening, moving door to door, guides her towards a deeper sense of compassion and a new way of seeing, as she comes to realize how oblivious she had been to the narratives of grief always present just beneath the surface.17 She is then better able to treat whatever she encounters as a meditation object and cultivate insight, as we’ll see in Chapter

3, as the attention she has developed in this process multiplies and points her towards the shadows of grief and loss that surround her in unexpected places. Led by the stories she hears and the modes of listening they make possible, Kisa Gotami becomes better able to perceive the world—and the suffering—around her.18

17 And this may be an alternate reading of the term first used to describe her: adiṭṭhapubbamaraṇatā, having never seen death before, or the state of death being previously unseen by her. While literally it may refer to the fact that she had yet to lose someone dear to her—she had not known a person who had died—perhaps we can also take it that she had not seen the way that death marks the lives of those around her as well. She had not previously seen the private griefs carried by everyone in her village; she had not seen death’s movement through the world. After all, the wise man still describes her as having never before seen death even after she had witnessed her son die. It is the process of encountering stories of loss—coupled with her own experience losing her son—that enables her to become one who has seen death, one who continues to see death and bear witness to the losses that haunt and hover over each and every family. 18 To place this within a Buddhist framework, stories pull her onto the first step of the eightfold path: right view. She can now see more clearly what had always been there but what she hadn’t yet known how to look for; she can now notice what lurked beneath her interactions that she, not seeing the death always present, couldn’t begin to see.

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Kisa Gotami’s story thus offers glimmers of a method for reading as geared towards caregiving—reading in such a way as to be led by narrative and to deepen our compassion and understanding. This model hinges on the cultivation of attention. Here we might turn to Simone

Weil, who theorizes attention as “the real object and almost sole interest” of study and the primary component of prayer.19 Reading—and reading stories in particular—can teach us how to pay attention through the slow and sustained vulnerability of receiving the story of another. It is precisely this careful, devoted attention that we can then direct towards one who is suffering, learning to see them in their affliction and bracing ourselves not to flinch or look away. Though this may sound simple, it is in fact one of the most difficult things we can do: the very act of giving one’s attention to a sufferer is “almost a miracle; it is a miracle.”20

Reading a story, then, can be seen an act of accompaniment, a skill that can deepen our ability to accompany patients through suffering and loss. We can learn to read others with the same care and attentiveness that stories draw out of us, to cultivate the patience, curiosity, and wonder as we turn towards the multitudes each individual contains. Weil makes this connection explicit in her use of the term lecture, or reading, which takes on a valence of emotional interpretation when she applies it to human beings. Our greatest failures, she writes, are our misreadings of others, particularly our impositions of how we read ourselves onto them or limit their possibilities through the lens of what we already know (or think we know) of them. Every being “cries out silently to be read differently.”21 In the ways that they expand our vision of the possible and train our attention to multiplicity, stories can play a crucial role in teaching us how to read others differently, as well as how to admit that we can never read them exhaustively.

19 Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009), 105. 20 Ibid., 114. 21 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 135.

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Anton T. Boisen, founder of Clinical Pastoral Education, often referred to chaplaincy work as the study of the “living human document.”22 Perhaps we can learn how to better engage in such study by following Kisa Gotami as she, in turn, follows the stories of others. We can learn to dance through her narrative, cultivating the art of attention as we then turn outwards towards reading—and minimally misreading—the living human documents we encounter.

22 Quoted in Kathleen A. Gallivan, Brian J. Conley, and Julia Polter, “Brigham and Women’s Hospital Clinical Pastoral Education Handbook,” Brigham and Women’s Hospital Spiritual Care Department, May 2019.

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Chapter 3: Reading for Yourself

Shortly after concluding her search (and leaving behind the body of her son), Kisa

Gotami returns to the Buddha with a newfound appreciation for all she had not previously seen: the countless ways that loss has marked the lives of those around her; the ubiquitous stories of grief she had not yet known how to listen for. When the Buddha asks her if she was able to attain even a single pinchful of the mustard seeds he requested, she reports back that she was not— after all, as she recounts, “in the entire village, only the dead outnumber the living.” He repeats back to her what she had thought to herself earlier, crystallizing (and scripturalizing) it in verse and enabling her to see it as a valid and vital learning. Hearing her own insight reflected back to her so poignantly, Kisa Gotami attains the fruit of streamwinning (the fruition of the first stage of the supramundane path to awakening), as do many others around her. Attention, it seems, is contagious.23 She then asks the Buddha permission to go forth; he ordains her and directs her to join a community of bhikkhunis, or women monastics. There, she orients herself to the day-today routines of monastic living.

One day, while lighting a candle in the ordination hall, she becomes mesmerized by the movements of the flame as it flickers, rises, and breaks apart. Taking the flame as her meditation object, she thinks, “In exactly this way, these beings are born and broken up; only those who have attained nibbana do not appear.” Now, the term ‘meditation object’ usually refers to a fixed class of objects conducive to meditation, objects typically chosen deliberately and geared towards developing concentration in a formalized and ritualized manner. But here Kisa Gotami chooses—or, rather, is chosen by—a rather idiosyncratic meditation object. Hers is not something she seeks out after careful consideration; instead, it is simply what she finds before

23 Here we see how attention multiplies not only across objects but across persons—cultivation of attention can make us better present to those around us, which can make them better to those around them, and so on ad infinitum.

Fleming 14 her as she goes through the rituals of her daily life. The meditation object Kisa Gotami receives suggests that she is able to read—and be read by—the world around her, as it appears to her within the context of her day-to-to routine.

To reframe this in the language of the previous chapter, her sustained cultivation of attention under the guidance of the Buddha now enables her to perceive the stories that surround her in her everyday existence—the potentials for stories that might otherwise go unnoticed. The deliberate and structured practice of moving from house to house, seeking out stories (by way of seeds) in a regimented way, has a lasting impact on the way she navigates her reality, preparing her to see the world around her as storied, ripe with narratives worthy of her attention. The

Buddha’s initial counsel, seemingly absurd, now pays dividends as her guided reading has primed her to be spoken to, to be grabbed directly, and to hear the stories that everyday objects and encounters contain. In other words, while stories have the power to speak, we must also cultivate the power to hear. Moving about—fumbling, listening, waiting—renders Kisa Gotami more susceptible to hear even when she is not directly guided to do so. Through a sustained practice of reading stories deliberately and with attention, we too might become more susceptible to being grabbed by the stories that surround us, whether the narrative a patient might tell about their illness or an unexpected site of recognition.

This is where reading serves as a mode of self-care and self-understanding: after encountering the flame, Kisa Gotami becomes more present not only to the world around her but also to herself. As her idiosyncratic meditation object leaps out to her, it guides her not only towards a realization about the fundamental nature of existence, but also towards deeper understanding of her own suffering. It becomes an instrument of meaning making—a mode of recognition. When she “reads” the story that the candle flame speaks through its flickering, she

Fleming 15 can reframe her experience of loss in the language of the flame. The flame thus puts words to what she had previously experienced or known only as beyond speech. While listening to the stories of the people she encounters offers her solidarity and support as she learns to pay attention to the loss all around her, it is in the story of the flame that she feels recognized and seen. A story seemingly far from her own—in fact, a story devoid of people at all—offers her new perspective both on past grief and on the path ahead. Because she had learned how to listen

(or to read), the story of the flame can grab her and guide her through her own loss.

