An Analysis of Literary Text: The Zen Ten Ox-Herding Pictures

This paper aims to analyze the renown Ten Ox-Herding Pictures as a literary text in order to provide a thought-provoking link between traditional Zen thought and literary texts with spiritual and psycho-therapeutic ideas. The Zen Ten Ox-Herding Pictures originated in 12(superscript th) century China as an allegorical illustration of man's quest for enlightenment or his true nature. The ten stages of Ox-Herding Pictures are depicted below: 1. Seeking the ox; 2. Finding the tracks; 3. Seeing the ox; 4. Catching the ox; 5. Taming the ox; 6. Riding the ox home; 7. Ox forgotten, self alone; 8. Both ox and self forgotten; 9. Returning to the source; and 10. Entering the marketplace with helping hands. In the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures an ox herd and an ox are depicted. In the pictures the ox represents Buddhist nature or one's true self, the essential self which we are seeking. The ox herd represents humanity, symbolizing the self of the phenomenal world that wants very much to grasp the essential self. The ox herd (the self of the phenomenal world) is, in fact, always seeking something like human self-questing. The paths of the ox herd's seeking self depicted by the ten pictures are perhaps analogous to the levels of spiritual development also described by Christian mystics. Furthermore, applying the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures to the interpretation of literary texts is feasible. So this paper also suggests that the mental processes and spiritual journeys of self-questing for enlightenment in Chuang Tsu's I Dreamt I was a Butterfly, William Wordsworth's The Prelude, and Henry David Thoreau's Walden can be illustrated and explored well by the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures.