This page is about Chapter 8 of the NCERT Class 10 English textbook First Flight: “The Sermon at Benares.” The chapter runs nine printed pages, from page 111 to page 119, and it carries both the story of Kisa Gotami and the Buddha’s first sermon, followed by the poem “For Anne Gregory.”
The official chapter PDF is linked below, and below it the whole chapter is explained page by page — the story, the sermon, the two modern texts on grief, and every printed exercise.
Keep your copy of First Flight open beside this page; each section names the textbook page it refers to.
Download the chapter PDF
This is the NCERT-published Class 10 English textbook First Flight, the official edition hosted on ncert.nic.in. Chapter 8 sits between “Glimpses of India” (Chapter 7) and “The Proposal” (Chapter 9), and the chapter file also contains the poem “For Anne Gregory” on pages 118–119.
You can open the Sermon at Benares Class 10 chapter PDF from NCERT First Flight on the official NCERT website — this is the publisher’s own file, so the page numbers, margin notes and exercises match the printed textbook exactly, and it is the edition most schools work from.
Chapter at a glance
The table on this page lists the chapter’s sections, figures and exercise questions, so you can see at once what the file contains before you start reading.
The chapter sits between “Glimpses of India” (Chapter 7) and “The Proposal” (Chapter 9) in First Flight. The same chapter file also carries the poem “For Anne Gregory” on pages 118–119, with the poem’s own glossary and questions. The sermon text itself is credited to Betty Renshaw’s Values and Voices: A College Reader (1975).
What this chapter covers
This is a page-by-page map of the chapter, in the order the book prints it. Follow along with a finger on the page:
- An opening Activity (p. 111) — asks what a sermon is, whether the word can be used negatively or as a joke, and what the “Sermon on the Mount” is.
- The story of Gautama Buddha and Kisa Gotami (pp. 111–113) — the narrative that frames the sermon.
- The sermon itself (pp. 112–113) — the preserved first sermon, printed with margin glosses for its difficult words.
- Thinking about the Text (p. 113) — questions on the story and the sermon.
- Thinking about Language (p. 114) — archaic diction and how semicolons combine clauses.
- Speaking (pp. 114–115) — two modern texts on grief to compare with the sermon.
- Writing (p. 116) — three topics for a three-paragraph composition.
- Closing lesson notes (pp. 116–117) — “What we have done / What you can do”, with the Gibran and Tagore extracts.
- The poem “For Anne Gregory” (pp. 118–119) — William Butler Yeats’s poem, with its glossary and Thinking about the Poem questions.
Key ideas in the story and the sermon
Two stories stand behind this chapter: the Buddha’s own story and Kisa Gotami’s. The sermon is only meaningful as the answer to her grief.
The Buddha’s path: from prince to teacher
- Prince Siddhartha Gautama (563 BC–483 BC) of northern India was schooled in the Hindu scriptures and married a princess, living as royalty (NCERT, p. 111).
- At about twenty-five, while out hunting, he saw four sights: a sick man, an aged man, a funeral procession, and a monk begging for alms — and he left the royal life to seek enlightenment about the sorrows he had witnessed.
- After seven years of wandering he sat under a peepal tree and vowed to stay until enlightenment came. After seven days he was enlightened, renamed the tree the Bodhi Tree (Tree of Wisdom), and became the Buddha, “the Awakened or the Enlightened.”
- He preached his first sermon at Benares, described in the book as the holiest of the “dipping places” (bathing places) on the River Ganges. That sermon, the book says, reflects his wisdom about one inscrutable kind of suffering — the grief that follows a death (NCERT, p. 111).
Kisa Gotami’s first journey: she looks for medicine
Kisa Gotami’s only son died. In her grief she carried the dead child from house to house, asking the neighbours for medicine, and the neighbours said she had lost her senses — the boy was dead (NCERT, p. 111).
