Class 10 English First Flight Chapter 8 (formerly Chapter 10), The Sermon at Benares by Betty Renshaw, recounts Prince Siddhartha Gautama’s renunciation of royal life, his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, and his first sermon at Benares teaching the bereaved mother Kisa Gotami the universality of death and how to overcome selfish grief. The PDF also includes W.B. Yeats’s poem For Anne Gregory.
What Class 10 English (First Flight) Chapter 8 Covers
Prose: The Sermon at Benares (Betty Renshaw) traces Siddhartha Gautama (563 B.C. – 483 B.C.), shielded from the world’s sufferings until at age twenty-five he went hunting and saw a sick man, an aged man, a funeral procession, and a monk begging for alms. Leaving his palace, he wandered for seven years, meditated for seven days under a peepal tree (renamed the Bodhi Tree, ‘Tree of Wisdom’), became the Buddha (‘the Awakened or the Enlightened’), and preached his first sermon at the holy city of Benares on the River Ganges. When Kisa Gotami, crazed with grief over the death of her only son, begs for medicine to revive him, the Buddha asks her to bring a handful of mustard-seed from a house where no one has lost a child, husband, parent or friend. Searching from house to house and watching the flickering city lights go out in the darkness, she realises that death is common to all and that he who seeks peace must draw out the arrow of lamentation, complaint and grief.
Poem: For Anne Gregory (William Butler Yeats) is a three-stanza conversation in which the speaker warns young Anne Gregory that young men love her for her ‘great honey-coloured ramparts at your ear’ (her outward physical beauty) rather than ‘for yourself alone’, and even if she dyes her hair brown, black or carrot, an old religious man’s text proves that only God can love a human being purely for their inner soul and not their yellow hair.
Exercises in Chapter 8
- Thinking about the Text asks how Kisa Gotami came to realise for the second time that death is common to all, why she did not understand this the first time, what the Buddha compares mortal life to (ripe fruits in danger of falling and earthen vessels made by the potter that end in being broken), and how one can obtain peace of mind.
Read Class 10 English (First Flight) Chapter 8 Online
More Chapters
- Previous: Chapter 7: Madam Rides the Bus (with Poem: The Tale of Custard the Dragon)
- Next: Chapter 9: The Proposal
- Workbook companion: Words and Expressions II Unit 8: The Sermon at Benares
- All English (First Flight) chapters and the other Class 10 books: Class 10 NCERT books 2026-27
- All Class 1 to 12 NCERT Textbooks: NCERT Books PDF (Class 1–12)
- Every book chapter by chapter: NCERT chapter wise PDF
FAQ
How did the Buddha make Kisa Gotami understand the truth of life and death without preaching to her directly?
Instead of lecturing the grief-stricken mother, the Buddha gave her a practical task: to bring a handful of mustard-seed from any house where no one had ever died. Although every family readily offered her mustard-seed, not a single household had been spared the death of a loved one. Through her own experience and watching the city lights flicker and extinguish, Kisa Gotami realised that human life is brief and mortality is universal.
According to the Buddha in ‘The Sermon at Benares’, how can a person obtain peace of mind?
The Buddha teaches that weeping and grieving do not bring back the dead or bring peace of mind; instead, they only increase pain and make the body suffer. He who seeks peace should draw out the arrow of lamentation, complaint and grief, overcome all sorrow, and become composed and free from grief.