The Father's Cane and the Roasted Birds

One late autumn afternoon, sunlight slanted through the gaps of a thatched-roof house, dust drifting lazily in the pale golden light. The crowing of roosters beyond the distant fence faded away, replaced by the sobbing of a five-year-old child who had fallen into a mud puddle in the front yard. The father stood with his arms crossed, brow furrowed, in no hurry to run over and pick the child up. The air in the small house suddenly grew thick, as if this moment of sternness were the only way for the little one to learn life's first lesson.

"If you fall, you get up by yourself. Next time, don't run around so recklessly," the father said, his voice low but not angry.

The child, eyes brimming with tears, crawled up and looked at the father with reddened eyes. The child could not understand why the father would not offer an embrace, the way the mother always did.

It had all begun a few years earlier, when the child was only three. The little one would run out to the street to play, and whenever strangers appeared, would want to follow them, refusing to listen to the parents. One day, the child was nearly struck by a truck, and only the father's quick pull saved the child. From then on, the father knew that if he kept indulging the child, the child would go astray. Many nights he lay awake, listening to mosquitoes humming outside the mosquito net, thinking of ways to raise the child to be a good person. Somewhere he had read a teacher's words: sometimes one must be firm in order to create great blessings from merit in the future.

That evening, after his daughter accidentally broke her grandmother's flower vase, the father decided he had to be strict. He picked up a small rattan cane, his heart tightening, but still he called the child over.

"I don't want to hit you, but if you misbehave, I must teach you," he said, his hand trembling as he held the cane. "I'm sorry, Father, I won't do it again," the child cried, fingers clutching tightly at the hem of his shirt. "Hold out your hand," the father said, his voice hard as stone. The cane fell lightly on the small hand, and the child cried out in protest, but the father turned his face away, his eyes stinging. He hurt twice as much as the child did, yet he knew he could not soften his heart.

At that very moment, at the market at the edge of the village, a bird seller was calling out to people, urging them to buy birds and release them for blessings from merit. A Buddhist layperson came and bought several dozen birds, releasing them into the garden, believing it to be a good deed. But that father, who had listened to his teacher's teachings, knew that if people kept buying birds to release, the roasting ovens would keep running, and the bird catchers would only grow more eager. He said to his wife:

"We won't buy those birds. Let them roast every last one. But if we are firm like this, in the future no one will dare catch birds anymore. If we keep softening our hearts, we will keep losing." "But the teacher said releasing lives brings merit," the wife replied, holding their daughter, who was rubbing her eyes. "True merit, yes—but buying from professional catchers only feeds the karma of catching. Better not to buy at all, so that there are no more buyers," he explained, gently patting his wife's shoulder.

The turning point came when, after that caning, the daughter one day suddenly tidied up her toys neatly and no longer demanded to go out in the evening. The father watched her from a distance and suddenly realized: the cane was not born of a cruel mind/heart, but of a deep love for his child that made him hurt along with her.

He quietly put the cane away in the corner of the cabinet, and instead, every evening he sat and told her stories of moral teachings. As for the birds, he went to see the teacher at the temple to ask for clarity, then returned and persuaded the families in the neighborhood to stop buying birds from the local trap-and-roast operation for releasing lives.

Five years passed. The little child of those days became a well-behaved ten-year-old girl who knew how to yield to her younger siblings. The professional bird seller in the area, finding no more customers, turned to farming instead. The wild birds around the village gradually vanished from the nets. Every afternoon, the father sat on the porch, listening to his daughter read her lessons, his heart at ease: firmness hurts at first, but afterward the whole family lives in peace.

The Meaning of the Story

Sometimes, out of love for their children, parents must be firm and discipline them so they may become good people. Likewise, with releasing lives, we should not buy birds from professional catchers, for doing so only feeds the karma of catching; instead, we must be firm and refuse, so that in the future no one will dare catch birds anymore. Endless soft-heartedness only makes us lose again and again; firmness at the right moment creates lasting merit.

Compiled from a dharma talk by Venerable Thích Chân Quang