At last a man told her he could not give her medicine himself, but he knew a physician who could, and he sent her to the Buddha. Kisa Gotami went and asked the Buddha for the medicine that would cure her boy.
The mustard-seed condition — and why the Buddha used it
The Buddha asked for a handful of mustard-seed, then added the condition: the seed must come from a house where no one has lost a child, husband, parent or friend (NCERT, p. 112).
The condition is the teaching, not a refusal. If the Buddha had simply said “everyone dies,” the words would have been lost on her desperation. Instead, the condition turned her demand for medicine into a search, and the search itself taught her: door after door, she heard other families say that the living are few but the dead are many.
A truth she discovered for herself was the only “medicine” that could reach her.
Kisa Gotami’s second journey: the search for a death-free house
The second round of visits is easy to confuse with the first, so keep them apart:
- First visit (p. 111): she asks for medicine for her dead son. She gets none, because the boy is dead and no medicine exists for death.
- Second visit (p. 112): she asks for mustard-seed, but only from a house where nobody has died. She receives the seed everywhere, yet she can never meet the condition, because in every house some beloved one had died.
Weary and hopeless, Kisa Gotami sat at the wayside and watched the city lights flicker up and die, one by one. The sight showed her that human lives do the same — they flicker up and are extinguished again.
She called herself “selfish in my grief,” because death, she now saw, is common to all; and she realised that even in this valley of desolation there is a path to peace for anyone who surrenders selfishness (NCERT, p. 112).
The sermon in three movements
The sermon moves in three steps, and each step does one job in the argument:
| Movement | What the sermon says | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Death is certain | Mortals’ lives are troubled, brief and combined with pain; no one born can avoid dying. Ripe fruit is in danger of falling and clay pots end in being broken; young and old, foolish and wise, all fall into the power of death. | States the fact the mourner must accept first: death is not an accident but the universal condition of life (NCERT, p. 112). |
| 2. The living cannot save the dead | A father cannot save his son, nor relatives their kin; as the relatives look on and lament, the dead are carried off one by one, like an ox led to the slaughter. Since the world is afflicted with death and decay, the wise do not grieve, because they know the terms of the world. | Removes the false hope that the dead can be brought back or held on to (NCERT, pp. 112–113). |
| 3. Grief’s arrow can be drawn out | Weeping and grieving bring no peace of mind; they increase pain and harm the body, and the dead are not saved by lamentation. One who draws out the arrow of lamentation and becomes composed obtains peace of mind, freedom from sorrow, and blessing. | Points to the way out: accept what cannot be changed and recover calm (NCERT, p. 113). |
The three movements follow the logic of the whole chapter — the fact, then the removal of false hope, then peace of mind. The Buddha preaches the same truth Kisa Gotami discovered at the wayside, but he phrases it as a sermon for the ear, after she has learned it by experience.
Reading the chapter’s two figures
The two captioned figures in this chapter are both pictures of grief — and both belong to the modern texts, not to the sermon preached over 2,500 years ago. The chapter places them that way on purpose.
This first figure appears beside “A Guide to Coping with the Death of a Loved One” (p. 114), right after the two case studies the guide opens with: Martha, who lost her husband of twenty-six years to cancer, and Anya, seventeen, whose grandmother recently died and who spends her days crying in her room.
Read the caption as the guide’s argument: a woman in middle age and a teenager are both “experiencing grief,” so grief is ordinary, cuts across every age, and needs no special justification (NCERT, p. 114).
The second figure belongs to Amitai Etzioni’s “Good Grief” (p. 115). Etzioni recalls that soon after his wife died in 1985, a school psychologist told him he and his children were not mourning the right way — he felt anger, but the proper first stage, he was told, is denial. When his thirty-eight-year-old son later died suddenly, he was angry again.
The caption is the essay’s thesis in a single sentence (NCERT, p. 115).
Read the two images together. The first says grief is common; the second says its expression has no fixed shape.
