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On first reading, Arnold Lobel's Owl at Home may simply appear to be a well-written and amusingly illustrated children's story. I certainly enjoyed reading it over and over in my boyhood, and last I checked, my mother can still quote lines from it almost verbatim. But when some years ago I reread Lobel's masterpiece while tutoring an elementary school student, I had a sudden insight: Owl at Home is not merely a series of stories about a lovable portly anthropomorphic simpleton's misadventures. Beneath Lobel’s humorous use of dramatic irony dramatic irony lies a profound hidden message. Owl at Home is not only a classic children’s story, but also a deep meditation on the teachings of Zen Buddhism. Lobel uses Owl's absurd actions not only to make us laugh, but also to throw the subtle but insidious false perceptions of the deluded mind into sharp relief. He presents Owl as a sort of hyperbolic mirror, encouraging us to examine our own actions.
In the first chapter of Owl at Home, “The Guest,” Lobel establishes the mise en scène. Owl apparently lives alone. He is taking his supper by himself beside the fireplace in the dead of winter. The setting lends itself to introspection and contemplation. Owl does not seem to be distraught in his solitude. We wonder what he is pondering as he eats his simple dinner of buttered toast and pea soup. Perhaps he has become distracted and is dwelling on some past regret or triumph. His eyes seem almost glossy and unfocused.
Whatever Owl is thinking about, he is soon drawn out of his reverie. Like the resounding crack of the taku wood clapper startling an inattentive Zen acolyte in their zazen (sitting meditation), a loud sound at Owl’s front door jars him back into the present. Owl naturally goes to the door to see who is there, but he finds no one. Is this some sort of trick? He returns to his supper only to be roused a second time by a second knock. Upon investigation, he again finds no obvious culprit. Clearly something unusual is going on here. Owl is given pause to think, as are we. Owl's conclusion--that winter herself is knocking—is characteristic of Lobel’s use of dramatic irony. We know that knocking is simply the result of a natural phenomenon, but Owl is too attached to the idea of agency. He is mired in the world of Samsara — the illusory world seen by the unenlightened mind. Faced again with an empty front stoop, he cannot break out of his habit of seeing the world only as so much inert matter which independent actors manipulate. He is so attached to the idea of self that he cannot conceive of the bang at the door as simply a naturally arising phenomenon without an actor. Just as sure as he feels himself to be separated from everything and individual, this knocking must be an act of agency, the deliberate action of someone or something foreign. To Owl’s credit, his misapprehension of the situation is at least tinged by compassion. He decides that the winter itself might need succor: “The poor old winter is knocking at my door. Perhaps it wants to sit by the fire. Well, I will be kind and let the winter come in”. The urge is laudable, but the insight is wrong.
The word Samsara literally means “wandering.” In Zen Buddhism it refers to the illusory everyday view of the world as consisting of fundamentally independent and separate things. It is the opposite of Nirvana, the state achieved when one intuits the fundamental interdependence and conditioned nature of all things and phenomena.
Lobel has created a wide gap between our understanding and Owl’s misapprehension of the situation, and he expertly uses this gap for comic effect. After deciding that winter is asking him for help, Owl throws the door wide, allowing winter full entry into his home. The winter bulldozes its way through his open door, pushes him against a wall, and blows out the fire. It rushes through his house, freezes his pea soup, and covers everything with snow. Owl grows angry. He shouts at winter as at an unwelcome guest. “You must go, winter! Go away, right now! Good-bye and do not come back!”
The consequences of Owl’s folly are mild enough that we may laugh at him without feeling cruel. But on a deeper level, Lobel is telling us that what results from Owl’s misapprehension, Owl’s good intentions notwithstanding, is suffering. Owl’s insistence on agency and his lack of “right understanding” (the first pillar of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path) leave him spinning on the wheel of Samsara. His false perceptions generate the seeds of his negative emotion and suffering. This accords perfectly with fundamental Buddhist doctrine, which holds that suffering and negative emotion arise from acts based on misperceptions, and that the only way to avoid the cyclical recurrence of this unfortunate and unnecessary suffering is to cultivate an understanding of the true nature of reality. Yet it should also be noted that the story ends on a positive note. After the winter has finished wreaking its havoc, Owl remakes his fire, thaws his soup, and quietly finishes his supper. Lobel is reminding us of the transitory nature of emotions.
But just what is this fundamental nature of reality we should strive to understand? The second episode of the book, “Strange Bumps,” uses a similar narrative structure to answer this question. When the story begins, Owl is lying in bed, ready to go to sleep. Just as he is about to blow out the candle, he notices two strange bumps at the foot of his bed. Lobel again employs dramatic irony – we can clearly see that these bumps are Owl’s feet, but Owl himself cannot make this connection. He is very troubled by these bumps. He cannot see that they are really just reflections of a part of himself cloaked by a blanket.
We laugh as Owl's investigations (such as moving his feet up and down) fail to produce insight; laugh when he removes the blanket, puts it back on, but still does not realize that the bumps are his feet; laugh perhaps hardest of all when he breaks his own bed by jumping on it out of frustration and then sneaks downstairs to fall asleep in his armchair. Owl's false perceptions once again generate negative emotions that culminate in suffering and destruction. But Owl’s misperceptions here point directly at a core Buddhist teaching – what is variously referred to as “non-duality,” “emptiness,” “conditioned arising,” “interpenetration” and “interbeing.”
Interbeing is the teaching that all phenomena and objects in our universe, including our physical and psychological selves, arise in complete interdependence on all other phenomena and objects in the universe.
According to the teaching of interbeing, if we analyze any distinct entity or phenomenon in our universe, focus on it for a very long time, and really consider its existence deeply, we will realize that its very separateness is a mental construct. All entities and phenomena in our universe arise in total dependence upon other entities and phenomena. For instance, if we look at a book, we can say, “there is a book on the table. It exists. I can pick it up, read it, put it on the shelf.” But consider it more deeply. Where did this book come from? Print was added to paper, covers were made, it was bound. Someone did these things. No bookmaker, no book. Where did the paper for the pages come from? Well paper is made from trees of course. Alright, so no trees, no book. But the trees, too, lack independence. They take in sunlight and water from the environment in the process of photosynthesis and use these resources to make energy. This logic can be carried all the way to the big bang. When we look deeply at anything, we see that its apparently inherent, independent existence is actually conditioned by an infinite number of factors, that its existence is in fact conditioned by every other piece of the universe.
This reasoning takes on particular importance in Zen when we examine ourselves. “I,” we think, “am separate. I am within this skin. What is outside of this skin is not me. I cannot feel it in the way I feel my fingers.” But think about your body more deeply. What did you eat for breakfast today? Where did the ingredients for your breakfast come from? They came from plants and perhaps animals. Well how do those plants live? They take in sunlight, water, oxygen and harvest energy through photosynthesis. So our physical selves are also interdependent and conditioned phenomena. Likewise the very sense of self, which seems so concrete and fundamental, can be shown to be dependent and conditioned. In our everyday thought, we are firmly convinced that we own our personalities, that who we are is fundamental to us and independent from other people and things. But consider this: how does one form a personality? Most people will readily admit that their experiences have shaped who they are. What do those experiences involve? Interactions. The influence of the people around us plays a strong role in shaping our attitudes towards the world, and the agency of others plays a large part in the formation of the very idea self, both consciously and unconsciously. Personality and personal identity, too, are interdependent to a far greater degree than we typically acknowledge. It should be emphasized that the conditioned nature of things does not render them useless. Zen Buddhists have personalities and possessions. To my knowledge, no Zen Buddhist has ever stood in court accused of theft and said, “but, your honor, there was no one to steal, nothing to steal, and no one to steal from.” Interbeing does not render conditioned phenomena useless or meaningless any more than a map is rendered meaningless or useless by being a contrived object that differs from the landscape it describes. Conceptual compartmentalizations such as “self” and “other” can be profoundly useful, but Zen Buddhism warns against overinvesting psychologically in their inherence.
