The Ten Pictures, in order
Kuòān's version (there are earlier 6-picture and 8-picture versions) is the one that achieved canonical status, partly because it doesn't end with the empty circle of earlier versions but returns the practitioner to the marketplace. 1. **Searching for the Ox** — awareness that something is missing 2. **Finding the Tracks** — first glimpses, reading teachers and texts 3. **First Sight of the Ox** — initial kenshō / recognition 4. **Catching the Ox** — sustained practice begins; ox is wild 5. **Taming the Ox** — practice deepens; ox becomes workable 6. **Riding the Ox Home** — effortless practice; ox and rider move together 7. **Ox Forgotten, Self Alone** — the search-object dissolves; only awareness remains 8. **Both Ox and Self Forgotten** — the empty circle; no observer, no observed 9. **Returning to the Source** — "flowers are red, willows are green" — reality-as-reality 10. **Entering the Marketplace with Helping Hands** — full re-emergence into ordinary life, indistinguishable from anyone else
The Jungian mapping (1–5): shadow recognition
**Picture 1 / Searching for the Ox** — Corresponds to Jung's "undifferentiated unconscious life," the phase before the ego recognizes it has a shadow at all. Characterized by generalized dissatisfaction, scapegoating of others, persona-maintenance. **Picture 2 / Finding the Tracks** — The moment a symbolic or analytic framework first suggests that what you've been projecting outward actually belongs to you. In Jung: first reading of Memories, Dreams, Reflections or first significant dream. In Zen: first coherent encounter with the Platform Sūtra or a teacher. **Picture 3 / First Sight of the Ox** — Jung's "first authentic encounter with the shadow." This is disruptive. The shadow is seen in full, not domesticated. **Picture 4 / Catching the Ox** — The early integration phase. The shadow resists integration actively. In analysis this is when material becomes volatile, dreams get turbulent, transferences intensify. **Picture 5 / Taming the Ox** — Sustained integration. The shadow becomes a known, workable part of the psyche. Jung's "conscious relationship with the unconscious" stabilizes.
The Jungian mapping (6–7): where Jung's map runs out
**Picture 6 / Riding the Ox Home** — Still intelligible in Jungian terms: the transcendent function now operates smoothly, ego and Self work together. Jung described this in late-career individuation case studies. **Picture 7 / Ox Forgotten, Self Alone** — This is the first picture where pure Jungian language begins to strain. The "ox" — the integrated shadow-self — drops out of focus, and only the integrating agent remains. Jung approached this but didn't systematize it; his Self concept still assumes a totality-to-integrate. Zen says: the integration is done, the process is the only remaining phenomenon. **Picture 8 / Both Ox and Self Forgotten** — The empty circle. Jung's framework does not accommodate this picture cleanly. The Self as a reference point dissolves; there is no one to whom integration is happening. This is śūnyatā, not Jungian wholeness.
The Jungian mapping (9–10): what Jung almost had
**Picture 9 / Returning to the Source** — "Flowers are red, willows are green." Reality appears as it is, stripped of symbolic overlay. Jung glimpsed this in his late alchemical writing (CW 14) and in the experience he describes after his 1944 heart attack (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ch. 10: "Visions"). He never formalized it as a stage. **Picture 10 / Entering the Marketplace with Helping Hands** — The practitioner returns to ordinary life, ordinary clothes, ordinary errands. Indistinguishable from anyone else, helpful without announcement. This is the stage Jung repeatedly emphasized in the late 1940s — individuation culminates in ordinary life, not monastic withdrawal — but he did not give it iconographic specificity. Kuòān, in Picture 10, does. This is the single most important contribution the Ox-Herding sequence makes to Jungian theory: it provides clinical-artistic specificity to a late-individuation stage that Jung kept gesturing at without fully depicting.
How to use the Pictures as a self-assessment
Print Kuòān's ten pictures (D.T. Suzuki reprints them in Manual of Zen Buddhism, 1935; Philip Kapleau in The Three Pillars of Zen, 1965). Sit with them honestly. - If you're at Pictures 1–2: your work is education and noticing projection - If 3: you've had an initial insight experience and need to stabilize it (find a teacher or analyst) - If 4–5: sustained practice is everything; avoid new teachers and systems - If 6: integration is maturing; guard against complacency - If 7: a more radical method is called for (huàtóu, intensive retreat, deeper analytic work) - If 8: no self-assessment tools apply; consult a teacher in the lineage - If 9–10: you are not reading this article