This story within a story might hint at how we might read and be read by stories, particularly as we struggle to make sense of experiences that feel so far beyond speech— witnessing death after death over the course of a particularly grueling overnight; accompanying a parent after the loss of their newborn; sitting at the bedside of a patient bombarded with difficult diagnoses. Perhaps Kisa Gotami’s story might be to us as the candle flame’s flickering is to her, catching us off guard and offering us fleeting moments of recognition. Like her, we might recognize ourselves and our experiences in startling ways, addressed by a narrative far from our own. Reading stories deliberately might make us better able to notice and attend to the stories of people around us at work or in our everyday life, but it can also make us more prone to be caught by stories or images that speak our experiences back to us in language we didn’t know we needed. Taking up reading as a practice can render us more susceptible to hearing stories speak when we least expect it.

Here it may be helpful to step sideways towards a similar story, that of Patacara.

Patacara, like Kisa Gotami, is well known throughout the Theravādin world—and beyond—as an

Fleming 16 iconic figure of grief stretched to its breaking point. 24 Her story is almost over the top in its loss after loss after theatrical loss: as a young woman born to a wealthy family, she is besieged by lust for one of the many servants in her home. Met by the disapproval of her parents, the two of them elope and take up lodging far from her village. Soon she gives birth to a son, and a couple years later she becomes pregnant again. This time, she begs her husband to let them return to her family’s home. He refuses; she departs on her own. As he follows and finally catches up to her, a thunderstorm strikes. Amidst torrential downpour, Patacara begins to go into labor and asks him to fashion them a shelter, but upon kicking an anthill he is promptly killed by a poisonous snake.

Meanwhile, Patacara gives birth to a second son in the middle of the road. The following morning, she finds her husband’s body and is thrown into a state of grief. Struggling to carry both her children, she makes her way to her family’s village. Soon she comes across a river swollen with rain; it is too difficult to carry both children over at once, so she places the older child down on the near shore as she transports the younger child across. Turning back for the older child, she swims through the river when a hawk strikes, swooping down to snatch the newborn from where it lay. Patacara, shocked, waves her arms to frighten the hawk; her older child, hearing her call, believe her to be beckoning him and dives into the river. He drowns.

One son devoured by the hawk, the other submerged by the waves, Patacara is left in the middle of the river, caught between her two dead children. Her grief compounded, she makes her way to shore and encounters a man. She asks him the way towards her family’s home. He is reluctant to speak at first, but after her prodding, he gestures towards the smoke in the distance.

There, the bodies of her mother, father, and brother all burn on a single funeral pyre—during the

24 What follows is a summary of the version of Patacara’s story found in the commentary to the Therīgāthā. The full story is available in the Pali at ThīA 5.10. Thank you to Beatrice Chrystall for first introducing me to this version of the story when we translated it together in Intermediate Pali.

Fleming 17 thunderstorm of the previous night, their house caved in, crushing them beneath it. Here Patacara reaches a breaking point: she loses her mind, tears off her clothes, and begins to wander about, stricken with grief and guilt that all these losses are her fault. People mock and ridicule her, pelting her with clumps of dirt. Eventually, she stumbles into where the Buddha is teaching, and though his disciples shoo her, he welcomes her in, clothing her and allowing her to stay. As she listens to him preach, the Buddha gives her language for her loss; feeling spoken to, she ordains.

This story has been told and retold in myriad forms: in poem, in song, in conversation as people across generations have attempted to narrate the unnarrativizable—the traumas and tragedies of their lives. As Anne Hansen and Charles Hallisey describe in “Narrative, Sub-Ethics, and the Moral Life,” in Khmer oral versions of the story, the narrative punch often comes through the details that are added and elaborated upon with each retelling, subjecting the listener to the visceral force of Patacara’s “unimaginable and unrelieved” suffering and subsequent liberation from it.25 And this retelling continues to this day. In the 1980s, for instance, when

Hansen interviewed Khmer refugees newly resettled in the United States, she asked them how the atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge could have happened. A substantial number answered by way of popular Buddhist stories—and by way of Patacara in particular. This raises a number of questions: Why turn to this story? And why take up another story to process and communicate their own?

Addressing these questions, Hansen and Hallisey tease out a moment from within

Patacara’s story itself that, like Kisa Gotami’s flames, may serve as an instruction manual or reading guide. One day, as Patacara bathes herself by the river, she sprinkles water on her feet three times. One stream of water flows for a short distance before stopping; the second flows a

25 Charles Hallisey and Anne Hansen, “Narrative, Sub-Ethics, and the Moral Life: Some Evidence from Theravāda Buddhism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 24, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 321–23.

Fleming 18 bit farther; the third, even father. Watching these rivulets form and cease, she grasps them as a meditation object, just like Kisa Gotami, and realizes: “Just like the first rivulet, some beings die in youth; just like the second rivulet, some beings die in middle age; just like the third, some beings die in old age.” These droplets reframe, in turn, the death of her sons, her husband, and parents. Seeing the movements of the water offers her something beyond what any words of comfort might give her: a story perhaps in harmony with her own, but distant enough that she can begin to see around herself and see beyond the trappings of her present circumstances. To use the language Hallisey and Hansen offer, she finds her experience refigured, transformed before her, and she can now attain higher ordination.

Perhaps this is why so many of the Khmer refugees turned to Patacara’s narrative: it offered sufficient distance for them to become detached enough from their present circumstances to see their lives from a new perspective. Like the water droplets for Patacara herself, Patacara’s story provided them with a way to narrate what may have otherwise felt forever unnarrativizable; to communicate what was too painful or too difficult or too opaque to share in the first person.

They felt recognized by Patacara’s story, and now, by projecting themselves out into the third person—her third person—they could begin to speak their grief, their pain, to those around them without having to remain the main character of their own life. Her narrative, on their lips, gave voice to their own, at once offering recognition and rendering an isolating experience shareable by way of a detour.

Returning to Kisa Gotami, perhaps the flames function similarly, offering her a mechanism to see herself from a distance and to be seen by the scene before her. She, too, is beginning to wrestle with the question of how to narrate and share her loss. Gazing at her meditation object, she speaks her insight that beings, like the flames, arise and perish; only those

Fleming 19 who attain nibbana do not continue to appear. And just when she finishes speaking, the Buddha appears to her. Still seated in his perfumed hut, he radiates his presence to where she is seated and addresses her as if they were seated face to face. As before, he repeats her insight back to her and builds upon it, infusing it with scripture: “In exactly this way, Gotami,” he begins, addressing her directly, “these beings, like the candle flames, are born and broken up; only those who have attained nibbana do not appear here.”26 He concludes with a verse. At the end of the verse, Kisa Gotami, hearing his words, attains arhathood, along with analytic insight, directly where she is seated.

