Week 11 Story Planning Post: Mustard Seeds

Mustard Seeds, Wikicommons

For this week I chose to do another planning post, because it will help prepare me for writing a new story, and I also learned a few things about my topic through the Jatakas that I read. For instance, in one story there is a woman who marries a rich merchant and has one child. The child eventually falls ill and dies. The mother is very distraught over the death of her child. She seeks the help of everyone in the village to aid her in possibly healing her child from the dead. She eventually gets directed to Buddha who tells her to bring him some mustard seeds that are from a home where no one has died. She spends a long time searching but does not find a home that fits the criteria, and it comes clear to her that death is imminent and a part of life.
This little story can tie into my writing by changing it up a bit by having someone find mustard seed from a home that does fit the criteria and have the person come back to life, this would be a pretty easy inversion of that story, but it would help to show that spices played parts beyond taste.
Reading more into mustard seeds I found this website. Mustard seeds also appear to have a wider range of applications that just bringing the dead back from life. Apparently mustard seeds strengthen the hear and resist poisons. I can already think of how to a story would play out with this information. Someone could get poisoned and then be cured by the mustard seeds, or something along those lines. It would also be fair to have the person die and resurrect due to the seeds. Another story that also pops into my mind would be having the someone lose some they love and instead of using the seeds to bring them back from the dead have them eat the seeds so their heart can grow. This research certainly opened the options up for what I could possibly write about.