Where a Small Life Belongs

Good evening.

I’m Ren, the lotus rabbit.

Tonight, a memory from long ago came back to me.

My little brother was on his way home from school.

As he was crossing at the crosswalk,

he found a small bird on the ground,

flapping, unable to fly.

Before the light turned red,

carefully, a little afraid,

he gently took hold of its fluttering leg,

and carried the little one all the way home.

It was our mother who didn’t know what to do.

She laid a towel in a large insect case

and placed the bird inside.

For my worried brother, she asked a local animal clinic

to treat it, but they turned us away.

And not just one clinic.

One after another, after another…

At last,

we met a vet who said, “Let me take a look,”

and only then

did we understand why we had been turned away.

Wild birds are not meant to be kept by people,

because they are part of the ecosystem.

That is what the vet told our mother.

And to my brother, the vet said:

“If you take it back to its mother and father,

I’m sure it will get well.”

That night, together with our mother, my brother returned the bird to the woods.

And he said goodbye.

Years later, as an adult,

I looked into this story again.

In Japan, there is a law called the Wildlife Protection and Management Act,

and as a rule, it forbids catching wild birds or animals

without permission.

Among its purposes,

the text of the law includes the words

“securing biological diversity.”

Even a single, nameless little bird

has a role in the ecosystem of its land:

eating insects, carrying seeds,

helping other lives carry on.

So kindness from one person alone

should not cut those ties.

I learned that this way of thinking

was what lay behind all those refusals.

Strangely enough,

Buddhism has a very similar idea.

It is called engi (dependent origination).

Nothing exists

entirely on its own.

Everything is here

only because countless connections have come together.

Birds, insects, grass, and trees

are all bound up with one another,

shaping a single world.

To keep one bird in your own hands

may also mean quietly cutting

the countless ties

it was meant to have.

In Japanese Buddhism,

there is another phrase:

sansen sōmoku shikkai jōbutsu.

Mountains, rivers, grass, and trees,

all things

carry the precious nature of the Buddha.

It is the idea that humans are not the only ones who are special.

The forest and the birds

are here with just as much weight.

When I think of it this way,

the woods where my brother let the bird go

were not just a backdrop.

They were the place it truly belonged.

That finally makes sense to me.

I also learned

the word hōjō.

It means releasing a captured creature

back to where it came from.

For a long time, in Japan’s temples and shrines,

it has been cherished as a form of jihi, compassion.

In jihi,

ji is the wish for another’s happiness.

Hi is the wish to take away another’s suffering.

Both, they say,

begin not with what satisfies ourselves,

but with asking

what is truly good for the other.

When my brother let the bird go,

perhaps he was choosing its happiness

over his own loneliness.

Everything changes and passes.

In Buddhism, this is called shogyō mujō, impermanence.

That bird, too,

could not stay in an insect case forever.

It was always going to return to the woods.

Perhaps letting go

simply means

not forcing that change

to stop.

The story of the ecosystem

and the teachings of Buddhism

seem to me to arrive at the same place.

Everything is connected.

And every single life

has its own role and its own place.

So,

the deepest love

we can give to someone dear

is not to hold them close beside us,

but to gently send them off

to a place where they can be truly themselves.

To the little bird my brother found that day.

To all the vets who turned us away.

And to the vet who, in the end,

kindly told us why.

“Thank you.”

The refusals,

the life we couldn’t save,

all of it.

Because that day happened,

I feel I was taught

that letting go, too,

is a kind of love.

Today, again,

to the people and things I meet,

one by one,

I’ll softly say, “Thank you.”

To the things that went well.

And to the things that didn’t.

Today, may a quiet calm, a gentle nagi, come to your heart.

#life #buddhism #gratitude #lettinggo