That double claim is what the modern texts add to the ancient sermon: the Buddha tells the mourner to accept death, while these texts tell the mourner — and everyone around the mourner — that however grief appears, it is real and it is allowed.
Words and phrases from the chapter
The textbook glosses the difficult words in the margins of the story and the sermon, and the poem adds one more. The table gives each glossed word its plain meaning and the page where it appears.
| Word | Plain meaning | Page |
|---|---|---|
| sermon | A religious or moral talk; the Activity notes it can also be used playfully or critically, as in “my mother’s sermon about getting my work done” | 111–112 |
| chanced upon | Came across by chance | 111 |
| enlightenment | A state of high spiritual knowledge | 111 |
| procure | To obtain or get hold of something | 111–112 |
| dipping places | Bathing places; Benares is called the holiest of the dipping places on the Ganges | 112 |
| inscrutable | Impossible to understand | 112 |
| repaired | (a stylistic use) went to | 112 |
| valley of desolation | An area filled with deep sorrow | 112 |
| mortals | Beings bound to die | 112 |
| be subject to | To be under the power of, or liable to — the sermon says all are subject to death | 112–113 |
| afflicted with | Affected by suffering, disease or pain — the world is afflicted with death and decay | 113 |
| lamentation | Expression of sorrow | 113 |
| be composed | Calm, in control of one’s feelings — the composed person obtains peace of mind | 113 |
| desolation | A state of ruin, or of being overwhelmed by grief | 112 |
| ramparts | The high, wide walls of a castle or fort; in the poem, a metaphor for the young woman’s hair | 118–119 |
For “Thinking about Language,” the book also asks you to turn the story’s old-fashioned phrasing into current English (NCERT, p. 114). The table below does that work:
| Old phrasing | Modern equivalent |
|---|---|
| give thee medicine for thy child | give you medicine for your child |
| Pray tell me | Please tell me |
| Kisa repaired to the Buddha | Kisa went to the Buddha |
| there was no house but someone had died in it | there was no house in which someone had not died |
| kinsmen | relatives |
| Mark! | Listen! / Take note! |
Common mistakes students make in this chapter
These are the mistakes a first reading of this chapter actually produces. Name them before they happen, and they stop being mistakes.
| Mistake | Correct rule | How to check your answer |
|---|---|---|
| Merging the two house-to-house visits into one | First visit: she asks for medicine for her dead son. Second visit: she asks for mustard-seed from a house where no one has died (pp. 111–112). | Ask “what does she ask for?” for each visit separately — name the object and the reason she wants it. |
| Reading the Buddha’s condition as a refusal or cruelty | The condition is the teaching: it makes Kisa Gotami discover that death visits every house (p. 112). | Re-read what the householders answer — “the living are few, but the dead are many” — the test is working on her. |
| Reading “selfish in my grief” as ordinary selfishness | She means her grief absorbed her so completely that it blinded her to everyone else’s losses — not that she wanted more than others (p. 112). | Check the sentence that follows her words: “Death is common to all.” |
| Assuming a sermon is always a religious lecture | The word means a religious or moral talk, but it can be used negatively or as a joke (p. 111). | The opening Activity’s own example — “my mother’s sermon about getting my work done” — settles it. |
| Reading archaic words as modern English | repaired = went; Mark! = listen; Pray tell me = please tell me; thee/thy = you/your (pp. 112–114). | Translate each phrase into today’s English before you answer; that is exactly the Thinking about Language task. |
| Joining unrelated clauses with a semicolon | Semicolons join clauses that are closely connected — the second usually explains, comments on or extends the first (p. 114). | After combining, ask: can the second clause stand as a comment on the first? If not, use a full stop. |
| Reading “ramparts” literally as castle walls | In the poem, ramparts is a metaphor for the young woman’s hair (pp. 118–119). | The glossary gives the dictionary meaning; the poem’s own words — “honey-coloured … at your ear” — show the hair. |
For the exam: what this chapter actually asks
The exercises printed in the book are the chapter’s own test. Here is what each set asks, and how to write a full answer.
