At last she said to herself, 'I will get up now and return to my father in Thawatti; he is all I have left. Though I have forsaken him all these years, yet now that my husband and his children are dead, my father will take me back again. Surely he will have pity on me, for I am much to be pitied.'
So she went on, and at length, after many days, she came to the gates of the great city where her father lived.
At the entering of the gates she met a large company of people, mourners, returning from a funeral, and she spoke to them and asked them:
'Who is it that you have been burying to-day so grandly with so many mourners?'
And the people answered her, and told her who it was. And when she heard, she fell down upon the road as one dead: for it was her father and mother who had died yesterday, and it was their funeral train that she saw. They were all dead now, husband and sons and father and mother; in all the world she was quite alone.
So she went mad, for her trouble was more than she could bear. She threw off all her clothes, and let down her long hair and wrapped it about her naked body, and walked about raving.
At last she came to where the Buddha was teaching, seated under a fig-tree. She came up to the Buddha, and told him of her losses, and how she had no one left; and she demanded of the Buddha that he should restore to her those that she had lost. And the Buddha had great compassion upon her, and tried to console her.
'All die,' he said; 'it comes to everyone, king and peasant, animal and man. Only through many deaths can we obtain the Great Peace. All this sorrow,' he said, 'is of the earth. All this is passion which we must get rid of, and forget before we reach heaven. Be comforted, my daughter, and turn to the holy life. All suffer as you do. It is part of our very existence here, sorrow and trouble without any end.'
But she would not be comforted, but demanded her dead of the Buddha. Then, because he saw it was no use talking to her, that her ears were deaf with grief, and her eyes blinded with tears, he said to her that he would restore to her those who were dead.