On The Timeless Trail

On The Timeless Trail

In the Ten Ox-herding Pictures, familiar to the student of Zen (found in such books as Phillip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen), a series of framed aspects in the life of the enlightened are depicted, beginning with a young man in search of an “ox” (enlightenment), and ending with an old man who has no concern for any particular worldly thing, including ox or self (“The gate to his cottage is shut, and even the wisest cannot find him”). When first we examine these pictures, with our conditioned eye, we view them in linear fashion: the old man’s “past” at the beginning, on the left side; the youth’s “future” on the right side, leading to a conclusion. Our normal impulse is to consider the advent of enlightenment as a course over a period of time. Were you to have no concept of time (beyond that of a particular interlude which we define as a “moment”), you could shuffle these ten pictures and you would recognize that a bodhi might conceive himself in any one of the frames, from any given moment to the next: the wise old man this morning, the ignorant boy this evening. When we have erased the time tracks from the page, the beginning is the ending, and the ending is just the beginning. There is no anchorage for the ship which remains under sail; there is no end to learning; the cottage gate that closes can open. With your cognition of time freed from bondage, it will also be apparent to you that, were the frames translucent and stacked upon each other, there is but one time and we are each the full expression of it in our every action. You are the old man and the young boy, and you were never in any way separate from each other.