An Ox-Herder without his ox

I've been preparing a manuscript to contribute to PhilosophyPortal's upcoming anthology on Lacan's Écrits. However, since the deadline was recently moved to give contributors more time, I've decided to hit pause and let the ideas simmer. That also gives me a chance to share what I've been working on.

In my contribution to the anthology, I'll be continuing to develop some ideas which I began exploring in my conference presentation back in February, namely, how do we induce in others a shift from an exoteric position to an esoteric insight? This section of the chapter uses the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures in Zen to approach that question from the perspective of narrative and personal development.

Reading the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures with Lacan

If we trace the narrative arc of a human’s individual development, we begin to notice a pattern – a known becomes an unknown, which catalyzes a journey, and this journey leads us home once again. However, we come back to ourselves changed by virtue of having gone on the journey. 

Because humans are fundamentally incomplete beings, this cycle repeats itself throughout our lives, often simultaneously at different levels of our person. Each iteration of this journey achieves a passage from our prior formation to a higher configuration of ourselves and the world, one in which the old forms and their essential elements can find a place, but which are now structured differently and included within a more open, vital, and playful world.

Jacques Lacan advances a precise and uncommonly strange interpretation of this journey. In his second seminar (1954-1955), he explains that, 

“What distinguishes Freud here from all the authors who have written on the same subject... is the idea that the object of the human quest is never an object of rediscovery, in the sense of reminiscence. The subject doesn't rediscover the preformed tracks of his natural relation to the external world. The human object always constitutes itself through the intermediary of a first loss. Nothing fruitful takes place in man save through the intermediary of a loss of an object... The subject has to reconstitute the object, he tries to find its totality against starting from I know not what unity lost at the origin."

Lacan describes this journey of self-creation (the constitution of “the human object”) as a process in which the human believes they are re-constructing a lost object. We use the fantasy of a prior loss as an “intermediary,” a lost object which facilitates our higher passage by allowing us to use the search for the object as a means of constructing the object for the very first time.

We often mistake this developmental process for a discovery of the “true self,” but Lacan here cautions us against the idea that the practitioner is unearthing “the preformed tracks of his natural relation to the external world.” For, as Lacan maintains, the human has no such fixed relation to nature (his famous dictum “there is no sexual relationship.”) – humans are plastic, moved by drive rather than instinct, and condemned to their freedom.

He positions this description over and against the common conception of this mythic journey as a remembering (anamnesis) or a returning wherein an agent finds themselves cast out of an original wholeness into a new state of desolation. Lacan interprets this wandering in the wilderness as precisely that which constructs the point of departure for the first time – i.e., the wholeness never existed in the way that the agent actually thought that it did. It’s only through relating themselves to this phantasmic lost object that the human can construct themselves for the first time, and thereby produce the very place to which they have seemingly returned.

The Ox-herder goes in for analysis

We find this peculiar narrative staged for us in a surprising way in the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures of Zen. The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures (or, “Ten Bulls”) are a tool for Buddhist practitioners to attain enlightenment through envisioning the need both to tame and to release the mind, all with the aim of surpassing the mind.

Likely created in the 12th century in China, the sequence of ten paintings follows a young man as he searches in the mountains for an ox – first finding its tracks, then hunting it, then taming it, and finally riding it home. However, by the sixth frame, the story seems to be complete – he has led the captured ox home. What remains of the hunt, and what happens in the subsequent frames after the seeming end of the story?

In the seventh frame, the Ox-Herding Pictures continue by depicting the ox-herder living in a thatched hut in the mountains, sitting alone as the ox rests somewhere out of frame. The thatched hut hearkens to a cultural image within Japanese culture (and inherited from China) of the mountain hermit engaged in rigorous spiritual practice in total isolation. Thus, the search for the ox having finally been concluded, there is now space for something else to emerge for the ox-herder. The ox is out of sight and in the process of falling away.

