The Ox Herding Pictures-A Christian Perspective by Fr. William Meninger, O.S.C.O.
The Ten Ox Herding Pictures
The Ox Herding Pictures-
A Christian Perspective
- William Meninger, O.S.C.O.
American Academy of Religion
San Diego, California
Nov. 2014
As I am giving a Catholic, or perhaps better, a Christian interpretation of the ox herding pictures, it is not my intention to look into their history, their many variations or the many thousands of interpretations given to them in Mahayana Buddhism. Suffice it to say that I am using the 12th century form of the pictures as drawn by the Chinese Zen master, Shiyuan and as published in 1957 in the book, "Zen Flesh Zen Bones" by Paul Reps.
In the traditional, Catholic, mystical perspective the three ages of the spiritual life: purgative, illuminative and unitive, are universally accepted. Beginning with Origen and further specified by Gregory of Nyssa these ages are the general context within which the mystics will include further metaphors such as a journey, Walter Hilton's journey to Jerusalem, a ladder, Guigo the second's ladder for monks,climbing a mountain, as in Margarete Porete's Mirror for Simple Souls and John of the Cross Ascent to Mount Carmel, or even (and especially) wedding espousals, John Ruysbroeck and Bernard of Clairvaux. The ox-herding idea is both unusual and somehow familiar, embodying as it does the traditional stages of the journey to God as found in the Catholic mystics. It concretizes the mystical journey, emphasizing its basic reality as an experience to be lived rather than as an academic theory. It would be difficult to find a metaphor more concrete than capturing a water buffalo!
The ox-herding idea is both unusual and somehow familiar, embodying as it does the traditional stages of the journey to God as found in the Catholic mystics. It concretizes the mystical journey, emphasizing its basic reality as an experience to be lived rather than as an academic theory. It would be difficult to find a metaphor more concrete than capturing a water buffalo!
As the Ox Herding Pictures transcend cultural differences, it would be worthwhile to see them from a Christian perspective. The human journey toward enlightenment, self-realization or salvation is seen as a gradual progression towards a personal union with a personal God. It should be noted, however, that this progression is subjectively experienced but objectively already accomplished. By reason of the very fact of his creation every individual is called to return into the heart of God whence he existed from all eternity. As we read in St. Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 1: “God the Father chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him in love.”
The classical expression of the stages of this journey is found in the second century in Origen and is used by virtually every Christian mystical writer since then. There are three stages: the first is called the Purgative Way. This is the way of the beginner, the novice or the newly converted. It involves trial and error, struggle, success and failure, a constant beginning again but each time on a higher often imperceptible level. Prayer at this stage is verbal, discursive and mostly self-centered. The second stage is the Illuminative Way. This is the way of the proficient, one who has spent usually a considerable amount of time in the struggle to live the Christian life. He has control of the virtues and practices them with minimal effort. He has free will and can still fall back into the Purgative Way. The attraction of sensual and material pleasures is overcome through a struggle sometimes called the dark night of the senses. It is at this stage that the call to contemplation or nonverbal prayer is given.
He is then called to advance to the third stage, the Unitive Way. This is the way of the perfect. It begins in this life and is completed in the next and consists in a union of wills with God to the extent that the individual apparently no longer exists as an individual but is divinized. He becomes God as a drop of water in the middle of the ocean becomes the ocean. As St. Paul puts it, “I live now not I but Christ lives in me.”(Galatians,2,20).
The journey progresses by an ever-increasing awareness of the individual's dependence on God and an acknowledgement of his own inadequacies. This is called the virtue of humility, a knowledge and understanding of the truth about oneself. It is fundamental to a knowledge of God because it forces the individual to recognize that his sufficiency is only found in God. It is achieved after an intense level of passive, personal trials sometimes called the dark night of the soul.
Humility leads to the virtue of charity or love, the greatest of all virtues and a veritable participation into the life of God. Charity is seen to progress in four stages. The first stage is attraction. One is called by God to union with God. The second stage is clinging. One endures the difficulties, even the failures, in giving in to this attraction to God by persevering or starting over again. The third stage is enjoyment, a relishing of this love even and especially, in the face of suffering. The fourth stage is a union of wills or a oneness with God beyond any duality. While God does not become the individual, the individual does become God.
First Ox Herding Picture
In the first ox herding picture, the boy is responding to the first level of love, attraction. He is consequently searching for this God to whom he is attracted but of whom he knows very little. All of this is accomplished because of and in union with the self giving of Jesus Christ through his death and resurrection. This is true even when the individual is not aware of Christ as revealed in the Christian dispensation. As St. John says in the first chapter of his gospel, “All things were made through him and without him was made nothing that was made” and “And in him are all things.”
The boy is in the Purgative Way. His humility, that is, his knowledge of himself, is very imperfect and therefore his knowledge of God is correspondingly imperfect.