Viewed through the lens of interbeing, Lobel’s intent in “Strange Bumps” becomes apparent. Owl is a symbol for the unenlightened being. Just as he is deceived by his actual blanket, the unenlightened being is deceived by the blanket of appearances. Evolution has provided us with a conceptual mind designed to cut up, categorize, and label the world around us for the purposes of survival. Our brains treat these compartmentalized reductions of the universe as fundamental aspects of the universe itself because doing so increases the chances of survival. We mistake our categorizations for inherent facts, attribute inherent natures to dependent phenomena, and mistake the suppositions of concepts such as “self” and “other” for concrete aspects of reality rather than convenient constructions. If we laugh at Owl's failure to recognize his own feet, we ought to laugh just at much at our own fears. Lobel wants us to see that in attributing to the world a greater independence than exists in reality and overinvesting psychologically in our misconceptions, we unenlightened beings are like so many Owls jumping on our beds.
But Lobel also gives a subtle intimations of hope in “Strange Bumps” through the use of light symbolism, consistently depicting Owl with a candle or lantern. Writing in the 1970s, Lobel was familiar with the concept of electric lighting, so his choice to depict Owl using candles and lanterns was deliberate. To understand this choice, we need only briefly consider the historical importance of light as a motif in Buddhist art. In historical Buddhist temple architecture for instance, it is not uncommon to find representations of Surya, the Hindu sun god, adorned with an urna on his forehead. In Buddhism, an urna is a mark that symbolizes an ability to see beyond the world of Samsara. It is one of the physical characteristics of the Buddha (who according to Zen was a human), but it would be wholly unnecessary for a divine being such as Surya. The inclusion of an urna on depictions of Surya in historical Buddhist temple architecture suggests that the sun god may have symbolized the potential for enlightenment in addition to his function as the bringer of light. In “Strange Bumps,” Lobel’s deliberate choice to include a candle and or lantern in many of his illustrations has a similar function. Even after Owl’s reaches the height of delusion and breaks his own bed in ignorance, Lobel depicts Owl carrying a candle as he sneaks downstairs. The inclusion of a lantern besides Owl as he sleeps in his armchair leaves little doubt about the significance of these symbols – the lights represent the concept of “Buddha nature” as conceived by Zen Buddhism. Zen teaches that every being has the potential to achieve enlightenment in this life. According to Zen doctrine, there is no fundamental difference between the Samsara world and Nirvana. Nirvana is simply living in a profound awareness of the illusory nature of Samsara, an awareness that has become so second-nature that the illusions no longer dominate our perceptions or thoughts, that we stop overinvesting psychologically in the inherence of mental constructs. Lobel’s full message in “Strange Bumps” is clear. Anyone mired in the world of Samsara will act in accordance with their false perceptions and unwittingly produce suffering. At the same time, however, everyone has the potential to escape this unfortunate loop by realizing the true nature of existence.
In the first two stories, Lobel presents Owl at his lowest moments, when he got caught up in his false perceptions. The next episode, “Tear-Water Tea,” presents a different aspect of Owl. Here, Lobel presents Owl performing a standard Buddhist compassion meditation. T he fact that Owl is making tea helps establish a monastic ambiance. Tea has long been the choice beverage of Buddhist monks all across Asia. One can see its profound influence in secondary cultural developments like the heavily Zen-influenced Japanese tea ceremony. Indeed, Owl's practice of making tear-water tea has an almost ritualistic feel to it. He draws out the kettle and verbally declares his intention to perform the ceremony, although there is no one there to hear him. With the kettle on his lap, he speaks again as if reciting some sort of incantation: “'Now,' said Owl, 'I will begin.'” Lobel writes, “Owl sat very still. He began to think of things that were sad.” The reader is immediately reminded of the story of the Buddha's path to enlightenment. By meditating on the suffering of the world, Buddha achieved supreme awakening. All sorts of Buddhists regularly perform precisely this sort of profound compassion meditation, thinking deeply about the suffering and sadness of others. So Owl, in sitting still and thinking of sad things, is essentially mimicking the Buddha in one of the ways suggested by Buddhist teaching. His tea ritual is in itself a form of meditation.
