Taking it all in all, Zen is emphatically a matter of personal experience; if anything can be called radically empirical, it is Zen. No amount of reading, no amount of teaching, and no amount of contemplation will even make one a Zen master. Life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow, to stop it for examination and analysis is to kill it leaving its cold corpse to be embraced. Therefore, everything in the Meditation Hall and every detail of its disciplinary curriculum is so arranged as to bring this idea into the most efficient prominence. The unique position maintained by the Zen sect among other Mahayana schools in Japan and China throughout the history of Buddhism in the Far East is no doubt due to the institution known as the Meditation Hall or Zendo. THE TEN COW-HERDING PICTURES THE TEN COW-HERDING PICTURES The attainment of Buddhahood or the realisation of Enlightenment is what is aimed at by all pious Buddhists, though not necessarily during this one earthly life; and Zen, as one of the Mahayana schools, also teaches that all our efforts must be directed towards this supreme end. While most of the other schools distinguish so many steps of spiritual development and insist on one’s going through all the grades successively in order to reach the consummation of the Buddhist discipline; Zen ignores all these, and boldly declares that when one sees into the inmost nature of one’s own being, one instantly becomes a Buddha, and that there is no necessity of climbing up each rung of perfection through eternal cycles of transmigration. This has been one of the most characteristic tenets of Zen ever since the coming-east of Bodhi-Dharma in the sixth century. “See into thy own nature and be a Buddha,” has thus grown the watchword of the Sect. And this “seeing” was not the outcome of much learning or speculation, nor was it due to the grace of the supreme Buddha conferred upon his ascetic followers; but it grew out of the special training of the mind prescribed by the Zen masters. This being so, Zen could not very well recognise any form of gradation in the attainment of Buddhahood. The “seeing into one’s nature” was an instant act. There could not be any process in it which would permit scales or steps of development.