Two deer kneel on the roof of every Tibetan monastery, listening. Far to the north, on the Mongolian steppe, stone deer have been flying for three thousand years. On an animal that has stood quietly at the edge of so many sacred places.
If you have ever stood in front of a Tibetan monastery and looked up, you have seen them. Above the main door, on the roof, a golden wheel with eight spokes. And on either side of it, a deer, one male and one female, kneeling on folded legs, heads raised toward the wheel.
They are not decoration. They are listening.
The first people to hear
After his awakening under the tree at Bodh Gaya, the Buddha walked west to a place near Varanasi called Sarnath, where five old companions of his were living. It was a park where the deer were protected and ran free: the Deer Park. There, the tradition says, he gave his first teaching, the one Buddhists call the first turning of the wheel of the Dharma.
The five companions heard it. And, the story goes, so did the deer. They came out of the trees and stood at the edge of the clearing, very still, the way deer do when something has caught their whole attention. That is why the wheel on the roof has two deer beside it. They are the first listeners, the ones who came without being asked.
We have always liked that the first audience included animals. It says something about what kind of teaching it was meant to be.
The king of the banyan deer
There is an older story too, from the Jatakas, the tales of the Buddha's former lives. In one of them he is born as a deer, a golden king of a herd living in the forest. A human king loves to hunt, and every day a deer must go to his kitchen to die. The deer draw lots to decide who goes.
One day the lot falls on a doe who is carrying a fawn. She asks for her turn to pass, just until the fawn is born. No one will take her place. So the deer king walks to the executioner's block himself and lays his neck on it.
The human king is so struck by this that he spares him, and the doe, and then, as the deer king keeps asking, all the deer, and then all the animals of the land and the birds of the air and the fish in the water. It is a story in which a gentle animal teaches a king what a king is for.
Flying stones
Now go north, a very long way north, beyond the Himalaya and the Tibetan plateau and the Gobi, to the grasslands of Mongolia and southern Siberia. There, standing alone in the open valleys, are tall slabs of stone, one to four metres high. They are about three thousand years old. They are called deer stones.
Carved all over them are deer unlike any real animal. Their bodies are stretched long, their legs folded beneath them, their antlers swept back along their spines in great waves, their muzzles pointed like beaks. They look less like they are running than flying, rising together up the face of the stone toward the sky. Archaeologists think many of the stones stood for people, perhaps chiefs or honoured ancestors, and that the deer were carrying something upward. What exactly, no one can say for certain. The people who carved them left no writing.
The same deer, legs folded, antlers streaming, turns up again and again across the steppe in the centuries that followed, cast in bronze, beaten in gold, tattooed on the skin of chieftains buried in the ice of the Altai. For the peoples of the grasslands the deer seems to have been something like a guide: the animal that knew the way between this world and the next.
What antlers know
There is a simple fact beneath all these stories. A stag loses its antlers every year, and every year grows them back, larger. Few animals carry renewal so visibly on their heads. It is not hard to see why people looking for a sign that what is lost can return would have looked at the deer, standing at the edge of the forest in spring with velvet on its new crown.
Why we went looking
Our bench grew up inside Buddhist work: stupas, vajras, conch shells, the whole Himalayan vocabulary, and the two deer on the monastery roof were a familiar sight to us long before we ever carved one. But a pair of silversmith's hands should not belong to one tradition alone. So for the Spirits of Life pieces we went north, into the deep forest, looking for lives that were there long before anyone arrived to name them.
What came back was not quite a deer. It was a deer spirit. We let the antlers grow as openwork knotwork, pierced right through and fire-gilded in 24K gold, branching and looping and closing on themselves the way a real rack branches. We put gold in the eyes, and nowhere else on the face, so that the only place the light collects is the gaze. The ruff under the throat is cut one strand at a time under a microscope. It is the slowest part of the ring, and the reason the animal looks warm rather than cast.
We do not claim the ring carries any power. We only know that the deer has stood at the edge of a great many sacred places, on the roof of the monastery, in the clearing at Sarnath, on the stones of the steppe, and that it has always been doing the same quiet thing there. Paying attention. Listening before it moves.
Of all the ways to stand near something holy, the deer's may be the best. Very still, ears forward, ready to leave, and not leaving.
Forest Spirit Deer Ring · Spirits of Life · Forest Bear Ring
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