To recap, then, Kisa Gotami is spoken to be the flame; she speaks; the Buddha appears to her right there and speaks her own words back to her, building upon them and layering them with scripture; she listens and reaches the highest stage of the supramundane path (before nibbana itself) exactly where she is seated. As she begins to navigate her own story through that of the flame, she enters into a dialogue that allows the Buddha to appear to her—or, rather, allows her to perceive his presence. Her engagement brings the Buddha face to face with her, and, side by side, they continue the conversation, mutually reading and being read by one another.

In fact, the verb used to indicate the Buddha’s speaking, kathento, can also mean

“reading” (as to read, in Pali, is literally to cause to speak). As he speaks her words, then, it is as if he is reading her. In the world of this story, reading is thus positioned as a relational activity, one that requires—and invites—a mutuality as the lines between reader and speaker begin to blur. To return to Morrison, in this back and forth of speaking, causing to speak (literally, reading), and being spoken to, Kisa Gotami begins to dance with the flame—and with the voice

26 Here the Buddha demonstrates his power as a skillful reflective listener, beginning with Kisa Gotami’s own words and images and then layering them with scripture that might speak to her.

Fleming 20 of the Buddha. She has learned to dance before, for what was her search for seeds if not a guided exercise in following? Now, she can improvise, taking the flame as her dance partner and allowing herself to follow and lead in turns.

As she dances with the flame, it passes into her world, her story, her very seat as the

Buddha reaches across space to show her that she’s been heard. It is this participatory act of meaning making—being recognized and being stirred to speak, then hearing her own words spoken back to her in the voice of another—that guides her to arhathood directly in the setting of her daily life, exactly where she sat. The story reaches out to redescribe her reality, startling her with its strangeness, and she is there to hear it—and to dance.

Fleming 21

Chapter 4: Telling Our Own Stories

Our stories never just stay our own. Inevitably, they become mixed, enmeshed, entangled with the stories of those around us, perhaps contaminated by snippets we pick up along the way from friends or patients or phrases in novels. The line between what’s ours and what’s another’s begins to blur, and in our own self-narration we often cannot clearly mark out where our story ends and another’s begins. Before we know it, we may find ourselves telling other stories to get at our own. This might be a conscious effort, as we pull from novels or parables familiar to us, projecting ourselves out into the third person into a realm or world distant from our own—as we’ve seen already with Kisa Gotami and the flickering flames—or it may be less deliberate, as clear lines of demarcation between self and other slip away.

At the conclusion of our story, Kisa Gotami is recognized by the Buddha as highest among those wearing meagre robes. After reflecting that she obtained this distinction through dependence on her teacher, she utters a verse in praise of spiritual friendship. “Spiritual friendship has been pointed out to the world and praised by the sage,” she begins, in acknowledgment of the webs of relationality that carried her through and out of her grief, and she then launches into the ways that associating with good people can free anyone from the traps of suffering.

And then the poem takes a curious turn: after laying out some of the suffering endemic to the state of womanhood—some, she quips, cut their throat only after giving birth once; the delicate devour poison—Kisa Gotami shifts into the first person, launching into what seems like an attempt at self-narration. She saw her husband dead, she tells us, after giving birth in the road, unable to reach her own house. (What house, we might wonder; what dead husband?) She continues, lamenting the death of her two sons—two sons? hadn’t she given birth only once?—

Fleming 22 and of her mother, father, and brother, all burning in a single heap. This is not the story we have just heard; the details don’t line up smoothly, and, in some places, they directly contradict the most distinctive features of the story that came just before. In fact, these plot points might sound familiar, as they form the contours of a narrative we’ve already encountered: that of Patacara.

Kisa Gotami continues on, pressing further into Patacara’s story as she narrates how, dwelling in the middle of the cemetery, after undergoing loss after loss—“the flesh of my sons consumed, family struck and killed, reproached by all, my husband dead”—she reached the deathless. The path developed for her, and, nibbana realized with her own eyes, she looked in the mirror of the Dhamma. She concludes, again placing this narrative squarely within her own and making no mistake about who has spoken: “Kisa Gotami Theri, heart freed, spoke this.”

The sudden insertion of Patacara’s story into a poem where Kisa Gotami is so clearly identified as speaker has bewildered commentators and scholars over the centuries. Some have chalked it up to textual error, claiming the two stories were mistakenly interwoven by an errant miscopying. Others attribute it to variations between Buddhist traditions in whose story belonged to whom. Some, accepting the text as it is, suggest that Patacara is actually jumping in in the middle of Kisa Gotami’s verse, interjecting with her own story once Kisa Gotami begins to speak of the pains of womanhood (or, conversely, that Kisa Gotami is addressing Patacara, in which case the vocative lines, “Oh, you wretched woman,” are directed to an external “you” rather than to herself).27

Regardless of how it originated, this seeming friction between verse and commentary offers valuable lessons both in how to read stories and in how we tell our own. It might serve as

27 For an overview of some of these attempts at working through (or smoothing over) discrepancies, see Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s introduction to his translation of the verse: Thanissaro Bhikkhu, ed. and trans., “Kisagotami Theri” (Thig 10), Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), November 30, 2013, https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/thig/thig.10.01.than.html.

Fleming 23 testimony to the slippages that occur between what we see as our narrative and the stories of those around us, the ways that our narratives are continually touched by and inextricably entangled with those we encounter. Instead of attempting to trace out the delineations between

Kisa Gotami’s story and what we may see as clearly Patacara’s, we might ask: What can we learn from bringing Patacara’s story inside of Kisa Gotami’s? What can Patacara’s narrative reveal and open up?

To start, we might begin where Kisa Gotami begins: with friendship. This verse, after all, is uttered in praise of friendship, and particularly friendship with her teacher, the Buddha. But the verse opens out into reflections on friendship more broadly, as, associating with friends,

“even a fool becomes wise.” Another story that perhaps lingers beneath these words is the network of friendships that structures Kisa Gotami’s monastic life and the Therīgāthā, the collection from which this poem is taken. At the center of this network lies Patacara, who came to be a friend and guide for many of the theris who had undergone loss. Some of the other poems in the collection name this dynamic explicitly, as Patacara offered a way out of grief-strickenness for many of the women she encountered.28

Perhaps this explains the at first abrupt transition from discussion of friendship to a frank acknowledgment of the pains that come with being a woman, and being a mother in particular— that pain, when shared, can become the foundation for deep and textured friendships, solidarity among women who have lost everything they thought they had. As Kisa Gotami tells Patacara’s story as her own, then, it may be a sign of kinship—a sign of stories shared and, over the years,

28 See, for instance, Chanda’s poem within the Therīgāthā on encountering Patacara and asking her to ordain her (to “make me go forth to homelessness”). Patacara is “sympathetic” to her and offers guidance, on which Chanda reflects, “I listened to her words and I put into action her advice. That excellent woman’s advice was not empty.” I am grateful to Georgia Kashnig and Charlie Hallisey for drawing this poem to my attention in their course, “Poems of the First Buddhist Women As Vehicles for Reflection Today,” taught at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.

