AT ADHYAPAKA BHAVAN ,
KARIKKAMURI CROSS ROAD ,
ERNAKULAM, COCHIN-11
KARIKKAMURI CROSS ROAD ,
ERNAKULAM, COCHIN-11
WHY HAS BODHI-DHARMA LEFT FOR THE EAST?
Written, directed, photographed, edited and produced by Bae Yong Kyun;
Korean, with English subtitles;
music by Chin Kyu Yong;
Synopsis:This unique Korean film explores the relationship between an elderly Zen master, an orphaned boy, and a young monk named Ki Bong. With little time left before his impending death, Master Hyegok teaches his two students all he knows about Zen Buddhism, which he has devoted his life to. In order to learn, both Ki Bong and the orphan Hae Jin must face and overcome their feelings of guilt for past deeds. Ki Bong left behind his blind mother and family when he came to the monastery; Hae Jin accidentally caused the death of a bird. After the old man's death, the monk and the orphan attempt to use their master's teachings to achieve spiritual enlightenment
Review/
Zen and the Art of Making Its Tenets Into a Movie
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
"I am insubstantial in the universe, but in the universe there is nothing that is not me," reflects Hye Gok (Yi Pan Yong), an elderly and ailing Zen Buddhist monk in Bae Yong Kyun's ravishingly beautiful film "Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?"
Not long after Hye Gok speaks these words to his young student Ki Bong (Sin Won Sop), his riddle finds a haunting visual corollary. As Ki Bong scatters the ashes of his teacher in a mountain pool strewn with autumn leaves, the colored foliage floating on the pool's surface intermingles with the reflections of leaves still clinging to the trees above.
At the same moment, the monk's reflection and his shadow overlap. The sounds of water, wind, birds and faraway animals blend with the imagery to evoke as intense an experience of being in nature as one could hope to glean from a film. Life and death, shadow and substance, image and reflection, all seem united and indistinguishable.
The scene, which the camera holds for several seconds, is one of many stunning visionary moments in the film, which opened yesterday at the Walter Reade Theater. Produced, directed, written, photographed and edited by Mr. Bae, a South Korean film maker, the movie, whose title is a Zen Buddhist koan, is a glacially slow but often spellbinding attempt to find a cinematic language for the Zen mode of perception.
The film tells the stories of the aging monk, his student and an orphaned child, Hae Jin (Huang Hae Jin), who live together in a remote Zen monastery on Mount Chonan, in South Korea. Several of the film's most striking early scenes portray the child's spiritual rites of passage.
One day, he throws a stone at a bird and seriously wounds it. Taking the creature home, he tries to nurse it back to life, but it dies. The boy hides its carcass under a rock, which he later turns over to discover the remains being devoured by maggots. Then he instinctively gives it a proper burial.
In a scene that suggests a Rousseau painting sprung to life, the child, while running through the woods at night, encounters a cow that has broken free from its shed. The two stand inches apart, gazing into each other's eyes. When Hae Jin has a toothache, Hye Gok ties a string around the tooth and yanks it out. Hae Jin's saving of his extracted tooth prompts a lesson in renunciation of the physical body.
Ki Bong also has difficult rites of passage. Both Hye Gok and Ki Bong pursue enlightenment through such intense physical challenges as meditating for hours on a rock while being lashed by icy river rapids that chill them to the bone. The young monk, who renounced the world to live in the monastery, returns briefly to the urban slum where he left behind his elderly blind mother. Sensing his presence, she greets him, but he doesn't acknowledge her call and steals silently and guiltily out of the house.
His most solemn task is the ritualistic cremation of his teacher in a mountain clearing. As his body becomes covered with ashes and soot from the blaze, he begins to grasp Hye Gok's teaching that birth and death are one.
Again and again, the film finds visual analogues for the oneness of the universe and the enlightenment to be found through the renunciation of earthly desires. In gazing into the physical world with a fixity, clarity and depth rarely found in the cinema, "Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?" goes about as far as a film can go in conjuring a meditative state.
Not long after Hye Gok speaks these words to his young student Ki Bong (Sin Won Sop), his riddle finds a haunting visual corollary. As Ki Bong scatters the ashes of his teacher in a mountain pool strewn with autumn leaves, the colored foliage floating on the pool's surface intermingles with the reflections of leaves still clinging to the trees above.
At the same moment, the monk's reflection and his shadow overlap. The sounds of water, wind, birds and faraway animals blend with the imagery to evoke as intense an experience of being in nature as one could hope to glean from a film. Life and death, shadow and substance, image and reflection, all seem united and indistinguishable.
The scene, which the camera holds for several seconds, is one of many stunning visionary moments in the film, which opened yesterday at the Walter Reade Theater. Produced, directed, written, photographed and edited by Mr. Bae, a South Korean film maker, the movie, whose title is a Zen Buddhist koan, is a glacially slow but often spellbinding attempt to find a cinematic language for the Zen mode of perception.
The film tells the stories of the aging monk, his student and an orphaned child, Hae Jin (Huang Hae Jin), who live together in a remote Zen monastery on Mount Chonan, in South Korea. Several of the film's most striking early scenes portray the child's spiritual rites of passage.
One day, he throws a stone at a bird and seriously wounds it. Taking the creature home, he tries to nurse it back to life, but it dies. The boy hides its carcass under a rock, which he later turns over to discover the remains being devoured by maggots. Then he instinctively gives it a proper burial.
In a scene that suggests a Rousseau painting sprung to life, the child, while running through the woods at night, encounters a cow that has broken free from its shed. The two stand inches apart, gazing into each other's eyes. When Hae Jin has a toothache, Hye Gok ties a string around the tooth and yanks it out. Hae Jin's saving of his extracted tooth prompts a lesson in renunciation of the physical body.
Ki Bong also has difficult rites of passage. Both Hye Gok and Ki Bong pursue enlightenment through such intense physical challenges as meditating for hours on a rock while being lashed by icy river rapids that chill them to the bone. The young monk, who renounced the world to live in the monastery, returns briefly to the urban slum where he left behind his elderly blind mother. Sensing his presence, she greets him, but he doesn't acknowledge her call and steals silently and guiltily out of the house.
His most solemn task is the ritualistic cremation of his teacher in a mountain clearing. As his body becomes covered with ashes and soot from the blaze, he begins to grasp Hye Gok's teaching that birth and death are one.
Again and again, the film finds visual analogues for the oneness of the universe and the enlightenment to be found through the renunciation of earthly desires. In gazing into the physical world with a fixity, clarity and depth rarely found in the cinema, "Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?" goes about as far as a film can go in conjuring a meditative state.
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