Master Dogen (1200-1253) tells a story about how a wise abbot chose to protect a wild deer. The monks at his monastery had encouraged the deer to eat grass in their garden. They were astonished when their abbot asked them to strike the deer and drive it away. “Why would you frighten away the poor deer? Where is your compassion?” They pressed for answers. The abbot replied: “When a wild deer becomes too tame around people, it will surely be killed by the next hunter.”

From James Austin’s Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2009, p. 198.