Fleming 24 coauthored and co-owned. This seeming interjection need not be a discrepancy or an error; rather, it stands as testament to the ways that we are made and remade by our friends and the stories they (we) tell.

Fleming 25

Chapter 5: Letting the Stories Speak

Finally, we return to the story itself. Kisa Gotami’s story appears (at least) twice in the aṭṭhakathā as context for two verses: one in the Dhammapada and the other in the Therīgāthā.

The first telling comments upon a verse spoken by the Buddha, which the commentator informs us was spoken directly to Kisa Gotami. Her life story is then offered as narrative context for why the Buddha spoke this verse to her in particular.29 This telling reorients us towards the relational nature of the verse we may see as decontextualized doctrine, returning it, too, into the world of the story. The second telling appears in the commentary on a verse spoken by Kisa Gotami herself in the Therīgāthā, an anthology of poems by the first Buddhist women. As the commentary offers the narrative context for the verse, the verse itself appears at the end of the story. Be forewarned—the story told within the commentary and the story told within the poem itself do not directly (or conveniently) match up! As discussed in the previous chapter, commentators have since tried to make sense of this friction by various methods, and in honor of honoring the messiness that comes with multiplicity, I’ve kept the story and the verse standing alongside one another without advancing any particular interpretation.

It is with that same spirit of honoring complexity rather than grasping towards a simple, single narrative that I offer both versions of the story as well, preserving the places where they deviate from each other and doing my best not to flatten distinctions. Both translations (and thus any and all errors) are my own. You may notice notes scattered throughout. These notes fall into two categories: information on individual word choice and suggestions for moments of intertextual reading (to be explored more fully in Chapter 6). The notes on etymology serve to

29 In this process the commentator performs the function of returning discourse to speech, to use Ricoeur’s language (a framing for which I am indebted to Hallisey). What we might encounter as an aphorism in the Dhammapada is contextualized as a verse arising in response to the circumstances of a particular individual—a verse addressed as if face to face, to use the language from the story itself.

Fleming 26 draw attention to what Walter Pater terms the “finer edges of words,”30 tracing out the strangeness of terms that sometimes become deadened or flattened with overuse—they are a call back to seeing possibilities in words we may skip over, presuming we have exhausted their meaning. And the fact of receiving a story in translation can further heighten this attention to unfamiliarity and unknowing, facilitating an orientation towards wonder. Treat these notes as invitations to play around and find the roominess that ambiguity can provide, tracing out as many possible readings as you’d like. (This process, of course, is endless.)

The notes on linkages to other texts serve as a starting point to begin to see this story as existing in a web of ever-expanding relationships with other stories and texts, both those more immediately proximate and those seemingly far afield. Once again, it’s up to you—you can ignore them all or read every one. They are there for you to make of them what you will. Now, give yourself permission to let this experience be your own and begin.

Story 1: Burning Coals and Candle Flames (DhA 8.13)

In Savatthi, some say, in the house of a certain wealthy merchant, forty million riches turned to burning coal. The merchant, seeing this, was overcome by the flames of grief.

Rejecting food and nourishment, he lay down in bed.

A certain friend of his came to his house and asked him, “Friend, why do you grieve?”

Hearing what happened, he said to him, “Do not grieve, friend. I know a certain trick, a way out31—take it.”

30 Walter Pater, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (Edinburgh: MacMillan and Co., 1889). For a dynamic case study in ways that cultivating close attention to the finer edges of words can help make life worth living, see Harold Bloom, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 433. 31 upāya. often translated as “skillful means” when used to describe the Buddha’s various stratagems and devices to guide beings with differing capacities and proclivities towards awakening. For more on the Buddha as trickster in Theravadin stories, see Sara McClintock, “Compassionate Trickster: The Buddha as a Literary Character in the Narratives of Early Indian Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79, no. 1 (March 2011): 102– 104. In fact, McClintock discusses the Kisa Gotami story and the tricks that later ensue therein! This category of

Fleming 27

“What do I do, friend?”

“After stretching out a fiber mat in your shop and heaping up your charcoal there, sit as if you were selling it. When people come and go, they will say, ‘Others sell cloth, oil, honey, molasses; but you sit here selling coals.’ To them you should say: ‘If I cannot sell what belongs to me, what can I do?’

“But one will again say to you, ‘Others sell cloth, oil, honey, molasses; but you sit here selling coals.’ To them you should say: ‘Where is there gold; where is there money?’ And when they say ‘Right here,’ you should say, ‘Bring it to me,’ and accept what they give in your hand.

What is thus given will become gold and money right in your hand.

“Then, if the person is a young girl, after marrying her to a son in your household and then, giving her the forty million riches, spend only what she gives you. If the person is a young boy, after giving him a daughter in your household of marriageable age and then, giving him the forty million riches, spend only what he gives you.”

Thinking, “Good trick!”, after heaping up the charcoal in his shop, the merchant sat as if he were selling it. People indeed said to him, “Others sell cloth, oil, honey, molasses; but you sit here selling coals.”

To them, he gave the reply: “If I cannot sell what belongs to me, what can I do?”

Now, there was a certain young girl named Gotami from a worn-out family, known to all as Kisa Gotami because of her skinny bones.32 She came to the door of the shop with a certain

trick they term deception, which they frame explicitly as “tricks in which the Buddha uses words in ways he knows will be understood by the listener, but that will also get the listener to act so that some deep-seated delusion will ultimately be destroyed” (102). 32 kisasarīratāya. Sarīra can either mean body more generally or dead body and is often used in the context of bodily remains.

Fleming 28 errand to do.33 Seeing the merchant, she said thus: “Why is it, father, that other people sell cloth, oil, honey, or molasses, but you sit here selling coals?”

“Girl, where is there gold, where is there money?”

“Is it not right where you are sitting?”

“Bring it to me, daughter.”

Having grasped a handful, she placed the coal in his hands. It indeed became nothing but gold and money.

Then, the merchant asked her, “Where is your house, girl?”

When she answered, “Here or there,” after knowing her to be without husband,34 arranging the wealth, and procuring her for his son, he gave her the forty million riches.

Everything became gold; everything became money!

On a future day, she became with child,35 and after the passing of ten months, she gave birth to a son. By the time he could walk by foot, he died.36

Because she had not seen death before,37 she obstructed those who tried to throw out the body for burning. Taking the dead corpse at her hip, she moved about38 from house to house, grief-mad, asking, “Do you know a medicine for my son?”

Now, people said to her, “Woman, you’ve grown mad—you move about asking for medicine for your dead son!”

33 ekena kiccena. Literally, that which ought to be done, often used in connection with duties to the dead, especially when in proximity to sarīra. 34 assāmikabhāvaṃ. Having the nature of no owner, husband, lord, or master. 35 Literally, an embryo established itself (or stood firmly) in her—the same verb used as when she herself later establishes herself in various spiritual states! 36 kālamakāsi. Literally, did the time. 37 adiṭṭhapubbamaraṇatāya. Because of the fact that death was not before seen. 38 vicarati. To wander or move about; often used in the context of almsgoing.

