The Fawn.

One day I was walking alone in the forest when I heard a strange sound. At first I thought it was a bird and so I looked into the branches of the trees, but saw nothing. Then, just as the small path turned I saw one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen in my life.

Trotting towards me in a quite nonchalant manner was a baby deer, a fawn. He was unaware of me until we almost bumped into each other.

We both stopped and I spoke gently like a parent might.

"Hello," I said, "what are you doing here? Where is your mother? Don't come too close to me, I'm a human, and the humans that live close to this forest like to hunt and kill little babies like you."

I looked to my left and standing perfectly still just a few meters away was his mother and a brother or sister.

I gently clapped my hands and ushered him away.

"Go, go to your family. Go." He hesitated for a moment and then joined his family and the three of them gamboled away into the forest. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life, and arising from that was a great Dhamma teaching.

A deep and profound insight arose in my heart that this incident had not 'just happened,' because nothing 'just happens.' It had taken from the beginning of all time and every aspect of human, animal and geographical evolution to arrive in this place where two separate species could meet and share a moment. But as the reflection opened there was also the subtle deepening of understanding and the recognition that Isabelle and I had to have become a couple for me to be in this place, to be in France, to be alone in a forest. 

For that to happen every moment of our lives and all the people we have each met and known and fallen in love with had to be exactly like the way it was, for better or worse, and then reaching further back to the lives of our parents, grandparents and great grandparents.

Nothing just happens and each moment is never an accident but a series of tiny events each dependent on the one that preceded it. 

There are no accidents, only cause and effect and things do not happen for a reason, they happen as a consequence. Each moment is a new moment and can never be repeated and so, not understanding this simple yet incredibly profound teaching, leads us back with no deviation to the First Noble Truth of the Buddha, that life as we experience it has the quality of being unsatisfactory.

This moment and this realization flowed into my personal universe and influenced every moment from that time on. It was an immense feeling of interconnectedness, the deepening of an insight I had experienced when I was a monk whilst cleaning out the small pool in the garden of the monastery.

 

May all beings be happy.

 

(Excerpt from A Journey to Awakening)