Many people say the American Zen priest Steve Hagen’s primer Buddhism Plain and Simple is excellent, and I drifted through its early pages thinking the same. He has a clear, direct style that avoids a lot of the clunky dharma translations that often serve only to confuse.
However, just as he is settling in to his discourse, Hagen feels the need to demonstrate what enlightenment feels like. He offers a picture of a “mysterious figure” (above), which he says is an almost photo-realistic rendition of something everyone will recognise. At first, he suggests, it might look like chaos, but eventually the picture leaps unmissably out at you, and this is kind of what enlightenment is like.
Enticing idea, but, well, I sat there staring at this thing for an hour on the train to work, getting absolutely nowhere. The best I could do was turn it into an interesting meditation on my reactions: one minute feeling like an inadequate fool for seeing nothing of substance, the next a raging head case.
Hagen urges readers to persevere, so illuminating will the big moment be, but kindly gives a page number where the answer can be found. Unfortunately, in an e-book, page numbers are meaningless.
To Google, then, which led me to various sites that revealed the picture was of a cow. Sadly, even having been told this, I still could not see it. Eventually, I stumbled upon a photo online that had been digitally enhanced to emphasise said beast. At last, enlightenment! (I have painted a rather sloppy rendition of a cow on top the picture below; once you know the rough shape of what you’re looking at, return to the unsullied image above.)
Having had to go to so much effort for a glimpse of this cow – which, as Hagen notes, is indeed unmissable once you have seen it – I felt not so much enlightened as duped. At best, the exercise was like one of those weird psychology tests where you get shown a blot and are expected to see a vagina. At worst, it was a cheap parlour trick. It put me off the book, and I got no further with it.
Could this be the intention? Perhaps a meeting with Hagen’s cow is like being hit over the head with a monk’s stick when you’re dozing off while meditating. Perhaps what he is really saying is: stop reading, stop thinking; or, as the first Zen patriarch Bodhidharma put it: “Using the mind to look for reality is delusion.”
- This post was originally published on my former blog Cosmic Donkey on July 27, 2014
Bardo Burner 
I got exactly what Mr. Hagen was conveying with the image. Once you see the cow you cannot go back to thinking it is a reclining man. Let me explain how this was translated in my own life. For 43 years I was a faithful, unquestioning Roman Catholic. Until one day I was presented with information that led me to an epiphany that the promise of an afterlife was just that–a man-made promise designed to give desperate people hope. Once I understood that reality, I could never go back to being a practicing Catholic. But I’m now in a much, much better place. So I guess you could say, I saw the cow.
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I think I had the exact same experience as you, Martin! 28 pages into this book, and enjoying it so far- when I got to this exercise with the “cow”. After staring at it for a while, I gave up and turned to the back of the book for the answer. But even then, I was left staring at the image asking, “how is that a cow?!” I had to find your website (and your useful graphic) to finally “see” it. I’ll keep reading, but I vote “cheap parlour trick” on this one 🙂
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For me it just demonstrated how empiricism needs quality data, i.e. what you see. This sadly was very dodgy visual data and didn’t alter my thinking in the way the author intended. Our minds are easily confused by what we see. Seeing should never automatically lead to believing.
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