Fleming 29

Still, she moved about, convinced, “Surely, I will find one who knows the medicine for my son.”

Now, a certain wise man saw her and thought, “My daughter, having birthed her first son, has never before seen death. I ought to be a refuge for her,”39 He said to her, “Daughter, I don’t know the medicine, but I know one who knows.”

“Who knows, father?”

“The teacher, daughter, knows. Go—ask him!”

After saying, “I will go, father; I will ask him, father,” she approached and saluted the teacher. Standing on one side, she asked, “Sir, do you know the medicine for my son, as some say?”

“Yes, certainly, I do know.”

“What should I get?”

“You should get a fingerful40 of white mustard seeds.”

“I will get one, sir. But from which house should I get it?”

“A house in which neither son nor daughter nor anyone else has died before.”41

Having saluted the teacher, saying, “Good, sir,” she placed her dead son at her hip, entered the inner village, stood at the door of the first house, and asked, “Is there a mustard seed in this house? They say it is medicine for my son.”

When it was said, “There is,” she said, “Well, then, give it to me.”

39 Or: it is proper for me to support her. 40 accharaggahaṇamatte. The measure grasped by snapping one’s fingers—a pinchful or snapful. Also used (as in English) to signify the snapping of one’s fingers as only a moment or an instant—both temporally and spatially miniscule. 41 matapubbo. Can mean “has been dead before” or “has been corrupted by death.”

Fleming 30

But as she took the mustard seeds, she asked, “Mother, in this house, has there not been a son or daughter who died before?”

When the woman said, “What are you saying, girl? The living, indeed, are few; only the dead are many,” she gave back the mustard seeds, saying, “Now, then, take back your mustard seeds, they are not medicine for my son.”

From then on, she moved about asking in this manner. By nightfall, having not taken mustard seeds from even a single house, she thought: “Well, this is a heavy deed indeed—I thought, ‘My son alone has died,’ but in the entire village, the dead alone outnumber the living.”

Thinking in this way, her oozing heart, once fat and greasy with love for her son, came to be firm.42 After abandoning43 her son in the forest and coming near the teacher and saluting him, she stood to one side. Now, the teacher said to her, “Did you get a single pinchful of mustard seeds?”

“I did not get any, sir. In the entire village only the dead outnumber the living.”

Now the teacher said to her, “You thought, ‘My son alone has died,’ but this is the stable law of living beings: the king of death hurls all beings into the ocean of loss, even as their desires are unsatisfied,44 sucking them in exactly like a great flood.45

That man possessed by longing, intoxicated by sons and cattle— Death goes on, having seized him, just as a great flood seizes a sleeping village. (Dh 287)

42 puttasinehaṃ mudukahadayaṃ thaddhabhāvaṃ agamāsi. muduka can mean pliable, flexible, tender; sineha has a viscosity to it—unctuous moisture, oily and oozing affection, fat grease. thaddha, by contrast, is hard, rigid, and firm. 43 chaḍḍetvā. This can mean abandon or reject, but also carries much more visceral notes of spitting out or vomiting—throwing away or casting out with disgust. 44 aparipuṇṇajjhāsaye. This term is particularly roomy—it could be taken as “when all beings still have unfulfilled desires,” or it could be describing those who are thrown into the ocean of loss as being bent towards imperfection (or not being adequately bent towards perfection!). 45 As PTS poetically describes, ogha can mean “the flood of ignorance and vain desires which sweep a man down, away from the security of emancipation.”

Fleming 31

At the end of this verse, Kisa Gotami stood established in the fruit of streamwinning; indeed, many others, too, attained the fruits of streamwinning and all that follows.

She then asked the teacher to go forth; the teacher, sending her out into the company of the bhikkhunis, ordained her.46 When she obtained higher ordination, she was known as Kisa Gotami Theri.

One day, seated in the Uposatha Hall, it reached her turn to light a candle.

Watching the arising and breaking up of the flames, she took the candle as her meditation object,47 thinking, “In exactly this way, these beings are born and broken up; only those who have attained nibbana do not appear.”

Now the teacher, seated in his perfumed hut, radiated his presence to her.

Speaking as if having sat down face to face with her,48 he said: “In exactly this way,

Gotami, these beings, like the candle flames, are born and broken up; only those who have attained nibbana do not appear here. Thus it is better to live even only a moment as one seeing nibbana that to live for a hundred years as one not seeing nibbana.” After forming this connection, he spoke this verse preaching the Dhamma:

The life of one seeing the step to the deathless for one day is better Than that of one who lives a hundred years not seeing the step without death. (Dh 114)

At the end of this teaching, Kisa Gotami became established in arhathood together with analytic insight exactly where she sat.

Story 2: What Friendship Makes Possible (ThīA 10.1)

46 Literally, made her go forth. 47 ārammaṇaṃ. Can also mean support or foundation more generally. 48 sammukhe. Speaking as if their faces were together.

Fleming 32

Some say that, in the time of the Padumuttara Buddha, a certain nun, after being reborn in a household in Haṃsavatīnagara and reaching the age of discretion, was listening to the dhamma in the presence of the teacher. Having seen the teacher placing at the very top those wearing worn robes and having done deeds of service, she made the aspiration to be recognized similarly.

After moving about continuously among gods and men for a hundred thousand eons, in the time of this Buddha’s arising, she was reborn in a miserable family in

Savatthi. Her name was Gotami. But she was called Kisa Gotami because of the fact of her skinny body. Gone to the house of her husband’s family, people treated her with contempt, seeing her as a daughter of a miserable family. She then gave birth to a single son. With the acquisition of a son, her husband’s family now honored her. But while the time passed as he played, he passed away.

Because of this, a mad grief arose in her. She thought, “I was met was contempt before my son was born, but honor was mine after. Now, these people even attempt to throw out my son away!” By the power of mad grief, having taken at her hip the dead corpse, she moved about the town from door to door, saying, “Give me medicine for my son.”

People scolded her, saying, “There’s no medicine here for that.”

But she did not grasp their speech.

Now, a certain wise man, thinking, “She fell to this derangement of mind through grief for her son. Only the Ten Supernormal Powered One knows the medicine for this,” said to her: “Daughter, after you approach the Perfectly Awakened One, ask him the for medicine for your son.”

Fleming 33

Having gone to the dwelling place of the radiant rays of the teacher’s Dharma preaching, she said, “Lord, give me medicine for my son.”

The teacher, after seeing what she was ready for, said, “Go—after entering the village, fetch a mustard seed from a house in which no one has died before.”

Her heart satisfied, saying, “Good, sir,” she entered the village. In the very first house, she said, “The teacher needs a mustard seed to make a medicine for my son. If, in this house, no one has dies before, please give me a mustard seed.”

“Who, indeed, can count the dead?”

After going to a second house, a third house, thinking, “Well, now, enough of mustard seeds!”, by the power of the Buddha, she stood established in natural mind free of madness and realized, “In the entire village, this alone will be the way. Through the

Lord, friendly and compassionate, this will be what is seen.” Filled with shock and fear of the inevitable,49 she went forth50 from there. Having abandoned her son where corpses are left to rot,51 she said this verse:

This is not just the law for one village, nor the law for one town, nor the law, indeed, for a single house. For the entire world together with the deva world, this is indeed the only law: impermanence. (Apa. Theri. 2.3.82)

After saying this, she returned to the presence of the teacher. Now, the teacher said to her,

“Gotami, did you get the mustard seed?”

