Plate XIII
The Graded Gaze
One field, four readings — the nadir and the zenith are a single image.
"We see that we ascend from the nadir of particularity, i.e. the vacant stare of a cow, through language and conceptual intelligibility, i.e. the imagination of the pastoralist or settler, through to the formless zenith of universality, i.e. the wonder and quietude of the Saint."
A bare dark from which engraved marks precipitate, connect, orient, and compose into one radiant figure, then disperse back into the dark
Drag vertically anywhere — up climbs the register, down descends it — or grab the rail's gold pointer directly and slide it to set the register exactly. Touch works the same. With the figure focused, the Up and Down arrow keys step it. Release holds wherever you left it; nothing returns to rest on its own.
Fig. XIIIa — the climb traverses the , from Materiality through Mechanism and Determination to , then exhales back to nothing.
The inability of people to distinguish elegantly between the vacant stare of the cow and the quietude of the Saint is precisely what muddles most discourse on Zen. The conceptual categories at one’s disposal are quite simply insufficient to the task: it requires a gnostic recognition, a noetic leap of verticality. The Ground of Virtue, note [1]