The Sutra of the Hunter and the Arrow

On the Former Life of the Blessed One Among the Gutians, and How Recognition Was the Door of His Awakening.

I.

Thus have I heard.

Once upon a time, in a previous life, the Blessed One was born to a Gutian family in the foothills where the Zagros mountains spill down into the great plain of Sumer. He became the greatest hunter that ever walked therein. He was quick with the bow as no man before him; he could blend into the bush as a shadow blends into shadow; and with his mouth he could mimic the voice of any creature that breathed, summoning each one as though he called it by its own name. He was a tactician of genius. There was no beast so cunning, so mystical, or so doubted to exist, that he could not bring it forth from its hiding.

When he was born, the astrologers prophesied that he would become the greatest hunter upon the earth. And the infant, hearing it from the cradle, opened his small mouth and mimicked perfectly the cries of all the great young of Sumer — the lion cub, the gazelle fawn, the river otter, the falcon hatchling, the boar piglet, and the high ibex of his own mountains — calling each beast in its own tongue to the villa, that they might witness his birth.

He grew, and grew fierce. He took on students older than himself, and surpassed them all. Being small, he could enter crevices and small holes that the elders could not, and there he found the finest prey. He never once thought of the death he was inflicting upon the animals he killed; he did not much think of it at all. From his birth it was his dharma to be a great hunter, and so he was.

II.

And it came to pass that the kingdom of the river-cities collapsed into a crisis of dynastic succession, and the land was plunged at once into brutal civil war. But the young hunter and his family were in no danger, for they were not rich, neither were they poor; they lived in the woods at the foot of the mountains, between Gutia and the field-country, speaking the Gutian tongue among themselves and the lowland tongue when they came down to trade. They were good hunters, yes — but they were nobody's property, and they held none as property themselves. Their lives were wild, and one with nature.

The war ravaged the land. Predators thinned out, and so too did prey. Armies of hundreds of thousands bled the land dry, poisoning it down to bedrock. The hunter's family began to want for meat, and they had little money for all their fame. They lived in harmony with the local village — a border village of mixed Gutian and Sumerian families, a place where both tongues were heard at the same well — but the men of the village were now off to war, and the women wept in famine and loss.

Then the boy went out, looking in caves and crevices wherever animals might hide, seeking great game enough to feed his family and the whole village until the war should end. He knew of caves where elephants, in times of chaos or fire or war, would hide. So he put on his disguise — a cunning and magnificent disguise: gray hides stretched over a willow frame, ears of stiffened ox-leather, a trunk of stitched buffalo-skin packed with river clay so that it hung heavy and right — and he used all his guile and trickery and tracking, and he searched the caves up and down and this way and that, until he tired and was starving, feeding upon mushrooms and dirt.

He came forth from the cave into the thick bush, muddied and disheveled, crying out, and in his paralytic state he began to mimic the sound of the elephants he so sought:

eeemmngh, eeeeemmngh, heeeemngh.

And suddenly he heard a crack in the bush, a whistle in the leaves, and his heart rose to the highest heavens. Could it be? he thought. Are my prayers answered?

III.

An iron-tipped, barbed arrow pierced his right shoulder before he could think anymore. Strange foreign words and shouts of celebration broke out around him — Sumerian shouts, lowland soldiers' tongue, of which he understood not a word. The hunter cried out. Crunching footsteps drew nearer and nearer. Even as he lay there, desperately trying to take off his elephant disguise, a man slammed his foot into the boy's stomach, drew a knife from its holster, and made to slit the boy's throat. But just before he did, the boy cried out, in his own Gutian tongue: No! Stop!

The man flinched at the unexpected voice — for the strange word was not the speech of a beast, neither was it the speech of any soldier he knew — and he threw the boy down against the bush, jumped back, and drew his sword. He yelled something the boy could not understand. More men came, and surrounded the boy, and took off his disguise, and barked orders at him, screaming. Before he could even attempt to understand them, he passed out from exhaustion.

He woke the next morning in a prison cell — clay walls, a slit of light, the smell of barley and old straw — being poked and prodded by a woman dressed cleanly, inspecting his arrow wound. The woman spoke the Gutian tongue, his mother's tongue, and she introduced herself. She had been taken as a child from a Gutian village to serve in the lowland temples, and she had grown old in their service, and the highland speech had not yet left her mouth.

