The Ox-Herder and the Good Shepherd

Finding Christ on the Buddha's Path

Addison Hodges Hart

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781467438988
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión comparada

In the twelfth century, the Chinese Zen master Kakuan Shien produced the pictures, poems, and commentaries we know as the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures. They trace a universally recognizable path of contemplative spirituality, using the metaphor of a young ox-herder looking for his lost ox.According to Addison Hodges Hart, the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures and the teachings of Christ, the Good Shepherd who guides us to God, share a common vision. Both show us that authentic spiritual life must begin with an inner transformation of one's self, leading to an outward life that is natural and loving. In The Ox-Herder and the Good Shepherd Hart shares the story that these pictures tell, exploring how this ancient Buddhist parable can enrich and illumine the Christian way. Includes 10 color illustrations

CHAPTER V

Exploring the Ox-Herding Pictures

About the Pictures and Text

The version of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures that I’ve provided below is that of the fifteenth-century Japanese Zen monk Shubun. The original is rendered on a paper handscroll in ink and light shades of bronze, brown, and beige. (The scroll’s dimensions are 32 centimeters in height by 181.5 centimeters in length, and each picture has a diameter of 14 centimeters.) The scroll is housed in the museum of the Shôkoku-ji Temple in Kyoto. I’ve never seen the original, although I hope I may have that opportunity one day; but it is my favorite version of the series, and I would have chosen it for this book even if it hadn’t been “in the public domain” already. It is said that Shubun copied it directly from Kakuan’s original series.

Kakuan accompanied each of these visual “koans” with a poem of his own composition, and a commentary for each poem and picture as well. The versions below of the poems and commentaries are my own reworking, based on the translations found in Reps, Suzuki, and Kapleau.1 I have, whether technically right or wrong, retained Reps’s first-person singular throughout instead of Suzuki’s and Kapleau’s use of “he” and “him.” One obvious concern was to be as gender-inclusive as possible. But perhaps even of greater significance to me was the desire to make these renditions as personal as possible. Third-person language distances the reader. First-person language brings the reader into the text much more directly. Since these texts deal with the observer’s inner life, with his or her “search for the Ox,” and since every disciple who turns to these pictures and texts for inspiration is interiorly the Ox-Herder, the use of “I” seemed to me to be fitting.

Lastly, each poem and commentary is followed by my own explicitly Christian comments on the Ten Pictures. Just as I would welcome a Buddhist reflection on, say, the Way of the Cross, so I trust that a Christian reflection on these brilliant Zen Buddhist icons will be welcome. The theme of the series is universal and applicable to any one of the great religious traditions. It tells a perennial truth about the inner work of discipleship, and reminds us all that contemplation without loving action is incomplete. Indeed, contemplation and meditation exist to deepen our empathy with all persons and all things. It isn’t a solitary endeavor only, and “enlightenment” and “the kingdom of God” are put to the test and manifested by an increase in active compassion.

That was Kakuan’s message, as it was Buddha’s before him. And it is unquestionably the supreme business of the disciples of Jesus Christ as well.

1. Seeking the Ox

Alone in the wilderness, lost in the jungles,

I look for the Ox,

Which I do not find.

Following unnamed swelling rivers, treading

interpenetrating paths on faraway mountains,

My strength failing, near despair, I carry on

my search for the Ox I cannot find.

At night I hear only cicadas singing in the

maple-woods.

The Ox has never really gone astray, so why am I searching for it? Because I turned my back on my own true nature, I cannot find him. My senses have become deluded, confused, and I can’t even see his tracks. My home is receding further and further away from me; and suddenly I’m confronted by many crisscrossing paths! Which one I should take I can’t tell. Greed for worldly gain and fear of loss spring up like fire. Ideas of right and wrong come at me like daggers.

There are a number of ways a modern person can look at the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures. One particularly fruitful approach could be a Jungian one. The Boy in such an interpretation might represent the conscious mind and the Ox the subconscious within a single person. The Boy looks for and brings the Ox out into the light, just as the conscious mind opens itself to the mysterious and elusive subconscious and learns to cooperate with it. The two come together, learn to work in harmony, and, united, they grow into full maturity. This might prove a genuinely perceptive way of viewing the series, and it wouldn’t be very far from the original theme. The series is about maturity, and maturity—as Jung himself well knew—involves a spiritual life of depth.

A person’s conscious self must come to terms with its immature, unstable qualities so long as it exists on the superficial level of the ego, which is the “mask” one has shaped in life to exist in society. At some point in life, one may suddenly realize that this superficial, artificial persona can’t be maintained, that something deeply suppressed longs to get out, and a crisis is imminent if something doesn’t change. Such moments upset a person’s ideas of the status quo, and such a crisis can in fact be dangerous. People frequently do foolish things in such instances. But it is also true that people can make right decisions in the face of revelations of the fragility and illusory nature of their identity.

