According to the Zen school, the ox is "self" or "true self", but for me, it is realized that the ox could not be the true self. I could say that, for the youth, his relationship to the Self at that moment creates such an image. In this view, the Self exists even in the first picture. But the youth, somehow, although he doesn’t know why, feels that there is something he needs to search for, but it seems completely vague, like something without form.

Then to him this condition manifests as the ox, a "presence" which he begins to relate to.

Then he "catches" it and "herds" it. Eventually he finds that he does not need to manage it any longer.

...Viewing these six in a Jungian perspective, with the youth and the ox indicating the relationship between ego and Self, the sixth may well be said to represent the pinnacle. Here the ego completely relinquishes its initiative to the Self, by which it is being led. The ego sings its own feelings, and the world surrounding it is also peaceful.

This sort of understanding it generally accepted, but I think that the Self now is manifested not as an ox but as the external environment surrounding the person, taken as a whole.

It is interesting that Kuo-an’s inscription for his second painting states: "Embodying all things as self." Then he continues, "He [the youth] has no discrimination between good and evil or true and false. That is to say, he embodies everything as self."

No. 7 at first may appear to be quite undifferentiated in terms of self-image and a sense of reality. However, one might say that here it is a conscious undifferentiation, rather than the unconscious undifferentiation of No. 1. It may be an awareness of no separateness or no independent nature.

We should consider that the two pictures by Kuo-an which follow No. 8 quite possibly are not meant to be developmentally higher. Japanese philosophers Ueda and Yanagita, who specialized in philosophy of religion, explain that 8, 9 and 10 are not positioned as steps of development: "The relationship of mutual penetration is immediately reversible."

Picture No. 9, "Return to the Source," is a painting of a flowing river and a blossoming tree. Ueda sees the transition from No. 8 to No. 9 as "after the cessation, again reviving." At this point, Zen people get into deep and difficult theory, but to me it seems more interesting to think that, since the following picture shows human beings revived from death, human beings would be experiencing "mineral consciousness" and "vegetative consciousness" at this point. These states need not be called "consciousness." But, if you can deal with "Absolute Nothingness" (No. 8), it certainly must be possible to experience animal and vegetative consciousnesses of some sort. Of course, this is just my own arbitrary assumption.

It is interesting that here, even though there is a space between them, these two people are one. This means that there is the possibility of the emergence of dialogue between them: "Who are you?" "Where are you from?" and so on.

And there is the possibility of leading back to the first picture. The tenth picture seems to show completion, but it also indicates a return to the beginning.....