Mother's Day for Buddhists

Honor Your Mother in a Buddhist Way

Many people in the West who have chosen the Buddhist path see their relationships with their families suffer. Mother's Day is a great time to show your parents that by following a path of spiritual development that is different from theirs, you are not rejecting them.

The Buddha put a great emphasis on the importance of loyalty to one's parents, perhaps because his mother, Queen Maya, died in childbirth (or a few days afterwards, since the sources of information about the life of the Buddha disagree). The queen's sister, Pajapati, the Buddha's aunt, brought him up, and in later years, it was in response to her request that that the Buddha allowed for the formation of an order of nuns.

It may be because he was so conscious of losing his mother and yet being consoled by the love of his adoptive mother that he took the example of the love of a mother for her child as the model of spiritual love that raises itself up to the ideal,

The Buddha taught in the suttas (the oldest Buddhist texts) that it is not easy to repay your father and your mother for your "precious human birth." In face, he specifies that even if you carried them on your shoulders for a century, taking good care of them, and allowing them to relieve themselves on you, you would still have a debt to them. That goes way beyond the rather vague Judeo-Christian commandment to honor your parents.

In one of the most repeated stories in the many volumes of Buddhist teachings, the Buddha tells of a young mother who turned to him for comfort after the death of her child, which she could not bring herself to acknowledge. He replied that there was a very simple remedy, mustard seed. Now, as we know from references in the New Testament, a mustard seed is a small, insignificant thing indeed, so she quickly brightened up at this news. The Buddha continued that this mustard seed simply had to come from a house where no one had died.