Self-knowledge is foundational to knowledge of God. As St. Isaac the Syrian says, “Be at peace with your own soul and heaven and earth will be at peace with you.” He carries in his hands a whip and reins. He is so ignorant that he actually thinks he can capture God. He thinks his kataphatic understanding of God is real. He does not realize that God is present in the ten thousand things in all his fullness in everything he sees, in the mountains, in the ocean, in the forest, and in the fields. He does not have to search for God because God is everywhere and God has already found him. How foolish he is! There is no need for a journey when you are already there. As Father Thomas Keating says, “There is no place you can go to get union with God nor is there any place you can go to avoid it.” Meister Eckhart says, “He knows God truly who knows him everywhere.” In Jesus Christ all things live and move and have their being. His activity in the world continues until the end of time embracing the present moment and the smallest created atom.
Second Ox Herding Picture
In the second picture ,the boy sees footprints. God is condescendingly revealing himself according to the categories of thought of this ignorant searcher. This is why the Word was made flesh and pitched his tent in our midst, so we could see his footprints, experience his presence and come to a knowledge of God even on our own terms, or at least according to our limited way of knowing. The boy is still in the Purgative Way and he is still very ignorant. Look at him actually running, holding the whip and the reins in order to capture God whom he understands only according to his limited, kataphatic knowledge of words,ideas and images.
Third Ox Herding Picture
In the third picture the boys sees something of God. This is clearly delineated in the book of Exodus,ch.33. Moses on the mountain asked God if he could see his glory, that is, his face. God replied that no man can see the face of God and live. But as a special favor to Moses, while he hid behind a large rock, God would pass by the front of the rock and Moses could peek out and see his “hinder- most parts.” This is exactly what the boy sees, the hinder most parts of the ox. Kataphatic knowledge of God sees only his hinder most parts. True knowledge of God, not intellectual but volitional, awaits apophatic understanding,not given in the Purgative Way.
Fourth Ox Herding Picture
In the fourth picture the boy captures the ox, or at least, he thinks so. He is now in the throes of the Purgative Way, of the dark night of the senses, a purging of sensible attractions and an unencumbering of the burdens these attractions bring. Grace and mercy will enable him to persevere. The boy is achieving the second level of love which is: clinging.
In the book of Genesis chapter 32 Jacob, who was to be renamed Israel, wrestled all night long with God. In the dawn, God said to him, “You have contended with divine and human beings and have prevailed.” Nonetheless, he refused to give to Jacob his name. This would await a further revelation.
Fifth Ox Herding Picture
And so we have the fifth picture. There is a certain harmony here, of bodies but especially of minds. It seems as though the boy is leading the ox but the reins are slack which shows that the ox is docilely following the boy. He is not being led.
The boy has now a certain limited degree of humility. He has a partial knowledge of himself. While wrestling with the ox, he began to realize that he could never overcome it, tame it, or bend it to his will. The most fundamental prayer of the Christian religion is, “Thy will be done.” The highest expression of this was in the garden of Gethsemane the night before he died, when and Jesus said “Father let this cup pass from me, but not my will but thine be done.” Christian spirituality is all about letting go. The prayer of St. Francis is probably the best-known expression of this:
“Grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive:
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned:
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
There is a paradox here. It is God who is the author of this harmony and the boy enters into it by doing God’s will and not his own. Now the contemplative experience has truly begun. Prayer is no longer a series of inadequate conceptual imagery but a blessed, harmonious union. The boy has let go to let God. He has entered into The Illuminative Way. He has some understanding of the truth, that the kingdom of God is within. Now he must come to understand that it is neither within nor without.
The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing warns us: “See that nothing remains in your conscience save a naked intent stretching out toward God. Leave it stripped of every particular idea about God and keep only the simple awareness that he is as he is. Let him be thus, I pray you, and force him not to be otherwise. Search into him no further, but rest in this faith as on solid ground.”
The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing warns us: “See that nothing remains in your conscience save a naked intent stretching out toward God. Leave it stripped of every particular idea about God and keep only the simple awareness that he is as he is. Let him be thus, I pray you, and force him not to be otherwise. Search into him no further, but rest in this faith as on solid ground.”
Sixth Ox Herding Picture
In the sixth picture the boy has achieved the third level of love, enjoyment. It is not all wine and roses but sometimes it is. He allows the will of God to carry him with minimal interference. He will be led into the way of suffering in the dark night of the spirit but will never be without the joy of blessed union with God. He plays the flute in woe and in weil, in desolations and in consolations and everyone who sees him smiles. Mystics and the contemplatives have a way of attracting others even, and perhaps especially, others who have no personal attraction to the contemplative dimension for themselves.