Thinking about the Text: what each question tests
| Question | What it tests | Evidence in the chapter |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 | The first, desperate visit — why Kisa Gotami fails | p. 111 (the neighbours: the boy is dead) |
| Q2 | The second visit — the condition and its failure | p. 112 (every house has lost someone) |
| Q3 | The new understanding — death is common to all | p. 112 (the wayside realisation) |
| Q4 | The method — why the Buddha taught by a test, not a lecture | pp. 111–112 (the discovery process) |
| Q5 | The meaning of “selfishness” in this context — an argued opinion | pp. 112–113 (her own words) |
Model answers: Thinking about the Text (p. 113)
The answers below are written from the text of the chapter. A full answer names the two visits separately, quotes or paraphrases the key realisation, and explains the purpose of the condition.
Q1. When her son dies, Kisa Gotami goes from house to house. What does she ask for? Does she get it? Why not?
Answer: She asks the neighbours for medicine that would cure her dead son.
She does not get it, because the boy is already dead — the neighbours say she has lost her senses, and no medicine exists for death (NCERT, p. 111).
Q2. Kisa Gotami again goes from house to house after she speaks with the Buddha. What does she ask for, the second time around? Does she get it? Why not?
Answer: She asks for a handful of mustard-seed — but from a house where no one has lost a child, husband, parent or friend.
She is given the seed everywhere, yet she can never meet the condition, because every house has lost some beloved one (NCERT, p. 112).
Q3. What does Kisa Gotami understand the second time that she failed to understand the first time? Was this what the Buddha wanted her to understand?
Answer: She understands that death is common to all: her loss is not unique, and every household has its dead.
The Buddha’s condition was designed to produce exactly this understanding — she had to discover the truth for herself, because a truth she discovered was the only medicine that could cure her (NCERT, p. 112).
Q4. Why do you think Kisa Gotami understood this only the second time? In what way did the Buddha change her understanding?
Answer: The first time, she was caught in denial — she treated death as a disease and went door to door for a cure, so nothing could reach her.
The Buddha did not argue with her; he gave her a task that forced her to enter one grieving house after another and hear each family’s loss.
By the time she sat watching the city lights flicker and die, the parallel between a lamp going out and a life ending was before her eyes, and the lesson finally took hold (NCERT, pp. 111–112).
Q5. How do you usually understand the idea of ‘selfishness’? Do you agree with Kisa Gotami that she was being ‘selfish in her grief’?
Answer: In ordinary usage, a selfish person puts their own comfort or interests ahead of other people’s.
Kisa Gotami uses the word in a gentler sense: her grief made her so completely absorbed in her own loss that she forgot the same loss had visited every house.
A reader may reasonably disagree — grief is a natural, involuntary response, not a choice — but the text clearly supports her realisation that her grief had blinded her to the suffering around her. This is an open question: any reasoned, text-based answer is acceptable (NCERT, pp. 112–113).
Thinking about Language: archaic diction and semicolons
The semicolon rule the exercise teaches: when two clauses are closely connected but a joining word like and or but feels forced, a semicolon (or a dash) can combine them. The second clause usually gives the speaker’s opinion on, an explanation of, or a consequence of the first (NCERT, p. 114).
Try these fresh pairs — each can be joined with a semicolon:
- “Martha could not sleep; she kept replaying her last conversation with her husband.” — the second clause explains the first: the memory is what keeps her awake.
- “Anya stayed in her room; she could not face anyone who might ask how she was.” — the second clause gives the reason for the first.
- “Grief has no set form; nobody has the right to tell a mourner how to feel.” — the second clause extends the first; together they make one point.
The book’s own long sentence asks you to judge rhythm: “For there is not any means by which those who have been born can avoid dying; after reaching old age there is death; of such a nature are living beings.”
Broken into three simple sentences it reads: there is no way for anyone born to avoid dying; after old age comes death; such is the nature of living beings (NCERT, p. 114).