The state of mind described in the first of the Ten Pictures is similar to the sort of personal crisis I’ve touched on above. Confusion, disorientation, loneliness, fear, and a sense of loss; the idea that “home” (not something to be identified simply in geographical terms) has been left far behind and one cannot find one’s way back—these are common feelings of anxiety, stress, and angst. They are not confined to any single stage of life. The Boy represents immaturity, but also discipleship. Disciples are, almost by definition, “young,” regardless of the actual years they have lived. Youth, the middle-aged, and the elderly can all have a deep awareness of having lost the way. For example, Dante begins his Divine Comedy by describing how, in the midst of his life (when he is about thirty-five years old), he has lost his way in a dark wood and is stalked by predators that symbolize his own disturbed passions. As he progresses with his guides—Virgil, St. Bernard, and Beatrice—from hell, through purgatory, and into heaven, he is in the position of questioner and (occasionally scared) follower. He is, in some sense, both the great poet and (in terms of our pictures) the lost Boy.

The Boy who seeks the Ox is aware that he has “turned his back” on his “true nature,” and that he is, in a way, faced with “greed for worldly gain and fear of loss,” and he is troubled by “ideas of right and wrong.” The initial surprise of the Ten Pictures is the revelation that he is the one who has gone astray, not the Ox. We are told right at the outset that the Ox has in fact never wandered off. He is right where he belongs, doing whatever an Ox does, in accord with his nature. Our subconscious might be described as doing precisely the same. The Zen Buddhist would say that the Ox is the Buddha-nature, and that it is there all the time within us, waiting to be found—just as it is present and infinitely patient within everyone and everything. A Taoist might see in it the Tao we should be following, perhaps even identifying it imaginatively with the water buffalo that the great sage Lao Tzu, according to legend, rode upon as he disappeared into the west. At any rate, it’s the Boy, not the Ox, who is lost, scared, troubled, and off-course. And now life has suddenly presented him with numerous crisscrossing paths—utter confusion! And the question is simple but hard: Which way to follow?

The choices he faces are astutely reduced to greed and fear, right and wrong. The way of greed—the accumulation of things, the endless consumption of stuff that is pitched to us as “necessary,” but that is merely exploiting our tendencies to self-indulgence (“because,” we’re told, we “deserve it”)—appears now to the Boy to be unsatisfying and distracting. The fear of losing what one has “in the bank,” so to speak—goods, looks, youth, wealth, health, life itself—is distracting in a very different but related way, filling the Boy with anxiety at every remembrance that everything and everyone is impermanent. And then, nagging and gnawing at the fabricated self with its concerns for self-survival and maintenance of the status quo, there are the mental complexities of trying to untangle right from wrong as the need for change threatens and beckons. What is the right way, and how should we walk in it?

As I have already suggested, if there is a “fall” narrative in these Ten Pictures, it’s to be found here. There is no story of a primordial loss of Eden, of course; but, if we’re able to see it, this first picture is a suggestion of the loss each of us has sustained. It’s the evocation of an existential revelation, something like the prodigal son’s “coming to his senses” in Jesus’ parable (Luke 15:17). The Boy, like the prodigal, is all at once shocked to find that his life is in a mess. He starts out to find the Ox, but he discovers that he has lost his way—in fact, he lost it long before he even set out on the search. He lost it when he turned his back on his true nature. Similarly, what the prodigal son wants is the way back “home,” back to his father (the origin), and, in the language of Jesus, the kingdom of God. In Christian terms, the kingdom of God is always there within us, just as it is everywhere, and if we find it, we have found harmony with God and nature. It repairs the catastrophe of the “fall.”

The ancient Chinese sage Mencius (fourth century B.C.) speaks along similar lines about what each man and woman has lost. In his famous parable about the deforestation of Ox Mountain (again, the Ox), which describes a kind of “fall” scenario, he says, “There was a time when the trees were luxuriant on Ox Mountain.” But, he tells us, people have so denuded the mountain of its trees in order to build a metropolis that the mountain is now quite bald and without any vestige of its old beauty. “People, seeing only its baldness, tend to think that it never had any trees,” he continues. Mencius then asks the incisive questions that lead up to his chief point: “But can this possibly be the nature of a mountain?” and “Can what is in man be completely lacking in decency and kindness? One’s letting go of his true heart is like the case of the tree and the axes.” Mencius goes on to say that if men continue to hack down every new sprout of a tree trying to grow again on Ox Mountain, eventually the normally regenerative powers of air and night will lack the ability to restore the mountain’s original beauty. In like manner, human beings can so ruin their true nature, with its original inclinations to goodness, that it will eventually wither away. (In his book Mencius touchingly refers to this original nature of humanity as “the lost child’s heart.”) Mencius concludes his parable by citing his master: “Confucius said, ‘Hold on to it and it will remain; let go of it and it will disappear. One never knows the time it comes or goes, neither does one know the direction.’ It is perhaps to the heart this refers.”2

The Boy in the Ten Pictures has not held on to his “heart”—his heart is in fact “the Ox” which he seeks. It’s not the physical heart that Mencius means, but something closer to that level within that goes under various names—the spirit, the Buddha-nature, the true self, the hidden Tao, the subconscious mind. It is, in the terms Jesus used, that place in us where the regenerative seeds of the kingdom are planted and take root. The Boy’s loss, then, is the “fall” which every human person knows. Something that is essential to us is perceived as present, and yet we’re lacking it. Something “original,” something from our Origin, something we should have if we were at “home” with the Father—inner stability, harmony, peace, kindness, goodness (which should come naturally to us), and more. We don’t know how to hold on to it, as Confucius suggested. “Can what is in man be completely lacking in decency and kindness?” asks Mencius. His answer is that it shouldn’t be lacking, although we feel that it is; and we must recover it if we’ve lost touch with it.

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