Seeing Like the Buddha

Seeing Like the Buddha

Enlightenment through Film

Francisca Cho
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cho, Francisca, author.

Title: Seeing like the Buddha : enlightenment through film / Francisca Cho.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031461 (print) | LCCN 2017001011 (ebook) | ISBN
9781438464398 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464404 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Buddhism in motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.B795 C46 2017 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.B795
(ebook) | DDC 791.43/682943—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031461

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgment ix
Abbreviations xi

Chapter 1
Seeing Like the Buddha 1

Chapter 2
The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . .
and Spring 27

Chapter 3
The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak 49

Chapter 4
Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 67

Chapter 5
The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 87

Chapter 6
The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 107

Chapter 7
Descent into the World 127

Notes 145
References 161
Index 171
 Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), Yasai Nehan (“vegetable

nirvana”), ca. 1792. (Courtesy of Kyoto National
Museum) 3
Figure 1.2 The artist Renée Cox substitutes for Christ in
Yo Mama’s Last Supper, 1999. (Courtesy of
Renée Cox Studio) 6
Figure 1.3 The plate just right of the Cox/Christ image
depicts a white Judas in the triad of disciples.
(Courtesy of Renée Cox Studio) 7
Figure 1.4 Borobudur Temple, ninth century. Central Java,
Indonesia. 20
Figure 1.5 An exposed stūpa Buddha on the circular terrace
of Borobudur. (Photograph by Robert DeCaroli) 23
Figure 2.1 The Bodhisattva Guanyin looks down upon the
world and hears its cries. 29
Figure 2.2 The man looks at the Buddha and seeks resolution
for his pain. 35
Figure 2.3 The Buddha is a live character who looks back at
the people who come before him. 35
Figure 3.1 Somdet To sees Nang Nak through meditation on
the cycle of life. 60
Figure 3.2 Nang Nak as seen through the humanizing vision
of Somdet To. 61

vii
viii Illustrations

Figure 4.1 The Rashōmon gate reflects the social and moral
disintegration of the twelfth century and the fall
of the Heian dynasty. 68
Figure 4.2 The woodcutter descends into the woods where
light and shadow are inextricably entangled. 77
Figure 4.3 The woodcutter emerges from the Roshōmon gate
into the clear light of moral action. 83
Figure 5.1 The running children are more distinct as shadows
reflected in the bright surface of the water. 90
Figure 5.2 In this long‑distance shot so typical of Maborosi,
Yumiko’s figure is hidden in the bus stop enclosure
as the bus slowly winds its way out of the still
camera frame. 90
Figure 6.1 The men of C Company are outgrowths of the
foliage and return to the landscape in death. 114
Figure 6.2 Private Witt is surrounded by Japanese soldiers
in the moment before his death. 116
Figure 6.3 The image of flowing water sustains Private Train’s
reflection: “Darkness, light. Strife and love.
Are they the workings of one mind? The features
of the same face?” 121
Figure 7.1 The perspective from the bottom of the stairs of
Borobudur provides a clear view of the niche
Buddhas, who appear to accompany beings
descending the temple. (Photograph by Alexander
Ipfelkofer) 129
Figure 7.2 A close‑up of some of the 432 niche Buddhas on
top of the gallery walls. (Photograph by Robert
DeCaroli) 131
Figure 7.3 Danielle as she appears 8 seconds into the video. 133
Figure 7.4 Danielle as she appears 4 minutes and 17 seconds
into the video. 133
 Acknowledgment

For the students of my Buddhism and Film course offered in the Spring
semesters of 2010, 2012, and 2014: It has been a privilege to share my
ideas with you and you have inspired me with your amazing insights
in turn.

ix
 Abbreviations

A Anguttara Nikāya. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi as The Numerical

Discourses of the Buddha. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2012.
AdS Amitāyurdhyāna Sūtra. Translated by Hisao Inagaki in col-
laboration with Harold Stewart as The Sutra on Contemplation
of Amitāyus. In The Three Pure Land Sutras. Revised Second
Edition. Numata Center for Buddhist Translation, 2003.
D Digha Nikāya. Translated by Maurice Walshe as The Long
Discourses of the Buddha. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995.
M Majjhima Nikāya. Translated by Bhikkhu Ńān.amoli and ­Bhikkhu
Bodhi as The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha. Boston:
Wisdom Publications, 1995.
PraS Pratyutpanna‑Buddha‑Sam . mukhāvasthita‑Samādhi‑Sūtra. Trans-
lated by Paul Harrison. Tokyo: The International Institute for
Buddhist Studies, 1990.
S Samyutta Nikāya. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi as The Connected
Discourses of the Buddha. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000.
SN Sutta Nipāta. Translated by H. Saddhatissa. London: Curzon,
1985.
Vm Visuddhimagga. Translated by Bhikkhu Ñyān.amoli as The Path
of Purification. Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1976.

