Journey Ten · Japan · 1400s AD
A year on a hillside, a rope, and an animal that does not want to be caught.
The ox-herding pictures are the most famous teaching sequence in Zen and the shortest text in this entire archive. Ten stages. Four lines of verse each. About eighteen hundred characters for the whole thing.
The version most people know is Kakuan's, which ends with the herder walking back into the marketplace with open hands. The version on this drive is older and different. It is Shubun's, from the fifteenth century, and its ten stages are Undisciplined, Discipline Begun, In Harness, Faced Round, Tamed, Unimpeded, Laissez Faire, All Forgotten, The Solitary Moon, and Both Vanished.
The difference matters. Shubun's ninth stage says that a last wall is still left barring the way home. And his tenth, having said that both the man and the animal have disappeared and the moonlight is empty and shadowless, finishes like this: if anyone should ask the meaning of this, behold the lilies of the field and its fresh sweet-scented verdure.
He refuses to explain it. Somebody asks what it all meant and he points at the grass. That is the ending, and it is better than any commentary anybody has written about it since, so this journey does the same thing. The ox is an ox for ten nights. No line anywhere tells you what the animal stands for.
What the verses give you is a wild animal with its horns in the air, a straw rope, a nose, a whip, a stream, a willow, a pine tree, a flute, white clouds, a moon, and at the end a field of lilies. What they do not give you is the work, and the work is what this is built out of: the rope burn across both palms, the shoulder that takes the jerk, the heels going into wet ground, and a whole day spent holding on and not winning.
It runs across a year, which the verses imply and never state. It starts in bare early spring with a dark cloud sitting in the mouth of the valley and the first grass trampled flat. It goes through a stream crossing, and a knot tied round a tree by a man who does not quite trust what he is seeing, and an afternoon asleep on a hot rock in high summer with no idea where the animal is. It ends under an autumn moon.
The thing to listen for is the rope. There is none on the first night. It goes through the nose on the second and the whole night is a man hanging on to it. By the fifth it is coiled and set down on a bank, and from the sixth night onward there is no rope anywhere in the journey at all. You should notice something missing before you work out what it is.
And the ninth night is the one nobody expects from a Zen text. The herder goes up a hill after dark for no reason, on his own, and claps his hands and sings badly in the moonlight because he is pleased with himself. And he is pleased with himself. The text lets him be, and then quietly points out the one wall he still has not fixed.
You know exactly which stone in the wall is loose, and you have known for a month. The new grass is laid flat in a track going up the hill, crushed into the mud rather than eaten. You find him in the rocks, forty paces off, with his horns turned up at the sky, and he looks at you and goes over the top.
You twist a rope out of straw before dawn and carry it up with a stick. There is no graceful way to describe what happens next and the day does not get easier. By the middle of the afternoon he stops pulling for a moment, not because he has decided anything, but because he is tired, and so are you.
He comes down the hill behind your shoulder because the rope does not change. Then you walk him. All day, through the stream and back, hour after hour, with nothing happening in any of them. And by evening you are reading him through eight feet of straw, and you know what he is going to do before he does it.
He lifts his head and turns the whole of himself round to face you, which has not happened before, and lets you put a hand on his nose. And then you walk him to a tree and tie him to it, and while your hands are doing it you work out exactly who the rope is for now, and it is not flattering.
Under the willow by the stream you take the rope out of his nose and put it down on the bank, and then you deliberately do not watch him. You fall asleep with your feet in the water. When the mist comes up and you start home without calling him, you hear him come out onto the track behind you.
The rope stays on its nail in the barn and you walk out with nothing in your hands. He is lying down in deep grass, which is more than it sounds, because a standing animal has not finished deciding. You find a cracked bamboo flute in your coat pocket that has been there since winter.
High summer, haze over the valley, the grass so thick the ground has disappeared. You climb onto a flat rock in the bend of the stream and lie down on it, and then you stop keeping track of where he is. Not as a discipline. You just lose the thread, the way you do when the sun is on you.
A full moon straight overhead and high white cloud going across underneath it, and the whole field is one color. He is lying by the willow and he is white, and he has never been white. Try to tell where the cloud ends and the light begins and the animal starts. There is no edge anywhere.
You go up the hill after dark on purpose, which you have never once done, and he is not with you, and you are not listening for him. On the top, under a moon on its own with the valley full of mist below, you clap your hands and sing badly. And then you look down and see the one wall you never fixed.
You come down in the morning and step through the gap without picking the stone up. There is no animal in the field. There is no herder in it either, and that went while you were asleep on a rock in the summer. The light is flat and nothing casts a shadow. And then you look down at the grass.
The Complete Journey
The whole year in one sitting — the empty field, the rope, the stream, the willow, the flute, the white night and the lilies. Edited to run as a single unbroken stretch: you are taken under once at the beginning and brought back once at the end, with the days crossfading into one another. Best with headphones, somewhere you will not be interrupted.