going home

Number Six of Genju’s haunting and beautiful Oxherding pics at 108zenbooks. She’s also creating poems to accompany the images—you can see them at her site. In lieu of my personal commentary (which I’ll save until I produce some oxherding pictures of my own—don’t worry, it won’t be soon!) I’m quoting elliptically from Daido Roshi’s commentary in the book Path of Enlightenment:

At this stage of the journey we start to navigate the complexities of life with ease…. A sense of unity with the myriad of phenomena of events in our life begins to appear.

1. Searching for the Ox
2. Finding the Traces
3. Seeing the Ox
4. Catching the Ox
5. Taming the Ox

[Image: 108zenbooks]

More Oxherding News
We had more oxherding news over the weekend. We covered this Western Wild Cow Herding series from Maria Kannon Zen Center in Dallas. (The cowboy theme recalls this dusty but still-mind-bogglingly amazing meditation video that we first saw on The Worst Horse.)

Barry Briggs, who runs the site Ox Herding, sent me a note that included links to some choice oxherding series from around the web—thank you very much, Barry!:

These were created by a German artist, Damien Crowe. He once had them posted on Flickr but has now removed them. Fortunately, he had earlier given me permission to present them on Ox Herding.  Here’s the link:
http://www.oxherding.com/my_weblog/2009/06/ox-herding-pictures-redux.html

As Lynette is now doing, I’ve also written poems to match the ox herding images, based on my own understanding. It’s a good way to explore one’s practice. Here is the first of my series of poems:
http://www.oxherding.com/my_weblog/2009/05/ox-herding-lost.html

Also, Zen Master Daehaeng, a female master in Korea, has written an interesting set of poems to match the images. These can be found on these two links:
http://wakeupandlaugh.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/herding-the-ox-part-1/
wordpress.com/2010/05/27/herding-the-ox-part-2/

Finally, anyone interested in the images might appreciate Shinzen Young’s talk on each of the pictures. The talk is contained in three videos on YouTube. Here’s the first video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8aN9O73lgg

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