Buddha once told a parable in sutra:
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
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the vine must be his attachment, him letting go to taste the strawberry is accepting his fate .
OK, good. That’s a way to look at it that I hadn’t seen before. He certainly did let go of his attachments.
I looked at it more for a story about someone being in the present. That strawberry was really good because it was the only thing in his mind, not worrying about the future.
Either way works, and there are probably other viewpoints too.
More importantly about the vine is that he holds the vine with one hand while grabbing for the strawberry with the other. It’s the middle way. You must be aware of your attachments but you can’t cast them all away haphazardly to go after the strawberry. He is simultaneously reaching out AND letting go.
The strawberry is the present moment.
The tiger above is his birth.
The tiger below is his death.
The mice, black and white, represent the passage of the days for when they gnaw through the vine, he will meet his death.
The strawberry represents the good things all around us. The vine is the timeline of life. I choose to celebrate the strawberry as the good things before me, always.
I can climb a vine. I can choose to confront the tiger above. Therefore, it may not represent my birth, only an adversity. The tiger below seems inevitable. Still, I have a choice as to which direction to move.
The mice are small, and therefore likely represent the range of myriad different details that life throws at us. I can deal with mice.
As I see it, this teaching shows us that we need only look for something very special, in any situation. Good things are all around us. We need only see them. They are there. They are everywhere around us. We need only see…
I look for strawberries. I’ve found many. I even keep chocolate to dip them in. Should I not be able to reach the chocolate…well, it is a luscious strawberry.
Perhaps most importantly, the man’s fate is sealed – in this hypothetical koan, there is only one end for the man (dead by tiger). All of us must face death some day as well. What we can learn from this koan is to not fret over the inevitable, but to accept it as such; otherwise, worry and doubt will poison the present. The man knows this, and can remove fear of death from his mind, enabling him to enjoy the strawberry.
It amazes me how often I’ve seen the word “is” throughtout this site. Nothing “is”. Things resemble, apeear, or have some qualities of other things, but no thing “IS” another thing. Most grown adults know what “is” means, so most grown adults lie incessantly everyday. “The sky IS blue. The air IS cold. That man IS ugly.” Lies.
Not mistakes, not semantic differences, but mere lies.
No, there are two senses of the word “is”. One is the “is” of equality or identity. The other is the “is” of predication. When we say that the air is cold, we are predicating coldness of the air. We are not saying the air is identical to coldness. So we are not saying something false (which would furthermore be a lie only if asserted by a speaker who knew it to be false). If the air is cold (e.g. it’s cold enough to snow), then the English sentence “The air is cold” is true.
Word can (and typically do) have more than one meaning.
A tree’s bark is brown.
A dog’s bark doesn’t have a color.
Context and use determine meaning. Meaning is not simply a matter of “these letters ‘bark’ have this meaning.” Likewise for “is.”
Pfft. Mysticism, zen, bullshit. Put yourself in that situation. ‘Looks like I’m gonna die soon. Hey, a strawberry. Fuck it, I’m gonna die eating.”
Don’t think I’m kidding or trolling, you’re just making it too complicated.
The both tigers to me represent suffering which the man was attempting to avoid by grasping the vine. The man clearly thought he was avoiding the tiger by swinging himself over the cliff. The vine may represent the mans life which he grasped with one hand while reaching out for the strawberry which to me represents pleasure because it was sweet. It is our desire for pleasure or our attachment that leads to death or suffering which are two sides of the same coin. The mice must represent something subtle because the man did not notice them. Although the man enjoyed the sweetness of the strawberry it was temporary. He inevitably met finally with a tiger again.