“The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.”
The actual contents of his tear-inspiring reflections are also significant, as they are laden with references to Zen Buddhist teachings. Describing Owl's second reflection, Lobel writes, “'Songs that cannot be sung,’ said Owl ‘because the words have been forgotten.'” The segmentation of this line by the words “said Owl” encourages us to consider its parts singly, revealing a clever double reference. The phrase “[s]ongs that cannot be sung” recalls the opening stanza of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching.
“A special transmission outside the Scriptures;
No dependence upon words and letters;
Direct pointing to the soul of man;
Seeing into one’s nature and the attainment of Buddhahood.”
The second phrase, “words have been forgotten,” is a direct reference to the associated Zen idea that Zen teaching cannot be properly or solely transmitted by words. This non-reliance on words or texts was one of the four fundamental aspects of Zen identified by D.T. Suzuki, the famous popularizer of Zen to the West. Indeed, there are anecdotes in the Zen tradition of teachers who burned the Sutras (written Buddhist teachings) because they considered them unimportant, if not a positive hindrance to true realization, or even because they simply wanted warmth.
Continuing his meditation, Owl reflects on “[s]poons that have fallen behind the stove and are never seen again.” Lobel has purposefully constructed a universe devoid of any living entities other than Owl, both to drive home the reflective setting and to underline the fundamental, undifferentiated unity which is the central idea of Zen Buddhist thought. For lack of any other being upon whose suffering he can meditate, Owl here rephrases the natural meditation on the ephemerality of life. Spoons that have fallen behind the stove stand in place of the friends and relatives who have died and shall never be seen again. Owl is reflecting on the Buddhist teaching of impermanence. The universe presents itself as a turbulent sea of conditioned phenomena waves constantly slipping in and out of existence, but the chaos of the surface conceals the quiet below and the fact that the waves are all just so much water.
Owl next reflects on “'[b]ooks that cannot be read…because some of the pages have been torn out.'” The phrase “Books that cannot be read” functions as another reflection of the fundamental Taoist-influenced idea of the ineffability of Zen Buddhist teaching. But taken as a whole, this meditation can should be interpreted as another substitution for the “other.” In this case, the book itself symbolizes the human being who believes that they have been damaged by the suffering of this life. They feel that their suffering effects them much the way that the tearing of pages effects books. But the reality of course is that there never was a separate book in the first place, and their perception of the damage they received is founded on an illusion. The essential Buddha mind cannot be torn by externals because there are no externals in undifferentiated awareness of the ultimate nature of reality.
Describing Owl’s next reflection, Lobel writes, “'Clocks that have stopped,' said Owl, 'with no one near to wind them up.'”1 Again, by segmentation we are encouraged to ponder the two clauses independently. The two pieces of this line are references to the Third and Second Noble Truths of Buddhism, respectively. The Second Noble Truth identifies the cause of suffering in life as attachment or desire, and the Third Noble Truth identifies the path to liberation through the cessation of this attachment. The Buddha taught that our clinging to and overinvesting in the impermanent, conditioned arisings of the world causes our suffering, but also that it is possible to break out of this deluded clinging. Through Owl, Lobel is using the metaphor of a clock to communicate this teaching – when we undertake actions motivated by clinging, we wind the clocks of our own suffering. But if we can see past the world of Samsara, we will gain the power of acting in a way that is not motivated by clinging, and we can thus stop rewinding the clock of our suffering and achieve Nirvana. The phrase “no one near to wind them up” is clearly a reference to the nonexistence of the ego implied in the Zen teaching of interbeing discussed above. According to Zen teaching, the realization is not that we can stop winding the clocks of our own suffering – the realization is that there is no separate self to wind the clock. The clinging itself is illusory, because there is no one to cling, just as there is “no one near to wind” the clock.