The author of The Cloud says in chapter 54:
“Contemplation will teach the man who possesses it how to govern himself and all that is his. He will even be able to discern the character and temperament of others when necessary. He will know how to accommodate himself to everyone, and (to the astonishment of all) even to inveterate sinners, without sinning himself. God's grace will work through him, drawing others to desire that very contemplative love which the Spirit awakens in him.”
The Seventh Ox Herding Picture
In the seventh picture it seems as though nothing has happened. He is sitting relaxed and serene in front of his cottage. As G.K. Chesterton describes it, He had left his home by the front door, traveled around the world and returned by the back door. His explorations have not ceased, says T. S. Eliot, but he has arrived where he began and sees it now for the first time. This is the contemplative attitude. Nothing extraordinary. But oh! What a difference. The human Jesus was the man from Nazareth. But when he died and rose from the dead, he became the cosmic Christ, someone beyond the mere individual level of the “Jesus and I” spirituality. He took each individual soul to the transpersonal and collective level. We have yet to uncover the depths of this concept of the Mystical Body of Christ. As Richard Rohr puts it: “The risen Christ, the cosmic Christ, brings us to an authentic experience of God which overcomes the primary split between the individual and the divine and also the split between the individual and the rest of creation.” Authentic mystical experience connects us with God at ever newer levels until as St. Paul says, “God can be all in all.” (1Cor.,15,28)
St. Paul also says that “The world, life and death, the present and the future are all your servants for you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God.” Paul refers here, not to the Jesus from Nazareth whom he never saw, but to the risen, cosmic Christ who revealed himself on the road to Damascus. Salvation, heaven, for the Christian is a universal connection. As Richard Rohr says, “Union with the divine is first experienced through the Christ, sometimes in nature, in moments of pure love, in silence, in inner or outer music, with animals, in a sense of awe or some kind of Brother Sun and Sister Moon experience.”
Eighth Ox Herding Picture
The eighth picture. Total non-duality. The Unitive Way.The fourth level of love. Of this, says Marguerite Porete, “No man can speak.” Some actually do, however, St. Bernard of Clairvaux in his commentaries on the Song of Songs and St. John of the Cross in his Living Flame of Love. It is on this level that mystics will use the word 'annihilation' to describe this experience.
The circle is the eye of God. But as Meister Eckhart says, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” The circle is the unspeakable nature of God. The circle says everything by saying nothing. God is an uncreated something in the soul but not of the soul. We are God but God is not us.
The circle is the eye of God. But as Meister Eckhart says, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” The circle is the unspeakable nature of God. The circle says everything by saying nothing. God is an uncreated something in the soul but not of the soul. We are God but God is not us. Ultimately we can only know God by not knowing.
Ultimately we can only know God by not knowing. The fullest most dramatic expression of this apophatic emptiness is found in the prayer of the Sixth Century, pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite:
Trinity, higher than any being, any divinity, any goodness!
Guide of Christians in the wisdom of heaven!
Lead us up beyond unknowing and light,
up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic Scripture,
where the mysteries of God's word
lie simple, absolute and unchangeable
in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.
Amid the deepest shadow
they pour overwhelming light
on what is most manifest.
Amid the wholy unsensed and unseen
they completely fill our sightless minds
with treasures beyond all beauty.
Ninth Ox Herding Picture
The ninth picture is really the same as the first but there is no boy, no searcher. He is dissolved into the blessed union of reality like a drop of water that falls into the ocean. The true mystic knows this from the very beginning. The search for God is not a search at all but a realization. He really does live in the most perfect of all possible worlds.
In the 10th picture the boy, now infused with the divine wisdom and of one mind with God, is in the marketplace teaching. The Latin mystics used two basic words for love: amor, which is the love for God and caritas, which is love for neighbor. But the two are one. As the Scripture says, “Where there is charity and love there is God”. You cannot have one without the other. “If you do not love your brother whom you can see, how can you love God whom you cannot see.”(First Epistle of John). The true mystic, the true contemplative, must be a teacher who shares the bond of love even as God does.
Just as Christ was before him, the boy is now a priest, prophet and a wise man. He bears the stamp of the Godhead. The Orthodox churches speak of the essence of God and his energy. The essence of God is who he is. The energy of God is what he does. But what he does proceeds from who he is. The essence of the ox herder is his blessed union with God. His energy is to dispense of that blessedness to all of creation. The marketplace is the cosmos.
The Tenth Ox Herding Picture
“The marketplace is the cosmos”
In the 10th picture the boy, now infused with the divine wisdom and of one mind with God, is in the marketplace teaching. The Latin mystics used two basic words for love: amor, which is the love for God and caritas, which is love for neighbor. But the two are one. As the Scripture says, “Where there is charity and love there is God”. You cannot have one without the other. “If you do not love your brother whom you can see, how can you love God whom you cannot see.”(First Epistle of John). The true mystic, the true contemplative, must be a teacher who shares the bond of love even as God does. He is following the command of Christ to go forth into the whole world and to teach in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
