JĀTAKA 15: The Trap That Does Not Console

 

Lucidity, refusal to learn, and the necessary wound of knowledge

 

 

The image shows a forest at dawn.
The light is calm, almost gentle. Nothing appears threatening.

Yet at the center of the scene, a young deer lies on the ground.
It is not struggling. It is not fleeing.
It is caught.

The threads of the trap are thin, almost elegant.
They blend with the light, the trees, the natural order of the forest.
They do not look like violence, but like normality.

This image gives visual form to Jātaka 15, Kharādiya:
the story of one who refuses to learn the ruses of survival and is therefore captured.

This is not a moral tale.
It is a radical critique of naïveté.

The young deer is not guilty.
It believes that knowing the trap would mean accepting it.
Ignorance is mistaken for freedom, abandonment for innocence.

In the shadows, at the edge of the image, stands an older deer.
It watches but does not intervene.
It has already taught. Now it withdraws.

There is no awakening here.
Only a refused survival technique.

Knowledge does not save.
It does not break the net.
But it is a necessary threshold.

As Cioran writes, lucidity is an advantage that does not console.
It arrives, but not always in time.
And when it arrives too late, it becomes a wound.

This image does not ask for compassion.
It asks for responsibility of vision.
It reminds us that often it is not the trap that kills,
but the refusal to know it.