Here is a well-known parable told by the Buddha:
A man, crossing a field, encounters a tiger. The man flees, the tiger pursues. Coming to a cliff top, the man grabs the root of a vine and swings himself down below the tiger's reach. The tiger waits. Looking down the precipice upon which he precariously swings, the man sees another tiger looking expectantly upwards at him. As if this were not sufficient cause for peril, two mice begin to chew the root from which he hangs. As he digests his unenviable condition, the man sees a ripe strawberry within his reach. Releasing the vine with one hand, he gently picks the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
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Teaching tales are a wonderful part of many other wisdom traditions, including Sufism, Taoism, Hasidic Judaism, the life of Jesus in the New Testament, and the stories of the desert fathers of early Christianity. Like this Zen parable, they lend themselves to meditation and revisiting.
When I first read this story, in my twenties, I took it at reasonable face value: a doomed man's capacity to pluck a last moment of pleasure before imminent and certain death. Having no experience of such, I nonetheless imagined that there was nothing like such inevitability to focus and heighten one's sensibilities.
Years later, ruminating on the story again while preparing to discuss it with a group of students, I wrote in my journal, "Can I, in the midst of all that distracts and destroys, with no hope of release from such circumstances, reach out to taste the fruit of life? I have a fierce and, I think, irredeemable tendency to hold on tighter to what I've learned to know as dear life. Perhaps, if I will not let go, I can at least learn to grasp with only one hand, leaving the other to reach out freely."
Now, later in life, I am more inclined to hear the tale as a nudge towards recognition of the evanescence of time in contrast to a world more and more compelled by the tyranny of time's presence and precision. None of my readings is lost. I live, as Stanley Kunitz writes elsewhere, "in the layers," and I too am not done with my changes.
There is a brief Sufi tale whose characters are not unlike those of this Zen parable:
A man being followed by a hungry tiger turned in desperation to face it, and cried: "Why don't you leave me alone?" The tiger answered: "Why don't you stop being so appetizing?""