The main story arc of the movie PTU (Police Tactical Unit) is about a cop who slips and falls in an alley while chasing a gangster. Losing his consciousness, he awakes to find his gun missing. He then goes on a series of misadventures which implicate many others to retrieve his gun, which he believes to be stolen by the gangster and his company. At the end of the story, while being chased by another gangster in a reversed situation, he slips and falls in the same place again. This time, he was conscious. While groping his way around to get up, he stumbles into some trash and… finds his gun! It had somehow fallen out when he first fell. He never really lost it to anyone. It was just misplaced due to unmindfulness. The place he thought he lost it was the place he found it again.
In the many rounds of rebirth, we are liable to slip and fall in some similar places time and again. Yet each time is never exactly the same due to differences in causes and conditions. It’s actually quite alright to fall again… as long as we learn something new! If not, we simply failed to learn what we ought to have had the last time we fell. The pain from falling becomes utterly pointless then. The cop’s gun saga reminds me of the parable in the Lotus Sutra, where a poor man leaves a rich friend’s house to look for wealth, not knowing he had left the house with a precious gem sewn into the hem of his clothes. The moral of the parable is that while we search for fulfillment external to ourselves, the most precious jewel of Buddha-nature has never been lost. We just need deeper mindfulness to discover it.
Related Article:
Gangsterism as a Poor ‘Career’ Choice
https://moonpointer.com/new/2009/11/slips-and-falls