Ten Bulls
Ten Bulls or Ten Ox Herding Pictures (Chinese: shíniú 十牛 , Japanese: jūgyūzu 十牛図 , korean: sipwoo 십우) is a series of short poems and accompanying drawings used in the Zen tradition to describe the stages of a practitioner's progress toward awakening,[web 1] and their subsequent return to society to enact wisdom and compassion.
In Indian Buddhism the simile of the bull is compatible to the ancient traditional Chinese view within Cosmology that includes the Ox (niú 牛) as a birth year and quality, as a result this similarity helped with the early assimilation of Buddhism into Chinese culture and then on to the rest of East Asia.
[web 3][note 1] The most famous version of the oxherding pictures was drawn by the 12th century Chinese Rinzai Chán (Zen) master Kuòān Shīyuǎn (廓庵師遠, Jp.
In Kuòān Shīyuǎn's version, there is no whitening process, and his series also doesn't end with mere emptiness, or absolute truth, but shows a return to the world, depicting Putai, the "laughing Buddha", who is bodhisattva Maitreya.
[web 6] In Japan, Kuòān Shīyuǎn's version gained a wide circulation, and many variations of these illustrations were made, the earliest one probably belonging to the fifteenth century.
[web 3] The following illustrations include the verses by Kuòān Shīyuǎn translated by Senzaki Nyogen (千崎如幻) (1876–1958) and Paul Reps (1895-1990).
[7] In the liner notes to the album, Cohen thanks his Zen Master Roshi for inspiring one of the songs: "I owe my thanks to Joshu Sasaki upon whose exposition of an early Chinese text I based 'Ballad of the Absent Mare.'"
In the 1989 South Korean film Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?, an ox escapes into the forest and one of the protagonists, a young boy, attempts to hunt it down through the bushes.
[8][9][10] During the opening scene of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2010 film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a water buffalo stands tied to a tree before breaking loose and wandering into a forest.
[note 2] In this scheme, śamatha practice is said to progress through nine "mental abidings" or Nine stages of training the mind (S. navākārā cittasthiti, Tib.