Lobel next has Owl meditate on mashed potatoes on a plate that no one wanted to eat. To get at the true meaning here, we need to question this choice. Why mashed potatoes? What makes them so sad? The answer to these questions is that mashed potatoes have taken on a perishable form. They cannot be returned to their original form of uncooked potatoes, in which they would have kept for a substantial period. In other words, like humans and anthropomorphic Owls, mashed potatoes are impermanent. All things in the interdependent world of forms lack independence and are constantly shifting and transforming. Human life itself is but one of these processes. The person who swims in the same river they swam in as a child is a different person swimming in a different river. And tomorrow both will be gone like so much spoiled mashed potatoes. Of course, Lobel’s clear reference to the Buddhist teaching of impermanence would not be possible without the implied juxtaposition of mashed potatoes with uncooked potatoes, which is the juxtaposition of Samara and Nirvana, of the false dependent self and the underlying unity.
Owl’s next meditation on pencils that are too short to use continues this theme. Just as a pencil's use is fundamentally limited by its length, so too our conditioned and interdependent existences are limited by the nature of our physiological systems. This observation of the individual characteristics of passing phenomena in the flux of our impermanent and interdependent world is a standard Buddhist meditation. Yet even Owl's meditation on the impermanence of life through reflection on a pencil has a deeper resonance with the teaching of interbeing. One statement of this teaching is that all objects and phenomena are devoid of independence, but a corollary of this teaching is that any single object can be taken as representing the entirety of the universe through its conditioning relations. This is sometimes conceptualized through the concept of the “Jewel Net of Indra,” a term drawn from Hindu mythology. Imagine the universe as a spider’s web covered in dew drops in the light of the dawn. If you look at a single dew drop closely, you can see a reflection of all the other dew drops, which in turn contain reflections of all the other dew drops, and so on ad infinitum, creating a fractal pattern in which the entirety of the web is reflected again and again on smaller and smaller scales. As discussed above, upon deeper reflection, any object or phenomenon is like a single drop of dew on the spider’s web. If you examine it closely, you can see the entire universe. So Owl is not only meditating on impermanence. He is also meditating deeply on interbeing. Any object might have done for this aspect of his meditation, but the choice of something as ordinary as a pencil gives his meditation a distinctly Zen flavor through its everyday simplicity.
After recounting many of Owl's specific reflections, Lobel writes that, “Owl thought about many other sad things. He cried and cried.” In other words Owl continues meditating for some time. As soon as his kettle is filled with tears, however, Owl is able to snap out of his sadness immediately. By meditating deeply on compassion, ephemerality, and interbeing, he has watered the seeds of his understanding and awareness, and he is ready to step right back into his everyday life. In fact, after Owl makes the tear-water tea, the reader learns that, “Owl felt happy as he filled his cup.” Lobel's message is that emotional mindstates are themselves impermanent and that meditative observation of their passing has an ameliorating effect and fosters good mental health. Owl's simple and unaffected pleasure after completing his meditation recalls the famous summary of the Zen thought: “When hungry, eat. When tired sleep.” His Zen is everyday Zen. After the first two episodes, “Tear-Water Tea” gives us the sense that Owl is making progress on the path.
“When mortals are alive, they worry about death. When they’re full, they worry about hunger. Theirs is the great uncertainty.”