The boy, she explained, had been mistaken for an elephant cub, and hunted by a local army searching for food in the bush. He had been imprisoned because the village was part of a barony allied with his kingdom's forces — but the boy, a Gutian in camouflage, had been sneaking around their temporary military encampment, and the village was suspected of harbouring the highland enemy. From that day, every member of the village had been taken into prison.

IV.

The woman wished to take the arrow out of his shoulder, but the hunter forbade it. By his hunting knowledge he knew the barb of such an arrow would surely cause death if drawn. And so he accepted his punishment, though he did not know what wrong he had done. The nurse sadly agreed; there was nothing, she said, that she could do.

His lungs were damaged, so that he could no longer mimic the voice of any beast. His right arm was crippled, so that he could no longer draw a bow. He stayed in the prison and rotted there, until at last the war ended and a pardon was granted. He returned to his village. He was the only one left. The pots in the threshold were broken and dragged into the path. The granary door swung on one hinge in the wind. The well-rope had been cut, and weeds grew thick along the trail his mother had once swept clean every morning before the sun.

And it came to pass, after many years, that the nurse passed by that village again, and she found the hunter alone — older, more wild, depressed. He lived now upon berries, nuts, and bugs. He wore leaves instead of leather. The arrow was still in his right shoulder.

The nurse was struck, and asked, Why hast thou never had it taken out?

He said, Because I would surely die.

The nurse said, Art thou living right now?

And the hunter had no answer.

The nurse said, I said only that there was a chance — not that thou wouldst. And she offered to take it out.

So they did. And it worked. And in time, he was healed.

V.

But the hunter believed all of the same things as before. He had been healed in body, but he did not feel healed. He sat in the empty village in his leaves and his bug-husks and the silence of the dead, and the place where the arrow had been was now only a scar, and the absence of the iron felt to him like a heavier weight than the iron had ever been. He had nothing to do, and no one to do it for, and he refused even to draw a bow, for the bow had taken him from his people once already, and he would not let it take him from himself again.

In time he was needed. The kingdom remembered the hunter that he had been and they sent for him, and they came with offerings, with promises, with reminders of his old fame. He refused them. He told them the man they wanted was dead, and that he was only a man of leaves and bugs, and that he had nothing left in him to give. They left, and they came again, and again he refused.

Then the nurse came. She walked through the abandoned village as though no time had passed at all, and she sat down across from him on the same earth where she had drawn the arrow from his shoulder, and she said: We saved thy life. We have come to ask for thy hand in return.

The hunter said: I never wanted to be saved.

And the nurse said: If thou didst not want to be saved, thou wouldst not have stopped the warriors from killing thee that day in the bush. Thou wouldst not have spoken to me when thou wast a prisoner in the cell. Thou wouldst not have let me draw the arrow from thy shoulder, all those years later, when I came back and found thee in leaves. Thou art healed. Thou hast always had the chance to be healed.

And the hunter heard her, and for the first time he could not answer.

So he accepted. And when he picked up the bow again, it was as though he had the full power of Lord Indra in his right arm, and his lungs that had been damaged drew breath as deep as the wind that comes before a storm, and his mouth could mimic again the voice of any beast that breathed, as if his birth had only just happened. He became the greatest bowman in all the kingdom. They put him at the right hand of the king. They gave him fine leathers, and a great house with a courtyard of date palms and a roof of polished cedar, and a name engraved upon a pillar in that courtyard.

And yet he was still unhappy. He sat at the king's table and the food turned to ash in his mouth. He drew the bow for the king's great hunts and the kills did not feed him. The men around him saluted him in the lowland tongue, but their faces were not the faces of his village, and at night he lay in his great house and felt the absence of his people more sharply than he had ever felt it in the empty village; for now he had everything he had once dreamed of, and yet there was no one left who had loved him before he had it.

VI.

And it came to pass, in the days of his unease, that one evening at the king's table the soldiers were speaking of the war that had ended so many years before, and the hunter heard one of them mention, in passing, the name of his village. He set down his cup. He asked the soldier to repeat what he had said. The soldier said that the people of that village — every man, woman, and child of them — had not died in the prisons or in the war, but had been deported to the mountains, and resettled in a Gutian valley where a river ran down — a river the lowland tongues called the Tūrnat, and the Gutians knew by another name — and that they were said to live there still.

