Here’s my telling of a famous Zen story

There once was a man who was wandering in a grassland region. Some ways off, he saw a tiger and the tiger saw him. Both stood motionless staring at the other. Suddenly, the tiger bolted toward the man who started running as fast as he could in the opposite direction. Glancing back as he ran, the man saw that the tiger was quickly shrinking the distance between them.

His panic turned to terror.

It was as if the running man could feel the tiger behind him. Just then the man saw that the ground ahead ended, so instinctively, he slid. And as he slid over the precipice he rolled his body and grabbed hold of a thick woven vine growing out of the face of the cliff. Holding the branch with two hands he shinnied down a few feet so that he was out of reach of the tiger that now stood panting, angry and hungry above him. The man’s heart knocked on the inside of his chest. But for the moment he was safe and in one piece.

The man looked down beneath where his feet were intertwined and locked around the thick vine. Seventy feet below another tiger stood looking up. The man quickly assessed the situation realizing if the fall didn’t kill him, the tiger surely would.

The hanging man looked up at the tiger. As he did he noticed two mice had crawled out of a hole in the wall of the cliff and were now nibbling and gnawing on the branch from which he hung. From bad to worse to desperate.

Just then he noticed a dash of green protruding from a crack in the wall. It held a large, ripe, luscious strawberry. With his left foot pressed against the side of the cliff and his left hand gripping the vine, he stretched out his other arm and with his right hand and picked the strawberry.

He put the strawberry into his mouth. Oh, how sweet and delicious.