The story continues in the eighth frame with both the ox and the self having been transcended, marking a total realization of the unity and interdependence of all phenomena. The artist chose to portray this moment simply as a circle, an en with its characteristic freehand style indicating both its provisionality and incompleteness. We might describe this frame as the true encounter with emptiness in the story, marking the full release of the ox-herder from whatever transitional objects he was still clinging to.

However, the ninth frame stages the results of this passage through emptiness – a natural scene with no humans at all. The river flows and the flowers are red. The whole world is simply what it is, and nothing more. Each thing in its place without crowding out the others. Both the bull and the ox-herder are gone, and in their stead appears the teeming energy of the cosmos in all of its beauty, impermanence, and creative force.

Finally, the sequence concludes with a smiling old man encountering others and giving gifts. The ox-herder has become a fountain of the universe’s continual bliss which it finds in itself as it gives life to everything, and from his thatched hut in the mountains he returns to the city to re-engage human society from a new standpoint. He enters the market to meet others and share with them the gifts which he has received from his spiritual practice.

These images of the young ox-herder who becomes a jolly sage illustrate for us many crucial insights about the nature of change, but the key notion to highlight in this particular section of the essay is that the initial object which facilitated our transition must also be surpassed to attain a successful passage to a new level of development.

This step of releasing the transitional object presents perhaps the most difficult labor of the student, and also the primary task which the teacher exists to help facilitate for the student. Once the transitional object has stepped aside, insight can come, and the work of integration and sublimation will naturally follow.

The search for the ox represents the student’s desperate search for enlightenment. However, the student does not understand that it’s precisely what they are searching for which impedes their enlightenment. The ox must first be captured and tamed before it can then fall away, paving the way to a true realization of the truest heaven found in the full realization of the tranquility of the river and the redness of the flower. One’s mind must be tamed, just like the ox, and it’s only once you’ve carried out this task that the mind and its desires can fade in their intensity, revealing a space for a deeper subjective shift in which one puts down “the rope and the whip,” as the images’ accompanying poems say.

A side note on "the hero's journey"

The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures mirror something of the Hero’s Journey, but they also include a bit more Lacanian honesty than Campbell’s popular monomyth. Zen’s developmental sequence centers on the necessity of losing the object which seemed to catalyze the journey, whereas Campbell’s monomyth places an intense tribulation at the nadir of the cycle, a trial through which the hero must pass to bring home the hard-won treasure. However, the turning point in the ox-herding images involves the realization that what one sought was not truly what one was seeking, and the consequent burning off of old desires prepares the way for the unexpected appearance of unforeseen transformations. 

Instead, we might nest Campbell’s monomyth within the broader arc of the Ox-Herding pictures, identifying it with the first six panels in which the young practitioner sets out on a journey to capture the missing ox, and persisting through the hunt and contest with the beast, brings it home with great rejoicing. Let us then conceive of the last four frames of the Ox-Herding Pictures as a psychoanalytic coda to the hero’s journey, a necessary s(but often missing) stage of the journey which serves to clarify the nature of the experiences which preceded it, bringing out the latent insights, and even hinting at a new journey which awaits.

Having returned from leading the tamed ox home, the triumphant hero finds himself lying on the couch, talking to his analyst. “I thought that catching the ox was what I really wanted, but now that I’ve caught it, I find this void within me. Sitting with it leaves me feeling deeply uneasy.” From within a Lacanian framework, the ox-herder is telling the analyst that his symptom has stopped working. He isn’t enjoying anymore, which has brought him into a deep practice of self-examination which holds a promise of transformation – he has entered analysis.

A huge shoutout to my friend Jonatan Anabalon who helped me flesh out these ideas through some conversations. You can listen to one of our conversations from a few months back on Samsara Audio – "Allergic to the Ancients." I commend that interaction to you as a model for thinking together in an exciting and charitable way. Jonatan is a top notch conversation partner, and I'm thankful that he's in my life.