Once upon a time a butcher made provisions as alms to support a monk, yet the monk did not share Dharma with the butcher. As karma would have it, the two again befriended with each other in the next life. Once the butcher ran out of money for business and the monk loaned him the money with the condition that the butcher must supply produce unconditionally when the monk demands it. Then it happened at a time when all slaughtering was banned for three days out of respect for the birthday of Avalokitesvara. Decapitation awaits any violators of the rule. The monk demanded half a pound of meat from the butcher, but the latter pointed to the ban for an excuse. The monk then said they could meet half-way and the butcher can just cut some meat from his own body to honor the commitment of their pact. The butcher bemoaned the request and said that the pain would be excruciating and too much to bear. The monk looked him in the eye and said, ‘now imagine how the animals feel to come under the knife’. The butcher was jolted by a shock that also awarded him with sudden enlightenment. He dropped everything and left to practice Dharma with the monk, and attained the status of an Arhat at the end. The story bears the name of ‘Putting down the slaughtering knife to pursue Buddhahood thereupon’.

A man of many vices can repent in a moment's realization that he'd want to right the wrong and make amends for the future. The man can pledge a vow and embark on a journey of attaining Buddhahood. In reality, not everyone is a butcher, and the butcher's knife stands to symbolize people's own confusions, delusions, preferences, and fixations. When the herder reached home and forgot the ox he rode, the anecdote suggests that a religious practitioner is free from worries, judgments, and wanton desires. The troubled mind is no more and the trouble-free person no longer picks apart the realms inside or out. No qualm of fixations, but perfectly aware of one subjective self. When all delusions disappear, the original nature emerges as absolute clarity with a perfect see-through. There is no description in any words when the Buddha nature emerges, because it prevails both in- and outside. A fish in water doesn't make much of the water, as do we with the air we breathe that is largely ignored by our conscious mind. The herder sans the ox is thus by now a person free of worries in the mind.

For the previous picture of ‘Riding the Ox home’, there was the oxherder and the ox, which stand for a mind to tame and a goal yet to achieve. The existence of the subject- the herder- and an object that he wants to tame demonstrates separation of Dharma practice and the expected realization. The present picture ‘Forgetting the ox and the oxherder rests alone’serves to remind us that even a God-forsaken sinner could still get on to the Pure Land of Amitabha if he can recite the name of Amitabha non-stop in his final moment - because his final idea was for and about all sentient beings except himself.