Page 24 - Summer 22

Ten Ox-herding pictures by Peter Gregory, UK
In a meeting of a group of Buddhist friends recently I was reminded by our teachers of the “Ten Ox-herding Pictures”, which depict the spiritual progression of a Zen student. The author is said to be a Zen master of the Sung Dynasty known as Kaku-an Shi-en belonging to the Rinzai school. He also wrote poems and introductory words for each picture.
I believe the stages are universal, and apply to anyone seeking their inner truth, wherever they may find it, but I also believe they are relevant to our personal progression in learning homeopathy; they certainly resonated with my own journey, so I though it might be interesting to look at them from a homeopathic perspective. The pictures I am using were painted by Shubun, a Zen priest of the fifteenth century. The original pictures are preserved at Shokokuji, Kyoto. He was one of the greatest painters in black and white in the Ashikaga period. I plan to take them one at a time and see how it goes. Instead of the original commentaries I will try and add a haiku for each one. I hope you may find it interesting and I don’t find I am being too ambitious!
Picture 8
The Ox and the Oxherder have gone
There is just an empty space. In the original narrative, this is a reminder that nothing is permanent, and more importantly that ‘we or the ‘I’ too is insubstantial. I am reading a book at the moment called ’Mind’ by Daniel Siegal. In the first couple of chapters he reveals that no- one has yet actually defined the ‘mind’. Earlier definitions which confined it to the brain, equating electrical activity in the neurons as evidence are no longer satisfactory. The author proposes ‘the system of mind is comprised of energy flow within a complex system’. Importantly, this system is not confined to the brain – already we know
there are collections of neurons in the heart, and apparently neurotransmitters such as serotonin and present in the intestine which directly affect our health and mental state. So the system of mind involves the whole of the nervous system and hence the whole body. One of the consequences of this understanding is that Descartes had it all wrong – we know he was totally wrong about animals and their capacity to feel pain but also his most famous adage was up side down: it should have read ‘I am , therefore I think.’ So what does this have to do with homeopathy? Well maybe nothing, maybe everything. If we assume, as I think we must, that our patients have minds of the same nature as we do then we have to take that into account. And if we think of the ‘mind’ being located in one area we have to have a rethink. Furthermore, I feel we have a tendency to see ‘mind’ symptoms as the most important as that’s what Hahnemann said, but maybe we have misinterpreted his words. He simply said that it is essential to match the mental symptoms of patient and remedy, because they are so characteristic of the patient, but he also stressed the importance of the Strange Rare and Peculiar (which apparently in Indian homeopathy is now a ‘PQRS’) That could well be a local symptom. So the local symptoms are just as much a part of the totality as the ‘mentals’, and not the result of the mental symptoms. I think this is at the heart of Sankaran’s Sensation method.
Another interpretation of the ‘emptiness’ of the eighth picture is that there is no boundary between the ‘I’ and homeopathy generally. Until now there was this idea that there was something to do, something to practise. There was a separation between ourselves and homeopathy – a distinction between what is homeopathy what is not homeopathy At this stage, we become united with homeopathy. We see that it does not happen just when we see a patient or read the materia medica; it is all
around us and even more
soweareapartofit.In
short, everything becomes
homeopathy. We do not even
need to try to discipline ourselves
to study, because now it comes
naturally – we go to seminars and read books because it’s a natural thing to do – we just do it; and indeed it’s a part of us. We see the effects of suppression and we see the development of disease patterns; we meet people who act in ways we can recognise from the archetypical remedy pictures we have learned about. We see that homeopathy brings us an understanding of animals, people, communities and even nations.. And it teaches us that everything is dynamic so everything changes. Not only is homeopathy everywhere around us but we live and breathe homeopathy. In 2000 the HPTG organised a trip to Goa to spend 5 whole days listening to Rajan Sankaran. He spoke without any visual aids and I seem to remember without notes. I guess this was before he had finalised his development of his Sensation method. He was experimenting with ragas, sacred Indian songs of which there are many hundreds if not thousands, each with different tune. He was performing provings on groups of people to document what feeling each raga evoked – we participated in one ourselves. At one point a member of our group commented to him ‘you seem to talk as if everything is homeopathy’. Sankaran replied ‘Everything is homeopathy’ I suspect he might also have added – and homeopathy is ‘everything’. So this one of the Oxherding pictures tells us that homeopathy is a way of understanding the world and equally that we are a part of that world. It isn’t something ‘out there’ separate from us – or even something ‘inside us’ – it is a natural law which explains the world’s idiosyncrasies , developments and paradoxes. How fortunate we are to have this insight.