Which reads better? The semicolon version runs all three claims together as one rising argument, which suits the voice of a sermon; the three separate sentences are easier to follow but break that rhythm. Both forms are grammatically correct — the exercise is about rhythm and effect, not right and wrong.
Speaking and Writing: carrying the ideas further
The Speaking task (pp. 114–115) asks the class to compare the Buddha’s sermon with the two modern texts and judge whether his ideas and his way of teaching still hold meaning for us. The comparison table below is a ready-made answer to that discussion.
The Writing topics on p. 116 reuse the chapter’s ideas: teaching someone a difficult idea, helping each other through hard times, and seeing yourself as one among billions — the third is exactly what Kisa Gotami learns about herself.
The three texts on grief, side by side
| Text | Its view of grief | How it says grief should be faced |
|---|---|---|
| The Buddha’s sermon (pp. 112–113) | Grief is natural, but weeping and lamentation only add to the mourner’s pain; the dead cannot be saved. Death is certain for every mortal — these are the “terms of the world.” | Accept death as universal, do not cling to the dead, draw out the arrow of lamentation, and become composed to obtain peace of mind. |
| A Guide to Coping with the Death of a Loved One (pp. 114–115) | Grief is an emotion natural to all types of loss; people feel sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, loneliness, fatigue and disbelief, each in their own way. | Recognise that grief shows itself through many behaviours; reach out to the grieving, be patient, and let them talk, reminisce or stay silent. |
| Good Grief (p. 115) | There is no set form for grief and no “right” way to express it; the supposed stages of grief are not a checklist — anger may come first, and that is not wrong. | Do not ask why but what: focus on what survivors do for one another — keep in touch, share ordinary days, and care for those left behind. |
All three texts agree that grief is real and that every household knows it. The real difference is emphasis: the sermon counsels the mourner to master grief from within, while the modern texts add the community’s duty to support — Etzioni calls looking after one another the only consolation survivors can find.
The poem: For Anne Gregory (pp. 118–119)
The poem is a conversation between a young man and a young woman.
The young man declares that no young man can love her “for yourself alone / And not your yellow hair”; she answers that she could dye her hair and then they might; and he closes by reporting that an old religious man “had found a text to prove / That only God … could love you for yourself alone.”
The first two Thinking about the Poem questions (p. 119) check the imagery: “great honey-coloured / ramparts at your ear” is her yellow hair, and young men are “thrown into despair” by it.
The later questions carry the real argument — whether people are loved for their qualities or can be loved “for themselves alone,” and whether the person can even be separated from how they look, sound and walk. The book itself raises Yeats’s question: how can we separate the dancer from the dance?
One honest note before you revise: textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical. Check the current official Class 10 English syllabus on the CBSE website to see what is examinable this session.
No one can honestly promise which questions will appear in a particular paper; the reliable preparation is to be able to answer every printed question in this chapter, because those are the questions the book itself sets.
The chapter in brief
A fast recap of the whole chapter in your own words — read it after the sections above, or the night before an exam:
- Prince Siddhartha Gautama saw suffering — a sick man, an aged man, a funeral procession, a monk — and gave up royal life to understand it. After seven years of wandering and seven days under a peepal tree he was enlightened, became the Buddha, and preached his first sermon at Benares (p. 111).
- Kisa Gotami, whose only son had died, first begged house to house for medicine. Sent to the Buddha, she was told to bring mustard-seed from a house where no one had died — and her search taught her that death is common to all (pp. 111–112).
- The sermon makes three claims: every mortal must die; the living cannot save the dead; and peace of mind comes only to one who draws out the arrow of lamentation and accepts the terms of the world (pp. 112–113).
- The chapter then sets the ancient sermon beside two modern texts that insist grief has no set form and no right way to express it, and closes with Yeats’s poem, whose argument is that only God can love someone for herself alone (pp. 114–119).
