Puščavnik iz Rjumona v jelenovi koži

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Puščavnik iz Rjumona v jelenovi koži

In a place called Ryūmon in Yamato Province there lived a holy man, known as the Holy Man of Ryūmon after the place where he dwelt. A man well acquainted with him spent his days killing deer. One pitch-dark night, during the season when deer were hunted by torchlight, this man went out to hunt. As he searched, he caught the gleam of a pair of eyes. “There’s a deer,” he thought, and circled round, keeping the eyes in view. Having worked his way within bowshot, he set his torch in its forked rest, nocked an arrow, and raised his bow to shoot. But the eyes seemed closer together than a deer’s usually were, and their color was different too. Puzzled, he checked his draw and looked more closely. Still finding something strange, he took the arrow from the string and held up his torch. “Those are no deer’s eyes,” he thought. “Well, if it bolts, let it bolt.” He edged nearer and saw what seemed to be a body covered in a single deerskin. Deciding that it was a deer after all, he made ready to shoot again, but still the eyes did not look right. He went straight up to it and saw what looked unmistakably like a monk’s head. “What is this?” he wondered. He leaped down, blew his torch into flame, and held it close. There lay the holy man beneath a deerskin, blinking his eyes. “What can this mean? Why are you lying here like this?” he asked. Tears streamed down the holy man’s face. “You will not heed my pleas to stop, and you kill so many deer. I thought that if I were killed in a deer’s place, surely you would give it up, at least for a while. So I lay here waiting for you to shoot me. Alas, you did not.” At these words the man threw himself to the ground and rolled about, weeping. “To think that you felt so deeply, while I stubbornly went on doing this!” There and then he drew his sword, hacked his bow in two, and broke his quiver and all his arrows to pieces. Then he cut off his topknot and became a monk under the holy man’s guidance. He served him for the rest of the holy man’s life, and after his death remained there in his place, devoting himself to religious practice.