Taming The Ox

Since no one wants my knitting efforts, I need some other hand work to do while waiting in all those medical places I am frequently prone to be in. I've taken up embroidery and it is satisfying. Combining embroidery with constructing books produced this book, "Taming The Ox," which is an adaptation of the ten steps to enlightenment probably  painted by a 16th century Chinese Buddhist monk along with his commentary which I downloaded from the internet. Surely copyrights don't last as long as 300 years.
​Anyway, my objective was to have images ready to embroider so I could practice stitches. Which I did. After embroidering all those ten paintings, I felt like there needed to be some color painted on them since the embroidery looked scanty. After all that huge amount of time spent, these 10 steps wanted to be in a book. See below.

Front and back covers. The cover image is the only one I drew myself.

The Ox is a the metaphor for our wild crazy untamed minds. The person is trying to rope the Ox in, in order to do the taming.

Skipping to step 4: the person ropes the Ox to a tree to keep control.

Step 5: As the Ox becomes tamed, its color fades.

Step 9.

Step 10: enlightenment.

Credits are tucked into the "moon" on the left. The Ox is in the barn.