Story · 22
The Hunter and the Deer: An Initiation in a Single Glance
The hunter raised his bow and set the arrow, and in that instant the doe turned and looked at him once. In that single glance the hunter lowered his bow, and he never lifted it again.
Rama asked, “Gurudev, can the slayer and the slain be one and the same?”
Vasishtha said, “Rama, listen to the story of a hunter and a deer.”
The Chase
There was a forest, and in it lived a deer, one with great antlers, a yellow back, and swift legs.
In that same forest a hunter went about his hunting, a bow and a single arrow forever in his hands.
One day the hunter caught sight of the deer, and the deer broke into flight.
The hunter stayed at its heels, and the chase stretched on and on.
The deer’s hooves struck the ground and lifted into the air again, and its breath came fast.
The hunter ran hard as well, and dry leaves snapped beneath his feet.
A taut line held between the two of them; the deer could not stop, and the hunter could not stop.
This went on for a long while, and then the deer came to the middle of an open meadow and stood still.
The hunter stopped there too.
In the center of that meadow sat a muni, a forest sage.
The muni opened his eyes and looked at them both, and the hunter raised his bow.
The muni said, “Stop.”
The hunter halted and said, “Speak, muniji.”
“Hunter, where is this deer?”
The hunter said, “Muniji, it is standing right in front of me.”
“I cannot see it.”
The hunter was baffled and looked again. The deer was right there, yet it was not there in the muni’s eyes.
The hunter asked, “Muniji, why can you not see it?”
The muni said, “Hunter, I see a single consciousness that holds both the deer and you within it, one consciousness only. My sight does not begin from your consciousness, nor from the deer’s. My sight rests on the consciousness that lies behind every being.”
The hunter lowered his bow.
The deer too was looking toward the muni, and something in its eyes had changed as well.
The hunter looked at the deer and the deer looked at the hunter, and between the two of them something shifted.
The hunter lowered his arrow, and the deer took a step toward him, and the hunter reached out his hand.
The deer touched the hunter’s hand with its muzzle.
The muni said, “Do you understand now?”
The hunter said, “I understand. The hunter and the hunted are one; only their bodies differ, and the consciousness is a single consciousness.”
The muni nodded in agreement.
The hunter set his bow down on the ground and walked away from that forest. The deer stayed where it was, and the muni remained seated where he was.
Rama said, “Gurudev, I too am a king, and I too have a duty, the duty of wielding the bow.”
“Yes.”
“But now, whenever I draw the bow, I will keep this in mind.”
“Keep what?”
“That the hunter and the hunted are two forms of one and the same consciousness.”
Vasishtha said, “Rama, once this settles deep inside you, even wielding the bow becomes a tapas, an austerity. You will kill, and yet you will not kill. You will make war, and yet you will not make war. Both at once.”
Rama looked toward the water.
Literary context
This story rests on the Yoga Vasistha, in its Nirvana Prakarana, canto 6a.124. This small parable of the oneness of hunter and hunted has been repeated many times over in the later Indian tradition.
A philosophical view
A hunter pursues a wounded deer. In the course of the chase he arrives at a rishi. He asks the rishi where the deer has gone. The rishi stays silent, then says only this: my eyes see, but within me I hold no division that would let me tell you who is the hunter and who is the hunted. The hunter’s bow goes slack. The story says that the one who pursues and the one being pursued are two forms of a single consciousness, and once this is seen, the pursuit stops of its own accord.
The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) showed in his Phenomenology of Perception (1945) that the seer and the seen cannot be separated from each other, that every act of seeing is also a kind of being touched, and that when the hunter looks at his prey he is present within the prey as well. The rishi’s silence is the gist of exactly this. He did not tell the hunter the direction of the deer; he showed him that the very question of direction is incomplete.