Use the map to see where you are, without rushing
Pick the picture that describes this week’s practice, and let the map describe you rather than rank you.
Why it works
A map helps only if it describes rather than ranks. Naming a present state with a familiar image can reduce the sense of being lost and give you options, while the risk is that the same map becomes a ladder. The series itself ends in the marketplace, not at the circle, which is one reason a reader should not treat the early pictures as failures. This is an interpretive use of the pictures.
How to do it
- Once a week, read the ten titles in order.
- Choose the one that best describes this week’s practice, and write one sentence on why.
- Choose a different picture next week if the first one begins to feel fixed.
- Notice any urge to compare, and set it down. No picture is a level you ought to have reached.
Evidence
The use of the pictures as a reflective map is practitioner use; no study has tested it. The publisher page for the Tuttle edition of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps, describes its part “Ten Bulls” as a commentary on the stages of awareness leading to enlightenment. (anecdotal)
A poetic map, not a measured developmental sequence. Its use as a checklist of progress is the main risk.
Sources
- Kuoan Shiyuan (Kakuan), The Ten Oxherding Pictures, Terebess Asia Online (translation credited on the page to Philip Kapleau).
- Reps, Paul (author of record), Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Tuttle Publishing (publisher page; four parts including Ten Bulls).
Common mistake
Using the map as a ladder of grades, treating the early pictures as failures, and skipping ahead to the end to feel finished.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures: A Zen Map of the Path
- Notice the search itself
Watch the mind’s seeking as an event in itself, rather than only as the route to something you still lack.
- Hold the restless ox steadily in sitting
In sitting, return attention to one anchor again and again, holding it the way the verses hold the rope: firmly, without yanking.
- Check who is riding the ox
When a session feels smooth, notice the sense of having arrived and ask, gently, who is noticing it.
- Sit with the empty circle without forcing it
Sit with open attention and nothing particular held, letting any sense of blankness be without trying to keep it.
- Carry the practice into ordinary action
Take one routine activity and do it with ordinary attention, offering the small help it needs without making a show of it.
- Ground first when sitting becomes frightening
When contemplation brings fear, shaking or unreality, stop, open your eyes, and reconnect with the body and the room before anything else.
Related concepts
- Zen Buddhism: Its History, the Rinzai and Sōtō Schools, and How to Begin
The branch as a whole: where Zen came from, how its schools differ, and the practices of a Zen community
- The Progress of Insight: The Stages of Insight in Vipassana
The Burmese insight map of what meditators say they pass through — read as a map, not a ladder
- Zen Koans: Inquiry Beyond Reason
Rinzai inquiry practice — how koans work, how to approach them, and honest limits
- States vs Stages of Consciousness: Wilber, Combs and O’Fallon
Why a powerful experience and a lasting change are different things, and how each one grows
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