49 saṃvegaṃ. See Thanissaro Bhikkhu on this term: “The oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it’s normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle.” Or, from Charlie Hallisey, fear of the inevitable, or, more viscerally, the “oh shit” moment. In either case, it is an emotion that often provokes the drive to spiritual practice—the same feeling that the Buddha himself experienced when encountering the first three of the Four Sights (the old person, sick person, and dead person). Taken by itself, it can lead to nihilism and despair; it is often recommended in combination with faith or composure (pasāda) to balance out this tendency. 50 nikkhamitvā. Both literally going forth and leaving behind the life of a householder, giving up worldly ways. 51 āmakasusāne. This term specifically evokes raw flesh, as in a charnel ground.

Fleming 34

She said, “The mustard seed deed is finished, Lord—now, be a refuge for me.”

Then the teacher said this verse:

That man possessed by longing, intoxicated by sons and cattle— Having seized him, death goes on, just as a great flood seizes a sleeping village. (Dh 287)

At the end of the verse, after establishing herself in the stream-winning fruit just as she stood right there, she asked the teacher to go forth. The teacher granted her permission to go forth. After moving around the teacher three times, saluting him, going to the dwelling of the nuns, going forth, and obtaining higher ordination, she increased insight, doing deeds with wise attention even after only a short time. The teacher then spoke this illuminating verse to her:

The life of one seeing the deathless only for a moment is better Than he who lives a hundred years not seeing the deathless. (Dh 114)

At the end of this verse, after attaining arhathood and becoming most excellent in using the monastic requisites, she moved about having covered herself in three meagre robes.

Now, the teacher, seated in Jeta Grove, setting up successive places for the nuns, placed her at the highest spot of those wearing meagre robes. Having contemplated her own practice, saying, “This distinction was obtained by me through dependence on my teacher,” she spoke this verse as a means of praise for spiritual friendship:

Spiritual friendship has been pointed out to the world and praised by the sage; Associating with good friends, even a fool becomes wise.

Good people should be associated with; for those associating thus, wisdom multiplies. Associating with good people, one would indeed be freed from all suffering

And understand suffering, as well as the origin and cessation of suffering, The eight-fold path, and, indeed, the four noble truths.

Fleming 35

Painful is the state of a woman;52 this is proclaimed by the trainer of the trainable.53 Being a co-wife,54 too, is painful. Some, having given birth only once,

Even cut their throat; the delicate devour poisons. Going to the middle of the dead during childbirth, both (mother and child) undergo ruin.

Going about, nearing childbirth, I saw my husband, dead. I hadn’t even reached my own house, having given birth in the road.

Two sons dead,55 and husband of this wretched woman dead in the middle of the road While mother, father, and brother all burn in a single heap.56

Family destroyed, oh miserable woman, the pain you’ve suffered has no measure; Your tears have flowed, indeed, for many thousands of births.

Dwelling in the middle of the cemetery, the flesh of my sons consumed, Family struck and killed, reproached by all, my husband dead, I reached the deathless.

The path—noble, eightfold, going towards the deathless—developed for me; Nibbana realized with my own eyes, I looked in the mirror of the dhamma.

The dart cut, the burden laid down, that which ought to be done indeed done, Kisa Gotami Theri, heart freed, spoke this.

52 itthibhāvo. State of a woman more generally or wife more specifically. 53 purisadammasārathinā. One of the epithets for the Buddha—man-trainer; charioteer of human steer. See PTS for some other colorful variations. 54 sapattikampi. Literally, “with partner”; sonically quite close to sāpattika, one who has committed a sin. 55 kālakatā. Like kālamakāsi above—“did their time.” 56 ekacitakāyaṃ. In a more technical sense, singular funeral pyre.

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Chapter 6: Practices of Reading, Practices of Care

As you return to this story, here are some possible entryways you might take. You’re welcome, of course, to trust your intuition and read this story as feels right to you, letting yourself be guided by the words of the narrative themselves. Think of these as directions for further exploration—inspiration in case you find yourself stuck or don’t know where to begin.

There are seven prompts to sustain you through a week of daily reading. Some are short; others unfold more slowly. Carve out some time each day—just a few minutes will do—and build a ritual around your reading. Give yourself over to the experience and see what happens.

Day 1: Curiosity

A core thread of chaplaincy—and of chaplaincy training in particular—is the cultivation of compassionate curiosity. This shows up in the day-to-day work of patient visits in learning to speak from a place of genuine curiosity and asking questions that open up spaces of possibility.

It also structures self-reflection, as we notice what we can’t get curious about—where triggers or past traumas block us from being able to access a sense of wonder.57 Often, chaplaincy involves learning to explore these spaces where curiosity feels inaccessible by coming at them sideways, finding new entryways and approaches to get unstuck so as to be more present to those around us. The careful cultivation of curiosity, then, can offer a powerful way out of numbness and stuckness in our own lives as well as paths to deeper connection and communion with patients.

Today, allow yourself to get curious about this story. What do you want to know more about? Where is your mind immediately drawn? Focus on one detail for now. It can be a line of dialogue, a single image, or a particular moment, like when the wealthy merchant in the first

57 This is communicated powerfully by Beth Naditch in her reflection on Internal Family Systems (IFS) in chaplaincy education: Beth Naditch, “Attunement, Attention, and Authenticity,” Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry 35 (2015): 207–12.

Fleming 37 story, having rejected nourishment, lies down in bed. Reread the passage where your detail resides, repeating it aloud to slow yourself down. Visualize the scene, perhaps closing your eyes for a moment to see the specificity of the detail you chose.

Set a timer for ten minutes and begin to ask questions. The questions can be simple, like

How did he lie down? Who offered him the food and nourishment he rejected? Honor anything that emerges as a genuine curiosity—don’t hold back!

Some questions may lead to others: Did he whimper, or was he silent? Was he alone?

Did he stay in bed until his friend arrived? Did he stay in bed even after his friend arrived? At what point did he get out? Soon you may face proliferation of question upon question upon question! Let them pile up unanswered, each multiplying the unknown.

Some questions may jolt immediate answers, as even the act of asking makes you realize what you already knew. You may picture, for instance, exactly how the merchant hangs his head.

But many may not. Do not rush to an answer—in fact, don’t try to answer at all.58 Let the questions guide you onward to more questions, more wonderings, as you tap into and replenish your own natural curiosities.

Day 2: Prayer

Read this story and let it teach you how to pray. What do you wish for Kisa Gotami? For the people she meets? What would you offer them? And what blessing would you ask of each of them—for yourself, for your patients?59 Carry this blessing with you through the rest of the day,

58 A perhaps familiar sentiment in the chaplaincy world. One of my colleagues, Ruth Delfiner, opens every service she leads with a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet to this effect: “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” 59 I am grateful to Georgia Kashnig for introducing me to this particular practice of reading prayerfully in the Women in the Buddha’s Life reading group this past fall. It has stayed with me since then, and it feels like a

Fleming 38 calling upon the characters when you need support or guidance. Listen to what they can offer you.