But Owl's next adventure shows that he is still far from consistent in his ability to keep his mind from running away with him. “Upstairs and Downstairs” is another allegorical exploration of the mind-states of unenlightened beings. Owl worries about what is happening on the level of his house where he is not, and to resolve his anxiety, he attempts to be in two places at once by ru nning up and down the stairs. Lobel uses this obviously absurd behavior to comment on the Samsara thought patterns that are so ingrained in most people that they escape notice. Owl’s mind is stuck deep in a rut. He runs, but he cannot escape his anxiety. Instead of stopping and being present with what he is feeling (as he did in “Tear-Water Tea”), Owl cannot help but exhaust himself in absurd exertions that will never relieve him. Just as Owl runs up and down the stairs, so the unenlightened mind darts between past and future, turning over regrets and anxieties. According to Zen Buddhism, the past and future have no real existence. Like the concepts of self and other, past and future are mental constructs created by the survival-obsessed brain. Owl’s repeated anxious consideration of what is happening elsewhere recalls the words attributed to Bodhidharma, the father of Zen Buddhism in China, who says in his Wake Up Sermon, “When mortals are alive, they worry about death. When they're full, they worry about hunger. Theirs is the great uncertainty.” According to Zen, we only really have the present moment, and to live one's life mired in the mental projections of past and future or anxieties about what is happening elsewhere is as senseless as running up and down the stairs to try to be in two places at once. In doing so, we miss our real lives and only succeed in exhausting ourselves.
Owl's cries from the top and bottom of the staircase heighten the absurdity and futility of his efforts, but they also recall the teaching of interbeing and the nonexistence of the separate self. As noted above, according to Zen, the ego-self is not inherent. If we look more deeply we will see that even our ideas about oneself are shaped both by upbringing and by the reactions of others, and that our identity, which is so easily taken as being fundamental, is as interdependent as everything else. As one scholar of Zen, Alan Watts, put it, personal identity can make one distinct, but not separate.1 Owl's attempts to call his own name from one end of the staircase to the other, then, are meant to illustrate the “emptiness” (i.e., nonexistence) of his separate self. He cannot get a response because there is no fixed entity to give him one, and his search for his independent self is futile. But Owl is so attached to his delusions that his failures inspire redoubled efforts rather than producing clairvoyance. Casting off our habitual delusions is a difficult process.
“Upstairs and Downstairs” is also a brilliant play on a traditional approach of the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism – the koan. Koans and unsolvable riddles or problems that are intentionally given to students of the Rinzai school, such as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” The purpose of these koans is to provoke students to intense but futile logical efforts in the hopes that by exhausting logic as an avenue for achieving enlightenment, they will burst through the limited survival-oriented consciousness into the light of satori or sudden awakening. Owl’s futile efforts mimic just this course. He attempts to solve an unsolvable problem in various manners until he totally exhausts himself. In the end, the physical impossibility of the task forces Owl to give up his efforts, at least for the moment. Lobel’s note that “Owl sat...on the tenth step because it was a place that was right in the middle” is an obvious reference to Buddhism as “the Middle Way.” And if running up the stairs and down the stairs is a metaphor for the unenlightened mind’s flights to past and present, Owl ends up in the present. But judging by the final illustration of the story, Owl has not yet hit this threshold or achieved release. So he must unfortunately toil on.
The final episode of Owl at Home, “Owl and the Moon,” begins with a scene that recalls Owl's meditation in the “Tear-Water Tea” episode. The first image of the story depicts Owl sitting calmly on a rock beside the sea. While he is not sitting in the traditional full-lotus meditation pose, given Owl's girth, it seems a safe assumption that as an inflexible novice, he is employing a more accessible chair posture, and the natural setting resonates with the Zen predilection for unadorned natural surroundings. As he did in “Strange Bumps,” Lobel employs light symbolism to deliver his Buddhist message. When Owl begins his meditation, “Everything [is] dark,” but soon “a small tip of the moon [comes] up over the edge of the sea.” Advancing light is thus associated with the initiation of meditation. As Owl continues sitting quietly, the moon rises in its full splendor: “Soon the whole, round moon was shining.” The connection to enlightenment is obvious. We must be careful not to let the Zen-influenced sparseness and simplicity of the description give us a false sense of the quick passage of time. In fact, Lobel makes a special point of mentioning the duration of Owl's zazen. He sits for a long time, and the fact that Lobel provides no description of Owl’s thoughts (in sharp contrast to “Tear-Water Tea”) is an indication that Owl is practicing a more traditional Zen meditation — suspending all judgment and letting words and feelings pass like clouds through the sky.
