The King Who Became a Deer

The sages told the Pandavas of Bharata, a great emperor who came within reach of liberation, lost it through a single tender attachment, and won it back at last only by becoming, on purpose, a fool whom the world despised. It is one of the deepest of all the old tales about the danger of attachment and the patience of the soul's long road.

Bharata was a mighty and righteous emperor, a king so great that the land itself is said to bear his name. He ruled long and well, but in his later years he did what the wise of old often did: he renounced his throne and his kingdom and his family, and retired to a forest hermitage to give his remaining years wholly to devotion and the search for the highest truth. There, free of the cares of empire, he lived as an ascetic, fixing his mind upon God, advancing far along the inner path, drawing near to the liberation that is the goal of all such striving.

One day, as Bharata sat by a river performing his devotions, a pregnant doe came down to the water on the far bank to drink. As she stood there, the roar of a lion suddenly shattered the forest stillness, and the terrified doe leaped in fright across the river - and in her leap, in her terror, she gave birth. The newborn fawn fell into the rushing water and was swept along, while the mother, exhausted and frightened past bearing, struggled to the far shore and there collapsed and died.

Bharata saw it all. His heart was moved with pity at the sight of the tiny newborn fawn struggling in the current, motherless in the very moment of its birth, helpless and alone. He could not bear to let it drown. He rose, went into the water, lifted the little fawn out, and carried it back to his hermitage to care for it. It was an act of pure compassion, and there was nothing wrong in it. But from that small, kind act grew the thing that would undo all his years of devotion.

Bharata raised the orphaned fawn with care, feeding it, sheltering it, watching over it. And slowly, without his noticing, his compassion for the creature deepened into attachment, and the attachment grew until it filled his heart and crowded out everything else.

He began to love the little deer as if it were his own child. He worried over it constantly - whether it had eaten, whether it had strayed too far, whether wolves might take it, whether it was well. When it wandered off, he grew anxious and went searching; when it returned, he was flooded with relief and delight. More and more of his thought, his care, his love, went to the fawn, and less and less to the devotions and the meditation for which he had given up an empire. The deer became the center of his life. The emperor who had renounced a whole kingdom and all his family without a backward glance, who had been advancing toward the freedom of the soul, was now bound, hand and heart, to a single deer - his mind, that had been fixed upon God, now fixed upon a creature.

So subtle is the snare of attachment that it caught a man who had escaped far greater bonds. He had given up a kingdom and felt no pull; he could not give up a fawn.

When at last the time came for Bharata to die, the attachment showed its full power. As he lay dying, his mind was not upon God, as a lifetime of devotion should have made it - it was upon the deer. His last anxious thoughts, his final feelings as his life slipped away, were all of the fawn: where it was, who would care for it now, what would become of it without him. He died with the image of the deer in his heart.

And there is an old and solemn law in these matters: that the final thought of a dying person, the state of the mind in the last moment, shapes the birth that follows. A person becomes, in the next life, what he thinks of in his last. And so Bharata, the great emperor and advanced ascetic who had nearly won liberation, died with his whole mind on a deer - and was reborn as a deer.

Yet because he had been so great a soul, so far advanced, a single grace was granted him even in this fall: he was born as a deer, but he retained the full memory of his past human life. He knew, as a deer, exactly what had happened to him - that he, who had renounced an empire and stood at the threshold of freedom, had been dragged down into the body of a beast by one tender, careless attachment to a creature he had loved.

So Bharata lived a life as a deer, but a deer with a human soul and a full memory of his ruin, and it was a life of bitter wisdom. He understood now, with terrible clarity, the lesson he had failed to learn: how a single attachment, however loving, could undo a lifetime of devotion and drag the soul down. And he was determined never to be caught again.

As a deer he kept himself apart from the other deer and from all attachments. He did not give his heart to the herd or to any creature. He stayed near the hermitages of holy men, where he could hear the sacred chants and teachings, and he passed his deer's life in inward devotion and detachment, careful above all to form no new bond that might trap him a second time. He simply waited out that birth, harming nothing and clinging to nothing, until at last the deer's life ended.

And because he had lived it so carefully, in detachment and devotion, he was reborn once more as a human being - given another chance at the human birth from which liberation can be won. But this time he came into the world resolved, with the whole hard lesson of the deer burned into him, that nothing - nothing at all - would ever bind him again.

