Whilst watching a wildlife programme, I was touched by the effort salmon were making to return to the part of the river where they had been born. Swimming up waterfalls and over shallow rapids, whilst bears tried to catch and eat them; swimming against the current, because of an instinct that called to them. It reminded me of when Shakyamuni placed his golden bowl upon the fast-flowing river Neranjara, and said that if it could float upstream, against the current (the pull of karma and distraction), then he knew he could realise the truth.

Looking into it, I found that many aquatic creatures, like turtles, dolphins, and frogs have what is called ‘the natal homing instinct’. A little frog will travel as far as four miles to return to the pond where they were born. That’s a long way for a frog. Birds will migrate thousands of miles, often through, and to, places they have never been before. In training, we do the same thing. We step off the map of our ‘known world’, and have to overcome many challenging situations. We risk everything to follow that instinct, that call to ‘return unto the source’, and, like the frogs and salmon and birds, we can get there, we can do it.

We, too have a built in longing to return to our ‘home’, to the source of all existence. An instinct calls to us, to know what it is we are, and to find something we feel has been lost along the way. We will have to swim against the force of ingrained habits that pull us into old patterns of thinking, acting and speaking which, if indulged, will take us further away from that ‘home’, that returning. We will have to resist the delusive lure of endless distractions, and the corrosiveness of self doubt, that can persuade us we cannot follow that call. We will have to risk much along the way, taking steps into an unknown, burning bridges behind us, going on through the darkness and the light, trusting ourselves when others may doubt us; never giving up.

The salmon kept going, even whilst some of them were being caught and eaten, they never deviated from their course, they kept true to the call within them. Rev Master Jiyu said, many times, that it was better to die trying, than not to try. What an example those fish are to we humans. Dōgen said if even animals can show gratitude, then surely people can do the same. If the fish can swim against the pull of the current, returning unto the place they came from, so can we.

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