Deer and the sage | Need of compassion | Beautiful life | Philosophy | Short Story | King Bharat | The Romanch |

Deer and the Sage

Add caption

This is a story of a king who ruled India many millennia ago. His name was Bharat. King Bharat ruled for a long time and when he crowned his son, he had no work left for the kingdom. He took Sanyasa and went to the forest.

One day when he was bathing in the river, he saw a deer which came there to drink water. She was pregnant and it was her maternity time. When deer entered the water, a terrible roar of a lion came from the jungle. She got afraid of the lion and jumped to escape.

This jump was her last jump. She died immediately and her fetus came out. Alive! The fawn started flowing with the stream of the river.

Bharat saw this all incident and he felt sorrow for the mother deer. He went ahead and picked baby deer and brought it to his ashram. The fawn survived. It started growing like waxing moon in Bharat’s ashram.

Bharat started loving it and his love got increased day by day. He left his tapasya, he didn’t pray daily nor did he anything that was essential for a sanyasi. He just kept his eyes on the fawn. The whole day he saw it playing, jumping and grazing. He enjoyed watching it so much that, if it went some far away, he used to become worry about it. He used to get anxious about it and he couldn’t keep his patience to wait.

When deer returned, he cuddled it and kissed his neck and forehead and ordered not to go anywhere else.

The time came when Bharat was about to leave this world. Still he didn’t think of God or other thing. He just watched the deer and kept his eyes on it. He died smiling with the desire of loving the animal.

The next life, he was born as a deer. The love, the unsatisfied desire that he left in his previous life was still in his mind as memory. He left his mother of this life and came running the place where he had died previously. He couldn’t find the deer. Perhaps the deer had died or left for some other place. His love didn’t end here. He lived for his whole life, waiting for the deer but the deer never came. Still his love never ended. His pure love for the animal made the Gods happy and they came to take him to the heaven. His love had impressed the creator himself and he was given the Moksha, the freedom from the cycle of birth and death.

This is the thing that we have lost from our lives. Our love has become a need for someone else. Our compassion has either dried or wiped out. We don’t feel for others, neither for a person nor for an animal nor a plant. The purity of thoughts is no more. The selfish desires have surrounded us and we are searching for the solution outside.

The solution is nowhere except in our own mind. The all possibilities and happiness is within us and we have to realise that. If we become loving, we become happy. Easily we shall start loving everyone in its natural form. The compassion is necessary for our lives, for everyone of this human society.