Warum Bodhi-Dharma in den Orient aufbrach

The first time I rented this movie, I saw it with a friend. We quit halfway through after groaning with boredom, then spent the rest of the evening making fun of it. A year later I tried it again, and have seen it five times since. It is extraordinary and is more gripping and absorbing each time I watch it.

There is of course no plot, only a loose story which illustrates, both in its whole and many fragmentary parts, core questions and ideas of Buddhism regarding the impermanence of all things and the corrupting nature of human desire. I know only a little about Buddhism, but what little I had read since the first unsuccessful viewing was probably what helped me see it subsequent times. Like Buddhism, it employs profound calm to upset some fundamental attitudes about the world and makes these disturbances fascinating: suffering, loss, the desire to hold on to things, and the vanity of intellectual growth.

This is however not by any stretch an "ideas" movie. It was made by a painter and remains very much a kind of tone-poem for the screen. I recommend it highly.

Many people have, at one time or another, asked the questions "Who am I, why am I here, what is the purpose of life?" This film addresses these issues as well as, and probably better then, any movie has since the film adaptation of Siddhartha or the more recent Little Buddha. Truly wonderful cinematography, acting, and a storyline that weaves traditional Zen stories/analogies into the works. The absorbing and meditative quality of the film itself makes it a classic work of Zen and film.

I first saw this film several years ago, and I was told that it was so hard to understand. Then I studied more about Zen Buddhism, and slowly but surely, I did begin to understand.

The movie is considered the best film about Buddhism, and rightly so. The director, a professor at the Buddhist Dongguk University in Seoul, took seven years to make it and used non-actors to play the parts.

He recently remastered the image and dialogue in a new DVD release, but unfortunately, no extras or featurettes. This film is one of the greatest made, and I feel sorry that it hasn't gotten the proper DVD treatment it deserves.

Nonethless, this movie is a meditation about Buddhism, life and death, and our raison d'etre. Definitely not to be missed.

I first saw this movie back in 1990, being played in Switzerland. to understand and appreciate this movie, you need to face the fact that western and eastern story-telling differ a lot. And since Bodhi-Dharma, who never appears in the picture, is the first patriarch of Ch'an Buddhism in China, meditation is not only a subject of the movie but also became an inspiration for the makers. The story is therefore told in an extremely slow manner, including several flashbacks. It's a perfect introduction to Zen, but also a relaxing and beautiful movie to enjoy alone.

How to approach beautiful, crazy Zen in a way that makes sense to us in the West? In a way that it, and this film, can actually inform us.

This problem, one of translation, was inherited by cinema. China conceived this poetry where humane dispassion is passionately sung about, where a flower looks back at us looking at it, but we know of Zen from Japan, us here most likely from their cinema. Perhaps even without knowing it.

But when the most fascinating form to express it in came along, so did Mao. Japan shouldered the task to do what the Chinese couldn't, with their affinity for broken symmetries and abstraction cultivated in the tea room, but even here we concede to a certain unfamiliarity that keeps these things at a distance. Teshigahara makes some general sense to us, but he's not really opened until we learn about ikebana.

How to bridge the rift then? Which is bigger than we think because we have the words, 'emptiness', 'desire', 'self', but mean by them wholly different things than the Buddhist.

Which is to say; having been brought up in a culture that distinguishes between the omnipresent creator who created something out of nothing and us as creatures separately placed in that world to atone for an original, ancestral sin (which means that the world itself is the punishment), or still swears by Descartes' old stratagem that we are because we think, how can we begin to wrap our heads around notions of emptiness as actually soothing? What are we to make of Zen poems that speak of death, which so terrifies us, as merely the echoes of bamboo flutes returning to the bamboo forest?

When Zen Master Ikkyu says that "I'd like to offer something to help you; but in Zen, we don't have a single thing", take his word for it. He's being a bit of a smartass, but that's because he wants you to listen for a moment. Which is to say that if we come to this looking for something, a taste of Zen that will guide us home, we'll likely have to struggle to stay awake long enough to realize that there is nothing to be offered.

More precisely, nothing to be taught. But if we become aware instead? If we come to embody what the film does? We are related with various aspects of the teachings here, how ego and desire bind us, how in stillness of mind we can free ourselves of those bonds. The illusionary burden of duality. But as the young monk meditates, a cow breaks free of her captivity. So what to do?

Down in the city, the monk offers up his alms' bowl in the middle of the busy marketplace. This is where stillness of mind attains proper meaning, in the sound and fury.

But again, if the film has few words to impart, and it does, like a visual mantra which in repetition calls for us to concentrate on the texture of the sound itself, what are we to take from it? Perhaps a few pointers to wisdom, mere signposts on the road.

Most importantly, meditational absorption (the actual Chan/Zen). Again we may be troubled by our inclination to regard images here as symbolic, as meaning something else, a flying crow or a cow leading a boy, when things are actually simpler; which is the most complex they can be. This is not a mystical work, things here mean what they are. If it is difficult to come to terms with this, it's because we've been so accustomed to grasp 'flower' by what stored ideas we have of 'flower'. Descartes again.

But to depart is to arrive, as the dying Zen master says. To send the mind out is to see it come back again. Isn't that cool? So how to depart from established notions? How to look at the flower as it looks back at us, to actually do this?

One of the great contributions of Zen to this conundrum is the koan, the enigmatic phrase whose purpose is to tie our tongue so that we may reflect in silence. There is a koan asked of the novice in this, which points towards the kensho, the awakening of the true self. The title of the film is another. Life is the most complex; how to gather all the different notes we can feel played out in us into a single harmonious music? And how to play that music, actively, joyfully, as it plays us?

There is no right or wrong answer to these, other than what we embody through our experience. Embodying this is enough. And by this I don't mean a fancier version of being 'mesmerized'. I mean be one with it, like the calligrapher becomes one with his brush, the haiku poet with his blank paper. Hear what is said, then be quiet as the question answers itself.

Something to meditate upon.