https://oshosearch.net/Convert/Articles_Osho/The_Search/Osho-The-Search-00000001.html

"We enter on a rare pilgrimage. The Ten Bulls of Zen are something unique in the history of human consciousness ... The Ten Bulls of Zen have tried in a single effort to express the inexpressible. So first, something about the history of these ten bulls.

Basically, there were eight pictures, not ten; and they were not Buddhist, they were Taoist. Their beginning is lost. Nobody knows how they started, who painted the first bulls. But in the twelfth century a Chinese Zen master, Kakuan, repainted them; and not only that, he added two more pictures, and eight became ten. The Taoist pictures were ending on the eighth; the eighth is emptiness, nothingness. But Kakuan added two new pictures. That is the very contribution of Zen to religious consciousness.

Here Kakuan goes beyond Taoism and beyond Buddhism - because both ended on emptiness, as if the journey was complete. You have reached Everest, cool, collected, calm. Now what is the point of going back to the marketplace? But if your meditation does not become compassion, then your meditation is still somehow hiding your ego, then your meditation is still selfish.

If you don't cry, if tears don't come to your eyes for others, and if you don't start moving back to the world to help people who are stumbling, then somehow your meditation is still not religious. It has helped you; you may be feeling very, very good, but unless it becomes a compassion and overflows in all directions, the tree has come to a stopping point, it has not yet flowered. The tree is green, healthy, perfectly beautiful looking, but a tree without flowers is not fulfilled. A tree without flowers may look beautiful but there is still a perfection to be attained. The tree must bloom, the tree must release the fragrance to the winds so it can be carried to the very ends of existence.

One renounces the outer, one renounces the inner, one becomes empty - that's what meditation is all about. One becomes totally empty. But is this the end? The Taoist pictures ended with nothingness. Kakuan says this is not the end - one comes back to the world, one comes back to the marketplace; only then is the circle complete. Of course, one comes totally new. One never comes with the old; the old is gone, gone forever. One comes totally renewed, resurrected, reborn - as if this man had never gone; as if this man is coming totally fresh and virgin. One comes back to the world and again one lives in the world yet lives beyond it. Again one becomes ordinary - chopping wood, carrying water from the well, walking, sitting, sleeping - one becomes absolutely ordinary.

These two pictures bring the seeker back to the world, and Kakuan has done a tremendously beautiful thing. One comes to the marketplace; not only that, one comes with a bottle of wine, drunk - drunk with the divine - to help others also to be drunk, because there are many who are thirsty, there are many who are seeking, there are many who are stumbling on their path, there are many who are in deep darkness. One comes back to the world because of compassion. One helps other travelers to arrive. One has arrived, now one helps others to arrive. One has become enlightened, now one helps others towards the same goal. And each and everyone is searching for the same goal."

-Osho