Scriptural source for the lost son story
Upvote:-3
The way it is told seems like a jakata tale, ie a little story about lay people being morons, then some sentence from the buddha, so probably a story from the jakata (in pali or some equivalent version in other collection) and mixed with the twisted version by the mahayanists of the Discourse to Dīghanakha https://suttacentral.net/mn74/en/sujato to feed their infatuation with ''enlightenment as having no views'', the ''two truth'' doctrine, the ''four noble truth and 8 fold path of the suttas is just a skillful mean given by the buddha to non-mahayanists and not the real teaching" and so on. https://books.google.com/books?id=kl8QBwAAQBAJ chapter 32
Upvote:1
Venerable, sadly, I could find no such reference in SuttaCentral. I performed a search for son, which revealed 730 results. None of those results had the words "ashes". And of the 20 results with "father", none revealed a story related to your search.
If there is such a story, it lies beyond the scope of what I could find in SuttaCentral, which does include Jataka stories. Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure of the extent of English translations on SuttaCentral. Perhaps such a story has yet to be translated and recorded in SuttaCentral.
What I did find was a relatable sutta addressing the panic/fear of the first part of the story:
SN1.55:1.1: “What gives birth to a person? What do they have that runs about? What enters transmigration? What’s their greatest fear?” “Craving gives birth to a person. Their mind is what runs about. A sentient being enters transmigration. Suffering is their greatest fear.”
And I found a relatable sutta addressing the delusion in the second part of the story:
AN3.111:1.4: Any deed that emerges from greed, hate, or delusion—born, sourced, and originated from greed, hate, or delusion—is unskillful, blameworthy, results in suffering, and leads to the creation of more deeds, not their cessation.
The story illuminates these two principles in a very concrete way that is easy to understand.
🙏
Upvote:5
As mentioned in another answer the story as written is published in at least one book by Thich Nhat Hanh. The following is copied from Being Peace, it's slightly more elaborate than the version you posted (e.g. "velvet bag" instead of "little bag") but with many of the same phrases:
Thay doesn't attribute a source for this story.
The next story on the page of stories which you linked to, i.e. Angry Buddha, is attributed to Being Peace -- so I suppose that probably is where they found the Lost Son story too.
I gather that the Vietnamese tradition is eclectic so in theory Thay might have gathered that story from anywhere, but I think the content or 'moral' of the story suggests it probably is from the Mahayana or Zen tradition.
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