Zen 10 Ox-herding pictures: 1-In the wild

Traditional Poem:

Displaying its horns, the buffalo bellows aloud,
Running along the mountain path into the distance.
A patch of black clouds overhangs the valley,
the buffalo tramples wheat seedlings wherever it goes.

My words:

Confusion and suffering,
all over the valley.
Look for the root,
and you will find the black bull.

These 10 stages are not real, but they are useful for the practitioner in order to know where he is on his way along the path.

In fact, this picture describes the usual state of mind of most of us: CONFUSED.

Most of the time we spend our life dispersed, without paying attention to what is going on: we just get carried away by our thoughts and emotions, without a clear objective, rambling up and down, getting trapped by our distorted perceptions of what comes across our consciousness, and we trample on the situations we find ouselves in, pushing and pulling like a wild buffalo, rejecting and avoiding some situations, and wishing and clinging to other ones.

This is Samsaric existence, the existence of sentient beings immersed in suffering.

This first picture of the set of ten, depicts the stage of the man or woman who wakes up to his or her real situation, and determines his/her mind to TAME the Buffalo.

From now on, he will be conscious of his sad situation, and will concentrate on capturing the wild buffalo, that is to say, getting to know his own mind.

From now on, he or she will become a PRACTITIONER.