You are walking through the village asking everyone you meet if they have seen an ox.
You describe it carefully. Large, brown, slow. You have been looking for it for years.
You ask the baker. You ask the farmer. You ask the old woman by the well.
No one has seen it.
You do not notice that you are sitting on top of one.
The Chinese Chan tradition has a series of ten pictures called the ox-herding pictures. They were painted in the twelfth century and they map the stages of a student looking for the truth.
The first picture shows a man searching for the ox.
The second picture shows him finding its footprints.
The third picture shows him glimpsing it through the trees.
But there is an older version of the joke, hidden inside the same tradition.
The ox was never lost.
The student was riding it the whole time.
Think about what this means for a moment.
You are looking for something. You are using a faculty to look. The faculty is awareness.
What are you using to look for what is doing the looking.
You are sitting on the very thing.
The mind cannot accept this. The mind says, if I am already on it, why can I not feel it. Why am I still looking.
The mind says this in the voice it uses for everything that does not match its model of how things work.
The same voice that has been telling you the ox is somewhere ahead.
The voice is also on the ox.
You cannot see what you are sitting on by looking down. You have to stop looking.
Not in despair. Not as a strategy.
You just stop, because the looking has begun to feel like the problem it claimed to be solving.
The moment the looking stops, the ox is right there.
Not because it appeared. Because it was never absent.
The looking was what made it seem absent.
The ox is your own awareness.
The fact that something is happening right now, that this sentence is being known, that the room you are in is being felt without effort.
That is the ox.
You did not create it. You did not earn it. You did not arrive at it.
You have been on it the whole time.
You read this and the mind says, but I do not feel anything special. I do not feel awakened. I do not feel like I am on the ox.
Of course you do not.
The ox is not a feeling. The ox is what is feeling the absence of the feeling.
The Zen teachers were unsentimental about this.
A student came to the master Nanquan and asked, what is the way.
Nanquan said, ordinary mind is the way.
The student said, should I direct myself toward it.
Nanquan said, if you try to direct yourself, you go away from it.
The student spent the rest of his life understanding what that meant.
You can spend the rest of yours, too. Or you can notice it now.
Directing yourself toward the ox is dismounting from the ox to look for the ox.
Trying to reach awareness is using awareness to look for awareness.
Practicing to be present is using presence to find presence.
In each case, you are riding the very thing you are searching for.
The search is not stupid. It comes from a real intuition.
You sense that something has been missed. You sense there is more to your experience than the surface of it. You sense you are not seeing what is actually here.
The intuition is correct.
What is wrong is the assumption that what you have not seen is far away.
It is not far away.
It is what is doing the searching.
When you finally stop, you do not have a great realization. You just notice that the ox was always under you. You notice the warmth of its flank. You notice the rhythm of its walking, which has been carrying you all along.
You notice that you were not the rider.
You were the riding.
The whole image collapses.
There is no separate ox. There is no separate rider. There is only the movement, which has always been doing itself.
The man searching for the ox was a story the man was telling to keep the search going.
The search ends when the man notices he is the ox.
You will not find this in a book.
You can read about it in a book. This is a book, in a way. But the noticing does not happen in the reading.
The noticing happens when you put the book down for a moment and the looking pauses.
The pause is the door.
The ox is already through it.
You are not going somewhere.
You are not becoming someone.
You are not going to wake up one day to find you have arrived.
You are already at the destination, performing a complicated routine of pretending to walk toward it.
The routine can end whenever you stop believing in it.
The believing is the only thing keeping it going.
Get off the search for one breath.
The ox is the breath.
Sources: The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, Chinese Chan tradition, 12th century, attributed to Kuoan Shiyuan. The exchange between Nanquan and Zhaozhou (Joshu), from the Mumonkan (Gateless Gate), case 19, compiled by Wumen Huikai, 1228.