Born again as a human, in a good and pious family, Bharata did an extraordinary thing. Knowing now how attachment creeps in through relationships, ambitions, and the ordinary involvements of life, he resolved to give the world no hold on him at all. So he deliberately played the fool.

He behaved as if he were a dull, witless idiot - mute, slow, vacant, incapable. He never spoke a sensible word, never showed his intelligence, never took part in the affairs or relationships or ambitions of those around him. He let people think him a simpleton, a half-wit, good for nothing. His own family, despairing of him, treated him as a burden; after his father's death his relatives mistreated him, gave him only scraps and leftovers to eat, and set him to the most menial labor, mocking him as a fool. He bore it all without complaint, eating whatever he was given, doing whatever lowly work was set him, never resenting the contempt, never revealing what he was. For under the guise of the idiot, inwardly, his mind was fixed wholly and constantly upon God, free now of every attachment, untouchable, serene. He had made himself worthless in the eyes of the world precisely so that the world could never again lay a finger on his soul. Men called him Jada Bharata - Bharata the Inert, the Dullard - and he let them.

One day a king named Rahugana was traveling to visit a great sage, carried in a palanquin upon the shoulders of bearers. One of the bearers fell ill, and the king's men, looking about for a strong-bodied replacement, saw the sturdy-looking Jada Bharata standing idly by and seized him, setting the palanquin-pole upon his shoulder and ordering him to carry it, for he looked like a fit laborer and a fool who would not object.

Jada Bharata took up the pole and carried the palanquin. But he was full of harmlessness toward all creatures, and as he walked he watched the ground carefully and stepped wide and slow to avoid treading upon the ants and insects in his path. This careful, uneven gait made the palanquin lurch and jolt, throwing the king about inside it.

King Rahugana, jostled and annoyed, leaned out and rebuked the bearer angrily. "What is the matter with you, you fool? Walk straight! Are you tired already? You look strong and healthy - a great fat fellow - and yet you cannot even carry a palanquin smoothly. Do your work properly, or you will feel my punishment!" And he heaped scorn on the seeming idiot for his clumsiness.

Then Jada Bharata, who for a lifetime had spoken no sensible word, finally opened his mouth - and out of the despised fool poured wisdom so deep that it stopped the king cold.

He spoke of the difference between the body and the soul. "You scold this body for being tired, and call it fat and strong," he said, "but these things - fat or thin, strong or weak, tired or rested, bearer or king - belong only to the body, which is a passing thing, born and dying. They do not touch the Self within, which is eternal, unborn, undying, neither a carrier of burdens nor a master of carriers. Who is it you imagine you are rebuking? The body that carries your palanquin is not the real I, any more than your royal body is the real you. The Self within both of us is the same deathless thing, untouched by the distinctions of high and low, master and servant, that so concern you."

And he discoursed on the unreality of the body's distinctions, on the one changeless Self that dwells equally in king and bearer, in the wise and the foolish, on non-attachment and the eternal soul, with a depth and a clarity that no scholar could have matched. King Rahugana listened, astonished, and understood that he had laid his burden upon no fool at all, but upon a great and realized sage who had been hiding under the guise of an idiot.

King Rahugana came down from his palanquin and fell at the feet of Jada Bharata, begging forgiveness for having mistreated and scorned so great a soul, and asking to be taught. And Jada Bharata, who had at last fulfilled the long, hard course of his soul, instructed the king in the highest wisdom, and went his way, free, untouchable, his liberation now secure - having conquered, by his deliberate foolishness, the attachment that had once cost him everything.

The sages drew the lessons for the Pandavas, and they were several and deep. "See first the subtle danger of attachment. Bharata renounced a whole empire and all his family without a pang - and was undone by his love for a single deer. The greatest bonds he could break; it was a small, tender, seemingly innocent attachment that caught him, because he did not guard against it. No attachment is too small to bind the soul.

"See, too, the power of our final thoughts, and so of the whole habit of the mind, for we become what we dwell upon. And see how a great soul, having fallen, did not despair but patiently worked his way back across lifetimes, learning his lesson so thoroughly that at last he made himself a fool in the eyes of the world rather than risk a single new bond. And remember, once again, never to judge a soul by its appearance: the despised idiot, mocked and set to carry burdens, was the wisest man in the kingdom. Wisdom often goes in humble disguise, and the one the world counts a fool may be the one who has conquered the world."

And the Pandavas took the tale to heart - both its warning against the small attachments that bind, and its comfort that even a great fall is not the end of the soul's long road home.