The father who never stopped waiting
A question, before any of this
Can you go home again?
Last week you read a departure, and departures are the half of this story everybody tells. A young man sees three things by the road, sits under a tree, and leaves. Told that way it is clean, and it is the version on the back of most books about Buddhism.
The poem does not let you have it that clean. After he goes, it stays in the palace for two entire chapters and does nothing but grief — the woman who raised him, the wife he left, the horse-keeper who drove him out and came back alone leading a riderless horse, and his father, who wants to die. And here is the thing worth the week: none of the grieving people are wrong. The poem does not set them up to be corrected.
This week you read what happened when he came back — years later, with a thousand followers, to the city he walked out of. His father rides out to meet him. And the very first thing that happens is that the old man cannot think of a single word to say.
No new vocabulary this week. "The Tathāgata," where it appears, is simply another name for the same man — you can read it as "he."
The storyOne chapter — read it before anything below
Father and Son Meet Again
The king rides out to meet his returning son, and finds he does not know how to address him. Later, the city argues about what it has just seen.
Read it →If you want the full weight of what the years between cost, the two chapters immediately after the departure are where the poem puts it — the palace finding out, and the king's own lament. They are optional, and they are the best-written grief in the whole poem.
Grief in the Palace (I) → · Grief in the Palace (II) →
Come back when you have finished. The rest of this page assumes you have.
Three momentsPlaces worth stopping
1 · A father who cannot find the word
"He descended from his carriage and approached slowly, fearing to create any obstacle to the Dharma; gazing upon his son's face, his heart leapt with an inward joy, and yet his mouth could find no words to speak at all."
"He thought to himself: I remained caught in the burdens of worldly life, while my son has transcended it all and ascended to the rank of a sage — though my son now holds the most honored place upon the path, I do not even know by what name I ought now to address him."
Of everything in this poem, this is the detail I would keep if I could keep one. Not grief, not anger, not a scene. A man who does not know what to call his own son.
Think about what has to be true for that to happen. "My son" no longer fits, because it claims something the situation will not support. The honorifics do not fit either, because this is a child he taught to walk. Every available word is either too small or too large, and the old king stands in the road holding none of them.
Then the poem gives him two images for it, and they are among the most painful lines in Buddhist literature:
"…like a man long parched with thirst who comes upon a clear, cool spring along the road, and rushes forward eager to drink, only to find, on reaching it, that the spring has suddenly run dry."
"Before I saw him, my thoughts raced with a thousand imaginings; now that he stands before my very eyes, I find no joy in it at all — like a man who, longing for a parted loved one, suddenly comes instead upon nothing but a painted image of their face."
See this passage in the full chapter →A painted image of their face. The features are all correct and there is nobody behind them. That is what the father sees, and the poem lets him say it without hurrying to tell us he is mistaken.
2 · What the waiting had already cost
"I have now reached just such an emptiness and thirst myself — having once had my son, I have now lost him again, as water lost from the hand. Before my own life comes to its end, tell me quickly where my son now is — do not let me die of this thirst…"
"I have always been a man of firm resolve, as hard to move as the great earth itself — yet, having lost my son, my heart is now as wildly disordered as King Daśaratha's once was."
It is worth knowing what happens next in that chapter, because it is very ordinary and very recognisable. The king does not recover. His teacher and one of his ministers talk him down — gently, the poem says, "neither too gently nor too sharply" — and what they offer is not consolation but a task: let us go and look for him. Let us try to talk him round.
And it works. Not because it is true, and not because it will succeed. It works because a search is something a person can do with their hands, and grief is not. The text notes, plainly, that once the two men had gone, the king and his household "felt their hearts grow somewhat cooler and more at ease, and their breath and appetite began, at last, to return to them."
His own image for the years that followed is a bird: "like the cuckoo circling in the empty sky in search of its own young." Circling. Not arriving.
3 · The city does not agree, and the poem prints it anyway
At the end of the chapter the Buddha goes into Kapilavastu with a bowl to beg for food, as he now does every day. The city comes out to look. Some weep with joy. And then the poem does something almost no religious text does — it gives the objectors the floor, at length, in their own words:
"He has abandoned his worthy wife and beloved son, taking his pleasure instead in solitary wandering, all alone — how hard this must be for that worthy consort of his, who has spent so many long nights nursing her own grief."
"Seeing his own son's once-wondrous form now disfigured by this going forth — even an enemy would feel pity at such a sight; how, then, could a father possibly find any peace in seeing it? And his beloved son Rāhula, forever weeping in sorrowful longing for him — to see him show no thought at all of comforting his own child, what use, then, is all this study of the path?"
"Every reader of auspicious marks once declared, at the prince's own birth, that he bore every mark of a great being… yet seeing what he has actually done now, all of that was nothing but empty talk."
Read that again and notice what is not there. No rebuttal. Nobody steps forward to explain why the objectors have misunderstood. The poem does not have a character correct them, and it does not correct them itself. It simply reports what the man walking down the street was walking through.
What it does say about him is careful and quite cold: his heart "held no attachment to any of it, feeling neither joy nor sorrow at any of these words." Not that he agreed, not that he was hurt, not that he had an answer. And then, the same paragraph tells us, he deliberately turned into the poorer quarter of the city to beg — taking whatever he was given, fine or coarse, choosing no house by its wealth.
That is the poem's whole answer to the objection, and it is an action rather than an argument. You are allowed to find it insufficient. The city did.
One thing to tryThis week · five minutes · nobody needs to know
The king's trouble was not that he had lost his son. It was that his son came back, and no available word fit any more.
Write down what you would honestly call them now. One line, for nobody. Not what you say to their face and not what you would put on a card — the word that is actually true this year.
If you want the harder version: send that person one message. Not to resolve anything and not to explain yourself. It took the man in this story several years to make his return, and even then, on the day, the meeting was awkward and his father could not speak. That is allowed to be how it goes.
Five questionsClick an answer for immediate feedback · nothing is recorded
One question, left open
Who in your life came back different — and did you let them?
The king's grief was not that his son left. He had survived that for years. It was that the person who returned was not the person the word in his mouth referred to, and he had to decide, standing in the road, whether to meet the man in front of him or keep waiting for the one who was not coming. Most people have been on one side of that road. A few have been on both.
Session 3 · Two men who couldn't stop lying to each other
That is the end of the life story for now. From next week the stories are the ones the tradition told because of him — collected in the year 516 into the largest anthology of Buddhist narrative in Chinese. They are much shorter, considerably funnier, and the first one is about a woodcarver and a painter who each think they have won.