You won’t find my name in any scroll, but I was there the day Punnika bloomed—like a lotus rising from the thickest mud.
I was just a servant girl in Savatthi, one of the great cities in ancient India. It was a noisy place, filled with markets, the scent of spices, and talk of politics and power. No one noticed girls like me. No one noticed girls like Punnika either.
Punnika was a water-carrier in one of the wealthier households near the temple gates. Every day, she’d walk barefoot to the river, shoulders bent from the two heavy pots she hauled all the way back. She never spoke much. People thought she was nothing more than what she did—just another muddy step in their clean path.
One morning, something changed. The sun still warmed the stone roads, the city still bustled, but as we passed each other at the well, I saw her stop—frozen, eyes fixed on an old monk nearby.
His name was Maha Kassapa. He had once been a prince but gave away all his riches to walk in the path of the Buddha. By now, he was one of the most respected monks in all the land. He sat still by the river, silent, watching a beetle crawl up a leaf.
Punnika was staring. Not at him—but at the way he breathed. Calm. Steady. As though all his worries had vanished.
She waited until the last drop filled her pot, then walked up to him, right through the crowd as if she didn’t care who saw her.
“Why do monks not shiver in the river’s cold?” she asked. “Don’t you ever suffer?”
Maha Kassapa looked at her—not with pity, not with pride—just compassion. “The body feels what the body must. But the mind... the mind can be free.”
I didn’t understand then what he meant, but Punnika did. She dropped her pots that day. Just left them in the dust and followed him to the monastery—not to be a servant, but to learn how to let go, how to awaken.
At first, there were whispers. People laughed. What could a mere servant girl know of truth? But Punnika didn’t speak back. She meditated. She listened. She practiced.
Weeks passed. Then months. One day, we heard her name again—spoken with reverence.
Punnika had reached awakening.
She became one of the arahants, a fully enlightened one, whose poem was recorded in the Therigatha—ancient verses of Buddhist nuns who had walked the path to Nirvana. Her words were simple, like her life once was, but they cut deep: “What use is bathing again and again when the fires of greed and hatred still burn?”
People now call her “the lotus that bloomed in mud.” I still think of her when I pass the old well. Not because she became someone important, but because she showed that even a water-carrier girl—forgotten, unseen—can hold the wisdom of the stars.
That day changed me too.
I walked away from the well, not carrying water, but carrying something lighter and deeper—a lesson. The mud of suffering may surround us, but within, the seed of awakening waits. All it needs is the courage to rise.
And Punnika taught me this: you are not the mud. You are the lotus.
You won’t find my name in any scroll, but I was there the day Punnika bloomed—like a lotus rising from the thickest mud.
I was just a servant girl in Savatthi, one of the great cities in ancient India. It was a noisy place, filled with markets, the scent of spices, and talk of politics and power. No one noticed girls like me. No one noticed girls like Punnika either.
Punnika was a water-carrier in one of the wealthier households near the temple gates. Every day, she’d walk barefoot to the river, shoulders bent from the two heavy pots she hauled all the way back. She never spoke much. People thought she was nothing more than what she did—just another muddy step in their clean path.
One morning, something changed. The sun still warmed the stone roads, the city still bustled, but as we passed each other at the well, I saw her stop—frozen, eyes fixed on an old monk nearby.
His name was Maha Kassapa. He had once been a prince but gave away all his riches to walk in the path of the Buddha. By now, he was one of the most respected monks in all the land. He sat still by the river, silent, watching a beetle crawl up a leaf.
Punnika was staring. Not at him—but at the way he breathed. Calm. Steady. As though all his worries had vanished.
She waited until the last drop filled her pot, then walked up to him, right through the crowd as if she didn’t care who saw her.
“Why do monks not shiver in the river’s cold?” she asked. “Don’t you ever suffer?”
Maha Kassapa looked at her—not with pity, not with pride—just compassion. “The body feels what the body must. But the mind... the mind can be free.”
I didn’t understand then what he meant, but Punnika did. She dropped her pots that day. Just left them in the dust and followed him to the monastery—not to be a servant, but to learn how to let go, how to awaken.
At first, there were whispers. People laughed. What could a mere servant girl know of truth? But Punnika didn’t speak back. She meditated. She listened. She practiced.
Weeks passed. Then months. One day, we heard her name again—spoken with reverence.
Punnika had reached awakening.
She became one of the arahants, a fully enlightened one, whose poem was recorded in the Therigatha—ancient verses of Buddhist nuns who had walked the path to Nirvana. Her words were simple, like her life once was, but they cut deep: “What use is bathing again and again when the fires of greed and hatred still burn?”
People now call her “the lotus that bloomed in mud.” I still think of her when I pass the old well. Not because she became someone important, but because she showed that even a water-carrier girl—forgotten, unseen—can hold the wisdom of the stars.
That day changed me too.
I walked away from the well, not carrying water, but carrying something lighter and deeper—a lesson. The mud of suffering may surround us, but within, the seed of awakening waits. All it needs is the courage to rise.
And Punnika taught me this: you are not the mud. You are the lotus.