Day 3: Body

One of the foundational goals of Clinical Pastoral Education, as stated when it was first established, was to get ministers and chaplains to live their theologies—to bring their beliefs, their understandings of faith and compassion and what have you down into their bodies.60

Today, bring this story into your body. Before you settle into reading, close your eyes.

Take a moment to shake out your shoulders, circle your hips, massage your jaw. Slowly settle into stillness and direct your attention first to your feet. Investigate the sensations that arise, noticing any pricklings or tinglings, pains or aches, spaces of lightness or lethargy. Begin to draw your attention up from your feet through calves, knees, thighs, taking time with each limb, each part, as you move upward through hips, belly, ribs, chest. Continue to take a few rounds of breath to rest in the awareness of your body as a whole, and then gently blink open your eyes.

You are now ready to read.

Pick up the story and move through it slowly, noticing where each line lands in your body. With the same incremental attention you just extended to each body part in turn, speak aloud each line that names a body part and let it redirect your attention there. Feel the charcoal burning in your hand, the dead son heavy at your hip, the forest ground beneath your feet.

What does your body know about this story? What can it teach you if you let it speak?

powerful practice of experimenting with the spaces of possibility that reading and prayer each open up. Reading can become prayer, and prayer can extend reading outward. 60 Kathleen A. Gallivan, Brian J. Conley, and Julia Polter, “Brigham and Women’s Hospital Clinical Pastoral Education Handbook,” Brigham and Women’s Hospital Spiritual Care Department, May 2019.

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Day 4: Reading Relationally

Reading, like chaplaincy, is a relational activity. But this relationship does not just exist between reader and writer or reader and characters—it takes place among readers as well. Read this story to someone else: a friend, a colleague, a loved one. Then have them read it to you.

Listen to their hearing. Ask them what stood out to them and wait. See where the conversation takes you.

Day 5: Reading Intratextually

Often, the stories we tell about ourselves—and the stories we hear patients tell—are multiple, sometimes contradictory or seemingly incompatible as they shift based on who we’re speaking to, how much time has lapsed, and how we’re feeling on any given day. Honoring and investigating these multiple narratives—in ourselves, in those we encounter—is a valuable component both of understanding ourselves as caregivers and of providing compassionate, nonjudgmental care.

And this is where reading stories comes in—and reading Theravādin stories in particular, where versions of any given narrative abound, preserved alongside each other without attempting to smooth over stubbornly distinct details.

We see this with Kisa Gotami’s story, where (at least) two versions exist within the aṭṭhakathā and the versions don’t necessarily fit neatly inside each other. Today, spend some time with both versions, reading them alongside each other. Begin with their beginnings. What echoes of each opening do you see in the remains of the story it introduces? In the other?

As you continue through the rest of the stories, pick out one detail in each not present in the other—maybe the burning coals, or the meager robes, or the reproach. How does each detail

Fleming 40 help you better understand the story as a whole? Why is it present? And what can it illuminate in the version in which is it absent?

As you bring moments and phrases from one telling inside the other, you may begin to notice more and more possibilities—more resonances, greater depths of meaning through these frictions and gaps. Continue as long as you’d like, allowing the stories to speak to and through one another.

Day 6: Reading Intertextually

We may tell a single story a thousand ways, but the story also doesn’t exist in isolation.

Rather, it is part of a dynamic web, ever shifting and transforming as our circumstances change, as we ourselves change, and as it interfaces with other narratives, both within and around us.

This story, too, is not sealed off from others. It exists in relationship with a variety of stories, verses, and texts, vibrating together across distance and carrying traces of each other.

Some of these texts are explicitly cited within the story itself (like the canonical passages it comments upon, or the verses Kisa Gotami and the Buddha speak throughout); others are alluded to through shared phrases and plot points; others still are linked and invoked through networks of friendship and proximity. It’s almost as if this story comes prepackaged with a list of suggestions for what to read it with if you only know how to look. Of course, you can read it together with any story it stirs up for you (and this is one of the great joys of learning to read intertextually).

But since it offers some hints for where to start, it doesn’t hurt to take them.

One of the most obvious hints, as touched on in Chapter 4, is the story of Patacara.

Resonances abound, both in their broad themes of extreme loss and grief-strickenness and in the repetition of certain key phrases or even words. We can think of these phrases as inviting an intrusion, calling each of these stories—and all the stories they carry!—to enter the text and

Fleming 41 move around. Return to Chapter 4 and read Patacara’s story once again, and then return to Kisa

Gotami’s. What happens when these two narratives are brought together, read alongside (and inside) one another? You might begin with one phrase that pops up in each—like the Buddha speaking to them as if seated face to face, or grasping whatever is before them as a meditation object. Or you might pick out one sentence from Patacara’s story and splice it into Kisa

Gotami’s, as if it had been mistakenly (or deliberately) miscopied. What might such an interjection reveal?

Day 7: Reading Intuitively

Chaplaincy, like reading, requires building up a set of tools—modes of responding to the needs of whoever is before you in any given moment. But not every tool fits every need; not every method makes sense in every moment. You have to gain sufficient fluency in different modalities—in prayer, in motivational interviewing, in reflective listening, and so on—so that you can move between them freely. You internalize them so that you can improvise with ease.

At this point we’ve moved through a number of modes of reading (and hinted at even more!). Today, there’s no prompt, no explicit guide. It’s time for you to choose. As you begin to read, notice what method or style emerges naturally for you. Where are you led? This is an act of listening to the text, yes, but also listening to yourself.

Trust your instincts. You know what to do.

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Appendix: Further Guidelines and Invitations

As you move through and beyond this story, here are a few gentle invitations to bear in mind as you begin to read. You can take them up as postures from the start, or you could test them out, trying on each one in turn less as a truth than as a method. See where they take you.

1. This story is inexhaustible. 2. This story is for you. 3. This story is relevant to you. 4. This story can bring you delight.

First, this story is inexhaustible. In fact, every (good) story is inexhaustible—no matter how many times you hear it or read it, there can be no end to its meaning. Each fresh encounter will bring with it new noticings, new insights, new connections, and, in a sense, a new story altogether.61 Be wary of believing that you ever have a full grasp of it—that you can get no more out of it or that you know what it is saying. Instead, let this be an opportunity to recommit to openness and to curiosity—to trust that there is always more than you might originally believe or understand.62 And even if this is not a posture you consciously adopt, you may find yourself subtly pulled into it as pieces of the story nag at you, asserting their strangeness and snapping you out of seeming complacency. In other words, this story is inexhaustible, but you don’t have to believe that it is inexhaustible because it will show you.