When Owl finally breaks the extended silence of his meditation, he does so by reciting a poetic invocation of the teaching of interbeing: “If I am looking at you, moon, then you must be looking back at me.” Looking, rather than being an action done by one entity to another, is an active interdependent relationship between entities are that are distinct but not separate. However, we must be careful here not to read too much into Owl's statement. The fact that he can produce such a statement indicates that he is at least familiar with the concept of interbeing, but it does not necessarily indicate that he has fully internalized the idea on an intuitive level. The subsequent events of this episode show that while Owl has an intellectual understanding of the idea of interbeing, he has not yet fully made it his own. His previous neurotic delusions emerge again when he decides to make his journey home. He perceives the moon as following him, a perception obviously rooted in the egocentric self. His failure to realize the true nature of interbeing shows the reader once again that Owl, for all his occasional faint perceptions of the ultimate dimension, has a long way to go to full enlightenment.
Owl's worries about the moon's actions function as another metaphor for perturbation caused by attachment to Samsara and the narrow sense of self fostered by the survival-oriented brain. His attempts to get the moon to stop following him are like humanity’s grasping attempts to deny or escape the fleeting nature of existence, the ephemerality and interdependence of everything. Both arise from a fundamental misconception, cause duress for no reason, and are incapable of changing the nature of reality. Owl’s statements to the moon show that he does not have the slightest sense of the the nature of his fault. He attempts to apply logic within his flawed framework. He tells the moon that “you really must not come home with me. My house is small. You would not fit through the door.”1 When this statement fails to produce any effect, Owl decides that the problem is not in his fundamental perceptions, but in the fact that the moon cannot hear him. He shouts from the top of the hill, “Good-bye, moon!”2 When clouds cover the moon, he is convinced the moon has at last acquiesced to his pleading, but he is nonetheless saddened. Even when the universe appears to behave in such a way as to confirm his del usions, he is unhappy. Lobel's message is clear. Attachment to false perceptions is generative of suffering.
Lobel's decision to end Owl at Home on the happy note of Owl's contentment with the moon's reappearance outside of his bedroom window brings back the light motif which started “Owl and the Moon.” Owl’s agitation peaks as the moon disappears behind the clouds with its light, but he again finds peace as the moon reemerges in its full brightness. Lobel is both driving home the false and transitory nature of Owl's misconceptions in opposition to the ultimate, unlimited reality and reminding us again of the fleeting nature of our mind-states.
Far from a mere collection of amusing anecdotes about the life of an anthropomorphic simpleton, Lobel's Owl at Home is an artistically and allegorically complex interweaving of fundamental teachings of Zen Buddhism. Lobel uses the obvious absurdity of Owl's misconceptions and actions as a hyperbolic mirror to bring the perniciously inconspicuous false interpretations of the Samsara-mind into sharp relief. Yet Owl is himself a seeker on the path to enlightenment, and while he often finds himself mired in Samsara delusions, he always carries a candle, and the light of the moon always emerges from behind the clouds. Indeed, the moon was never gone even when he could not see it. The title of the final episode of Owl at Home, “Owl and the Moon,” recalls the traditional description of Zen as “a finger pointing at the moon.” Zen teaching, the finger, is only a guide to help us see the true nature of reality, the moon. Owl at Home is Lobel’s literary finger pointing at the moon. It is best understood as a call to awakening and self-examination. After reading Owl at Home we should ask ourselves, “am I playing the Owl in my own life without realizing it? How many beds have I broken? How many days have I spent in senseless and futile exertions only to wind up unhappy?”
