The First Six Oxen

Reading again last night one of the books of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian founder of Logotherapy,  a psychotherapy centered on Meaning, I was surprised to wake up this morning reminded of the famous ox-herding pictures of Zen Buddhism. That puzzled me for a while until the association began to make sense. On that in a moment.

The ten ox-herding pictures are an important part of Zen teaching, almost unavoidable for anyone who looks into the subject. They represent the soul’s development in stages, in which the ox represents the quest itself—but only for a while. The pictures we now have came from a Chinese artist, Kakuan Shien; he lived in the twelfth century and himself copied some even earlier depictions. What the ox actually represents is not defined in the original verses that accompany the images. Perhaps it is the quest itself, becoming more and more dominant. I provide this link to a site where the images are shown with the traditional verses beneath. The essence is that the ox must be found, caught, tamed, and finally ridden—and after that it is forgotten but—and it is an important but—the final source (of something) is ultimately reached. After that, in the last image, the disciple once more returns to society. The eighth picture, when both the ox and the self have been transcended, is blank.

Now for my association. I am a great admirer of Frankl’s psychotherapy. It is the only one that encompasses the whole human being, including the soul, the human being’s transcending core. But Frankl (1905-1997) was a transitional figure. Freudian and Adlerian analysis were dominant as he forged his own views. The Freudian is based on the pleasure principle, the Adlerian on the will to power or status. They are lower drives which, when frustrated, can produce psychiatric problems. Frankl sternly critiqued both. His own view was that the deepest human drive is to discover meaning. But in the process of ministering to the human need for the transcending, a border, you might say, must be crossed—between the physical, where medicine mostly operates, and the spiritual, where the cry for meaning arises. And Frankl had to stand astride that divide. He wished to help his patients but could not enter the religious ranges that open up as soon as Meaning is written with a leading cap.

Therefore, in light of Kakuan’s ten ox-herding pictures, Frankl could only deal with the first six—wherein the patient is searching, first without knowing much but in agitation, then by following tracks, then sighting the ox, and so on. But Frankl had to stay with the ox until the patient could ride it. He could not go beyond that stage. Whatever follows then is up to the patient, helped by religious guides. Therefore Frankl’s own series ends a little prematurely—and reading his book, his hesitation to go on had reached me consciously. And then, while sleeping, my hidden self produced the images that explained my sense of unease. There are ranges where the MD can no longer help you.

New Year: Marking Eternity

Henry Corbin, the French philosopher, relates an amusing and meaningful exchange at a conference in 1954. Present at this encounter were Corbin, Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn, Mircea Eliade, and D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese author on Zen. In conversation with Suzuki, the company asked him what had been his first encounter with occidental spirituality. Suzuki answered that his encounter had taken place fifty years before when he had translated four of Swedenborg’s works into Japanese. To continue in Corbin’s words:

Later on in the conversation we asked him what homologies in structure he found between Mahayana Buddhism and the cosmology of Swedenborg in respect of the symbolism and correspondences of the worlds … Of course we expected not a theoretical answer, but a sign attesting the encounter in a concrete person of an experience common to Buddhism and to Swedenborgian spirituality. And I can still see Suzuki suddenly brandishing a spoon and saying with a smile: “This spoon now exists in Paradise…” “We are now in Heaven,” he explained.*

Thoughts along these lines have been running about in my head of late: the difference between what we call time (time-as-motion, as I like to put it) and eternity. I like the notion that eternity is pure duration—and think that we actually experience it whenever time-as-motion, Einstein’s time, you might say, is temporarily forgotten, when events don’t interfere with our experience of being: contemplative or creative time, also physically active times when we are in control and in the flow.

This morning it struck me (or struck me again—this is not an original observation, certainly not in a context in which Mircea Eliade, who wrote The Myth of the Eternal Return, is mentioned)—it struck me, to repeat, that our ritual markings of anniversaries, like Christmas and New Years, are (perhaps paradoxically) assertions of eternity. On days like today, time stops in a way. Our urge to set such markers—and they are absolutely arbitrary—arises, I think, from the very experience Suzuki highlights, spoon in hand, namely that we already are, if we could but keep it always in mind, already in eternity. We keep falling out of it, of course, day after day. We fall into the hectics of a lower kind of existence, into the rapids of ordinary time. But the odd feelings that mark transitions produce in us a kind of suspension; they serve as reminders that, above the torrent that keeps raging on, there is another time, that of duration, that of eternity. Swedenborg himself struggled to give this feeling expression. In Heaven and Hell (and elsewhere) he suggests that the concept of time in heaven is transformed into something else, what he labels “states.” Yes. But in this life too we can sometimes achieve states in which we slip out of the turbulence into experiences—not of magical exaltations, not of remarkable ecstasy, but of sovereignty.

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*Corbin, Henry. Alone With the Alone. Princeton University Press, 1969. p. 354.

China’s Religious Experience

I’ve always considered the religious forms native to China the most sophisticated—at least in comparison with religious forms in India and in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world. The last three, of course, are closely related. The specifically Chinese forms are a belief in spirits, especially those of the ancestors, and Taoism, a much later mystical form, in which the ultimate is pictured as a transcendental All. The chief similarity of Chinese and all other religions is that it is based on a conviction that a spirit world exists beyond this one. The chief difference lies in the absence of a personified God, a God whose characteristics are based on the human model. The great benefit of the religious view for the Chinese people has been that a sophisticated view of the All High is almost impossible to exploit for political purposes. Hence China has been spared the vicious religious wars that have plagued other parts of the globe.

Of course, as many, many people have observed over time, The Chinese temperament is practical and down to earth. Indeed, calling it a “temperament” is probably wrong. It is a cultural blessing, in a way—and in China the culture has been pretty continuous for at least 4000 years. No lesser person than D.T. Suzuki has elaborated this very point. Suzuki, a Japanese, is the chief introducer of Zen Buddhism to the West, and in his Essay in Zen Buddhism, he too stresses the point. Zen, as he points out, is as much a Chinese creation as an Indian, and Zen Buddhism is practical and down to earth.

This works out well. Ancestor worship enlarges the sense of living in this dimension by extending it into the invisible. The ancestors are seen as able to influence one’s banal fortunes in this dimension—and we can please ancestors by upholding the ethical norms. So at the bottom of society. At its highest levels, the concept of Heaven, impersonal but not unaware, has been developed as the sanction of rule. Those whom Heaven favors, have the Mandate of Heaven. Those whom Heaven would depose are deprived of the mandate and, no matter what they do, they will swept away. It is the only culture on the planet in which the personal virtue of the ruler is conceived of as directly related to success in governing a realm—and in which the ruler’s chief activity is to let ordinary people live while keeping the lesser lords from exploiting them. That works for me.

And then, at the very highest levels, the mystical and philosophical, the conception of divinity is appropriately high, always reverent, never inclined to suggest that you can bribe, fool, or otherwise influence the highest. It shall prevail, through any and all contingencies at precisely the distance from us which we also feel when contemplating our own puny selves.