Bimba's Lament

Once, in the years after the Enlightenment, the Buddha returned to his father's palace for a visit. When he meets his former wife, whom he had given up when he set out on his spiritual quest, she laments having been abandoned and worries about the fate of their son. She urges the little boy to ask his father for his inheritance. The Buddha replies that the inheritance will be in wisdom rather than in earthly riches and has the boy ordained as a novice monk.

Here, the Buddha's former wife, holding their little boy, kneels before the Buddha. She makes the touching gesture that in Siamese art of the nineteenth century signifies weeping.