Related resources
This listing is maintained for the 2026-27 academic session using the NCERT textbook information available to us. NCERT remains the authority for confirming the latest edition.
If the chapter PDF is open in one tab and this page in another, the links below move you around the rest of the site.
For the same chapter in a step-by-step study format, our notes on The Sermon at Benares work through the story, the sermon, the language exercises and the poem question by question.
The next chapter in First Flight, “The Proposal,” has its notes in the Class 10 English notes collection; “Glimpses of India,” the chapter before this one, is part of the same sequence.
For every subject at this level, start from the Class 10 hub; the CBSE notes index organises everything on the site by class and subject.
For the authority itself: ncert.nic.in is where the official First Flight PDF and every NCERT textbook are published, and the CBSE website carries the current Class 10 curriculum and syllabus.
| What the chapter holds | Count | Where it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Printed pages | 9 | |
| Figures with NCERT captions | 2 | |
| Exercise questions | 5 | answered in our NCERT Solutions |
| Activities | 1 | |
| Official NCERT PDF | Download the chapter PDF | the chapter exactly as NCERT publishes it |
Reference: NCERT Class 10 English First Flight textbook, chapter 8, official edition on ncert.nic.in.
Sources and data verification
- The page numbers and the two figure captions on this page describe the NCERT Class 10 English textbook First Flight, Chapter 8, “The Sermon at Benares,” as published on ncert.nic.in.
- This page covers this one chapter of First Flight; it does not describe the full CBSE scheme of subjects or every chapter of the book.
- The page is maintained for the current academic session using the NCERT information available to us.
- NCERT settles the textbook, its editions and the official PDFs; CBSE settles the curriculum, syllabus and examinations.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Kisa Gotami go from house to house twice in The Sermon at Benares?
She makes two separate rounds for two different things. The first time she asks the neighbours for medicine to cure her dead son, and they tell her the boy is dead and she has lost her senses (p. 111).
The second time, after meeting the Buddha, she asks for a handful of mustard-seed from a house where no one has died — and although every house gives her the seed, she cannot find a single house that meets the condition (p. 112).
What does the mustard-seed test teach Kisa Gotami?
It teaches her that death is common to all. The condition is not a cruel trick: it makes her enter one grieving household after another until she discovers for herself that every family has lost someone — and a truth she discovers herself is the only “medicine” that can cure her grief.
When she finally sits at the wayside and watches the city lights flicker out, she understands that human lives do the same (NCERT, p. 112).
What does Kisa Gotami mean when she calls herself “selfish in my grief”?
She does not mean she wanted more than others. She means her grief had absorbed her so completely that it blinded her to the suffering around her — she had forgotten that every house has its dead.
Realising that death is common to all is the moment her grief stops isolating her, because it places her loss among the losses of the whole human family (NCERT, p. 112).
What is the main point of Amitai Etzioni’s “Good Grief”?
That there is no set form for grief and no “right” way to express it. Etzioni writes that after his wife’s death he was told his anger was wrong because denial should come first, and after his son’s death he was angry again.
The essay’s advice is to stop asking why and focus on what — that is, on what the survivors do for one another, since caring for each other is the only real consolation (NCERT, p. 115).
What is the poem “For Anne Gregory” about, and what does “ramparts” mean?
The poem is an argument between a young man and a young woman about whether anyone can love her “for yourself alone,” apart from her yellow hair. The young man says no; she says she could dye her hair; he answers that an old religious man declared that only God could love anyone that way.
In the poem “ramparts” — literally the high, wide walls of a castle or fort — is a metaphor for the young woman’s hair at her ear (NCERT, pp. 118–119).
Where is the version of the sermon used in this chapter taken from?
The textbook credits the sermon text to Betty Renshaw’s Values and Voices: A College Reader (1975). The chapter prints it after the story of Kisa Gotami, and the credit appears beneath the sermon on p. 113.
Explore Class 10 English Books
Related chapters: