Searching for the Ox
by Kuo-an Shih-yuan (Kakuan Shien)

Click here for the 1st poem and picture

Kakuan, a Chinese Zen Master, developed this series of 10 poems and pictures around 1200 AD. It shows the Pathway to Enlightenment, from the first tentative steps seeking something that seems distant and elusive to the final climb up the summit and absorption in Nirvana.

The sequence ends with the way back down the mountain as Samsara and Nirvana are one, and the Mahasiddha moves freely throughout the 10,000 states of mind. As Rama wrote in Snowboarding to Nirvana, "As Saraha has correctly expressed, 'Those fortunate ones who attain the knowledge that from the beginning of endless time mind has never existed realize the mind of the Buddhas of the three eras.'"

This sequence is excerpted from:
The Three Pillars of Zen
by Roshi Philip Kapleau
Anchor Books/Random House
Copyright (c) 1980 The Zen Center, Inc.
Copyright (c) 1965, 1989 by Roshi Philip Kapleau
Reprinted with permission.
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