This inexhaustibility is explicitly foregrounded in the textual traditions surrounding this story and others like it: Buddhaghosa, Theravadin commentator and composer of at least one of the versions presented in Chapter 5, structured his work around the immeasurability of the words of the Buddha, or buddhavacana. As Maria Heim argues, this is as much an assumption about

61 To substitute story for religion in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s “The Comparative Study of Religion: Reflections on the Possibility and Purpose of a Religious Science”: “All [stories] are new [stories], every morning” (51). 62 To turn to another Smith, once again swapping in “story,” this time for “object”: considering what constitutes intelligence in The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), Brian Cantwell Smith asserts that “to know a [story] as a [story] is to know that it exceeds your grasp” (86).

Fleming 43 the Buddha’s omniscience as it is a discovery arising from Buddhaghosa’s encounter with the ever-unfolding nature of the canon’s stories, verses, and lists themselves; as much a doctrinal stance as a method of reading.63 Reading as Buddhaghosa reads, then, we emerge from stories with a newfound trust in their inexhaustibility through the very process of spending time with them, giving ourselves over to their infinity. This inexhaustibility extends to the characters within a story as well, as stories teach us lessons in the mystery and unknowability of the other.

Like the story itself, its characters resist easy interpretation and cannot be captured by our first or second read, or even our third or fourth or fiftieth.64

It is precisely this quality of inexhaustibility that transfers to the context of the pastoral relationship. Each person, too, is inexhaustible, utterly beyond the bounds we may—or they may themselves—set in defining and limiting the terms of their identity or their narrative. Stories thus offer us encounters with the utter exteriority of the other, “the elusiveness of that which cannot be possessed and is always more than any concept or system can contain.”65 A commitment to— and an encounter with!—the infinity of a particular story can augment our ability to see that infinity in the other, both in a more generalized sense and in the particular of each individual patient consult, each family visit. Reading with this inexhaustibility in mind is thus a rejection of totality, the forces of thought and action that flatten and subvert beauty, vulnerability, and multiplicity. It is an acknowledgment that there is always more beyond our grasp, and these gaps—these unknowns—cultivate the kinds of creative attention that make care possible. And

63 Maria Heim, Voice of the Buddha: Buddhaghosa on the Immeasurable Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 15. 64 No matter how many times we read, there is still an infinite gap between us as readers and the characters we encounter. We might, with each successive reading, gain a new pair of eyes, but even if we managed to inhabit “fifty pairs of eyes” at once, like Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe claims we would need to fully see Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, we could still never see any of them completely. 65 Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 68.

Fleming 44 not only can this inexhaustibility help us orient towards the inexhaustibility of the other, but it can also provide nourishment and pleasure. To borrow language from Georgia Kashnig, it is capable of offering infinite gifts.66 Its immeasurability is for you.

This leads to our next guideline, which is that this story is for you. Many stories within the Theravāda Buddhist world begin with the same three-word formula: evam me suttam, typically translated as “Thus (evam) was heard (suttam) by me (me).” But me can take on any number of forms, and, as Buddhaghosa draws out, the ambiguity of that me opens up another option: Thus was my hearing, as in this is the way that I heard the story, but that hearing is particular to me and my circumstances, and I need to hear it from other perspectives—to be continually drawn into relationship, as Kisa Gotami hears similar stories again and again from the different people she meets—in order to get a fuller picture. But these are not the only two possibilities—me can also be dative, as in Thus was heard for me. This story was heard for you—it has emerged to meet you in this space and time, arising for the particularities of your needs and your circumstances. It is a gift to you. Cherish it.

And this flows into our next guideline: this story is relevant to you, though not necessarily in the ways you might think. As Garth Greenwell writes in an essay against

“relevance” in art, too often we dismiss stories by labeling them as “irrelevant,” unable to speak to this particular moment, this particular need, this particular me. This can be especially tempting with stories separated from us by oceans and millennia, stories that we see as confined to another time and place with little bearing on our lives now. But labeling something as irrelevant presumes, dangerously, that we know what we need—that we can “engineer an encounter with

66 Georgia Kashnig and Charles Hallisey, “Poems of the First Buddhist Women as Vehicles for Reflection Today,” Barre Center for Buddhist Studies online course, October 5, 2020.

Fleming 45 art,” determining what it is that we will extract from it. Approaching stories with an eye towards relevance (and irrelevance) is a failure at once aesthetic and ethical: as Greenwell writes,

When I use relevance as a filter for determining what books to read, I’m failing to make myself available for an authentic encounter with otherness, something genuine art always offer. I’m presuming that I can guess, from the barest plot summary, whether a book will be useful in my life. But how can I know what I will find relevant about a work before I have submitted myself to the experience?67

When we consign a story to irrelevance, we refuse to let it speak to us—and we refuse to allow ourselves to be transformed in the process. (Sometimes, of course, we will be transformed nevertheless, but often the dismissal precludes even the possibility of relationship.)

Understanding, then, that you cannot engineer outcomes, allow yourself to trust in this story’s relevance to your life and your work, submitting, even if only for a moment, to the experience of being guided by its narrative, drawn into participation. And perhaps not in ways you could anticipate or expect, you will emerge with some small insight or spark of wonder—some subtle transformation that make take longer to unpack. And the story will indeed become relevant, both in the sense of worthy of your attention and capable of offering relief—of setting you free.68

And regardless of whatever else you take away from it, this story can bring you delight.

Yes, it can offer valuable lessons on how to grieve, how to listen, how to read, how to understand yourself and the world around you, but reading it is also a worthy exercise in its own right, reward enough as itself alone. Here we can learn from no better than Virginia Woolf. When addressing a group of schoolgirls on how one should read a book, Woolf speaks of the value that

67 Garth Greenwell, “Making Meaning: Against ‘Relevance’ in Art,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2020, https://harpers.org/archive/2020/11/making-meaning-garth-greenwell/. Thank you to Eugene Nam for sharing this delight with me. 68 In the essay Greenwell also explores the etymology of relevant as linked to relieve, with an attention to the finer edges of words that would make Harold Bloom proud. Both stem from the French relever, “which meant, originally, to put back into an upright position, to raise again, a word that twisted through time, scattering meanings that our two modern words have apportioned between them: to ease pain or discomfort, to make stand out, to render prominent or distinct, to rise up or rebel, to rebuild, to reinvigorate, to make higher, to set free.”

Fleming 46 literature can bring to methods of meaning-making, self-understanding, and intellectual development. Through the “rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment” that books can foster, she claims, the act of reading has the power to transform the reader, the author, the critic, and the future of literature. Yet she closes her lecture on a note of pleasure:

Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”69

In our context, whatever else may be true of the role reading can play in pastoral formation, it is also an end in itself. Stories can shield against burnout in their ability to help us move through grief, and they can usher us into deeper patterns of attention and care. But they can also nourish us through the pleasure that they—and the modes of reading they demand and invite—provide.

They can offer us powerful practices of getting lost in narrative, turning towards joy and wonder amidst it all. And isn’t that enough?

69 Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” in The Common Reader: Second Series (London: Hogarth Press, 1932).

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Abbreviations

Dh Dhammapada DhA Dhammapadaṭṭhakathā DN Dīghanikāya PTS The Pali Text Society’s Pali–English Dictionary Thig Therīgāthā ThīA Therīgāthaṭṭhakathā

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