Compassionate Deer

More on the Jataka Tales... I just heard of this beautiful story when I was in Sarnath recently. It seemed that Buddha had been born as a deer before in the Deer Park in Sarnath. It seemed that in ancient time, a king always went on a hunting spree there, killing more deer than necessary. The deer community thus made a pact to send one deer for sacrifice each day to prevent more unnecessary death. When the turn for a pregnant doe came, it worried more for the life in its womb and the leader of the deer had thus voluntarily taken the place of its pregnant subject. The king on learning about this, realized how the deer as an animal, had cared more than him, a human, for its living subject. He then decided to stop the killing of deer and deer thus live peacefully in this Deer Park in Sarnath till this day. I understand that the leader of the deer was Buddha himself when he was a Boddhisatva but frankly, I find it hard to grasp the idea of rebirth, an important subject in Buddhism. Someone, somewhere out day, may perhaps clarify...


With the deer in Deer Park in Sarnath, India...