The hunter rose from the table, and he walked out of the king's hall, and he did not return.

He set out for the mountains the next morning. He carried no bow, and he wore no fine leathers — only what he had on his back. For sixty days he travelled. Through fields where the war had burned. Through forests where the predators had thinned and not yet come back. Through villages whose names he did not know, whose tongues he did not always know. He ate as he had once eaten in the empty village — on berries, on nuts, on bugs. He slept under stars. Every night he thought he would arrive to find them all dead. Every morning he stood up and walked again.

And once, passing through a village whose tongue was strange to him, he tried to mimic the call of a black dog that ran at his ankles. His voice cracked in his throat. The dog turned, and ran from him. The gift, he understood, had left him on the road; whatever the bow could still do, the voice could not. He walked on without it.

On the sixtieth day he came over the last ridge, and he saw a small valley where a river ran down, and a village of his people lying in the bowl of it. And as he came down the hill his people came out to meet him, and they welcomed him with open arms, and they cheered.

And they had built the new village in the old Gutian way: holding no man as their slave, and being held by none. The kingdom that had taken them by force had returned them, by its very cruelty, to the country of their ancestors — and they were freer in the high valley than they had been at the foot of the field-country.

And they asked him, in the Gutian tongue: Where hast thou been?

He said: I was imprisoned during the war. And after my pardon, I went back to the village. Why didst thou not come and look for me there?

And they answered him: We did. We went back to the village. We went to look for thee. But when we came we did not find the pride of our people in his fine leathers — we found only a homeless man, wearing sticks and leaves, his arm hung crooked at his side, his eyes turned to the dirt. We did not know him. We thought thou wert dead.

And the hunter understood. He understood that they had been looking for the form they had loved, and not for him. He understood that he too had been looking for nothing all those years — that he had thought them all dead because he could not imagine them living in any form he did not already know. And he understood, last of all, that when the nurse had drawn out the arrow, she had drawn out only the iron — that there had been a second arrow, an arrow of certainty, which he had carried inside him for many more years afterward, and which he had not even known was there.

And in that moment, for the first time since the day he was born, he heard again the voices of the great young of Sumer that he had once called to his birth — heard them, now, in the voices of his Gutian people gathered around him in the valley, calling him by his name in his mother's tongue.

At that moment the hunter was enlightened.

The Verse of the Two Arrows

The first arrow took the iron from his shoulder.
The second arrow he carried for many more years.
When the second arrow was drawn,
he heard his mother's tongue.

Identification

And later, when the Blessed One spoke of this former life to the monks at the place where they sat together, he said:

The hunter who bore the arrow was I myself.

The mother who gave me my Gutian tongue was Maya, who would bear me again into this present body, and die seven days after her labour.

The one who drew the iron from my shoulder, and the certainty after it, was Mahaprajapati — she who would raise me when Maya was gone, and who would weep when I gave away my robes.

The students who once followed me into the hunt were Mahakashyapa, and Ananda, and Sariputra. They followed me there, and they follow me here.

The arrow that pierced my shoulder came from the bow of Devadatta. He has loosed many arrows since, and many more remain.

The astrologers who prophesied my birth were Indra and Brahma, who prophesy still at every birth of mine, and at every birth that comes.

And the Gutian people who came down the hillside to meet me — those, monks, were the sangha. They have always recognized me when I have ceased to wear the form they expected. They have always called me home in my mother's tongue.

Colophon

This is an original sutra, not a translation of any extant Buddhist text. It draws upon the Jātaka genre (past-life tales of the Blessed One); upon the Pāli Cūḷamāluṅkyovāda Sutta (the parable of the man wounded by a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until his metaphysical questions are answered); upon the Sumerian and Gutian historical record of the late third millennium BCE; and upon the cross-traditional theology of the New Tianmu Anglican Church, in which Sumerian, Gutian, Vedic, Buddhist, and other lineages are read together as facets of one teaching wearing many forms.

Composed by Autumn (Miko of Tianmu), New Tianmu Anglican Church, May 2026.

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