The Banyan Deer King's Offer

A king who loved hunting deer daily was persuaded by his two deer-herd kings — one golden like a banyan tree, one ordinary in color — to end the chaotic, wasteful mass hunts that killed and wounded far more deer than needed, in exchange for a calmer system: one deer would walk forward voluntarily each day, chosen by lottery within its own herd, to be the day's single kill.

The arrangement spared countless lives and injuries for both herds, until one day the lottery fell upon a pregnant doe in the ordinary herd, who begged her herd king for a delay, not for her own sake but so her unborn fawn might live a little longer first. Her king refused, unwilling to pass the burden to another deer whose turn had not yet come.

Desperate, she appealed instead to the Banyan deer king of the other herd, who, upon hearing her plight, made a decision that stunned every creature in the forest: rather than ask anyone else to take her place, he walked to the hunting ground himself and offered his own life in her stead. The human king, arriving to find not the expected doe but the magnificent Banyan deer king lying calmly ready for death, was so moved that he refused to kill him at all — and, humbled by a mercy greater than his own, abolished the deer hunt entirely, granting the whole forest permanent sanctuary from that day forward.