xi
 chapter 1

Seeing Like the Buddha

Erasing the Buddha

T he objective of this book is to demonstrate that films can take on

the role that has been played by traditional Buddhist icons and
images. Film can articulate Buddhist teachings and, more significantly,
put them into practice. This means taking film seriously as a medium
for cultivating certain ways of being in the world that have previously
been attained through ritual and contemplative practices. Both tradi‑
tional and filmic practices can be put under the rubric of “seeing like
the Buddha,” which is intimately tied to the desire of Buddhists to see
the Buddha himself. As a founded religion, Buddhists express devotion
and piety toward the historical Siddhārtha Gautama of the Śakya clan
(Śākyamuni). This means keeping him alive through images and narra‑
tives about his life, similar to the way Jesus is kept in mind by Christians.
And parallel to Christology, theoretical understandings about the nature
of the Buddha as both a historical and transcendent being have allowed
Buddhists to “see” him in multiple ways, as well as in multiple things.
But throughout Buddhist history, the project of seeing the Buddha has
entailed a mandate to see like the Buddha, which, paradoxically, erases
the individual form of Siddhārtha. The emphasis shifts from what is seen
to how one sees, which in turn renders art and aesthetic experiences into
equivalents of the Buddha himself.
This drift toward erasing the Buddha in favor of seeing like the
Buddha is the central aesthetic and soteriological theme of this book, and
the organizational principle behind the films that have been selected for

1
2 Seeing Like the Buddha

discussion. The progression of films increasingly loses references to and

images of all things Buddhist until “the Buddhist film” is instantiated
in ostensibly secular works. This pattern is modeled after a particular
dynamic in Buddhist history. This is not to deny that the Buddha’s
image is revered, preserved, and perpetuated by Buddhists even now,
some twenty‑five centuries after his death. Depictions of the Buddha are
governed by iconographical conventions such as hand postures (mudras)
that signify certain activities or moments in the Buddha’s life, and the
thirty‑two marks (laks.an.a) of the great man such as the fleshly protuber‑
ance on the top of the Buddha’s head (us.n.īs.a) and the imprint of wheels
on the soles of his feet.1 There are other kinds of Buddhist icons such
as representations of bodhisattvas (Buddhas‑to‑be) and man.d.ala Bud‑
dhas that are endowed with fixed symbolic attributes. But there are also
“open form” images that exhibit the layering and substitution of motifs
(Shimizu 1992, 207). In such images, the Buddha is “present” primar‑
ily as a reference point that deliberately raises the question of what and
whom else can be seen as the Buddha.
Itō Jakuchū’s (1716–1800) painting entitled Yasai Nehan (“veg‑
etable nirvana”), for example, takes the traditional image of the reclining
Śākyamuni passing into his parinirvana and replaces him with a daikon
radish surrounded by other vegetables that stand in for the various ele‑
ments of this iconic scene. Eight corn stalks take the place of the Śāla
trees under which the Buddha died, and the daikon radish is surrounded
by an array of turnips, gourds, mushrooms, melons, chestnuts, and other
vegetables to form the assembly of mourners who witness the Buddha’s
passing. Jakuchū’s well‑attested Buddhist piety eliminates the possibility
that the painting is a mere parody, and the image must be understood
in the context of Japanese Buddhist and culinary history. Relevant factors
include the tradition of monastic vegetarianism, the association of the
daikon with the pure and rustic life, and quite importantly, the Tendai
Buddhist creed that even plants and trees attain Buddhahood due to the
inherent Buddha‑nature in all things. It is this notion that “allowed the
interchangeability between the original subject (Śākyamuni) and other
subjects, be they poets or mendicant monks”—or even vegetables (Shi‑
mizu 1992, 211).
The doctrine of Buddha‑nature was not espoused by all Japanese
Buddhists, let alone the entire Buddhist world, but it is dominant in
the Mahāyāna‑leaning regions of East Asia and Tibet.2 The concept
of Buddha‑nature originates in the bivalent Indian Buddhist idea of
Figure 1.1. Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), Yasai Nehan (“vegetable nirvana”), ca.
1792. (Courtesy of Kyoto National Museum)
4 Seeing Like the Buddha

tathāgatagarbha, which translates both as the “embryo of enlightenment,”

in the sense of the incipient and potential Buddhahood within all beings,
and also as the “womb of enlightenment,” in the alternative sense of
a space that contains all beings. Both readings affirm that everyone is
a Buddha, either in the future or as a present reality due to the fact
that all beings are already contained within the womb of Buddhahood.3
According to the Śrīmālādevīsim . hanāda Sūtra (“The Lion’s Roar of Queen
Śrīmālā”), when the tathāgatagarbha is covered by defilements then it
is in an embryo state, and when it is not covered by defilements then
Buddhahood is a present and actualized reality (Wayman and Wayman
1974, 45). The critical idea here is that even when it is covered with
defilements, the tathāgatagarbha is nevertheless present. “Buddha‑nature”
is actually a translation of the term buddhadhatu (“Buddha element”),
which is one of many synonyms for tathāgatagarbha, and which empha‑
sizes this idea that it is a quality possessed by and present in all things.
Tathāgatagarbha thought is closely linked to the doctrine of empti‑
ness (śunyatā), which deems that the dependently arising nature of all
phenomena makes everything empty of inherent essence and identity. To
be empty of an inherent essence may sound negative, but it is understood
as the quality that enables beings to transform into a Buddha—Buddha‑
hood is possible precisely because suffering and delusion are not inherent
to human being and existence. This openness to becoming and change
in a felicitous direction may be understood as the quality of the Buddha
himself—the tathāgatagarbha. Understanding the truth of emptiness is “a
necessary precondition of the realization of tathāgatagarbha” and the idea
of tathāgatagarbha in turn corrects “a one‑sidedly negative perspective” on
the teaching of emptiness (King 1991, 16). Functioning as positive and
negative formulations of the same insight, respectively, Buddha‑nature
and emptiness both erase the separation between the enlightened realm
of nirvana and the tainted world of samsara, at least in their earlier
interpretation as incalculably distant spatial and temporal domains. This
also eliminates the distinction between the Buddha and other beings,
and sanctions the idea that even “secular” aesthetic works can function
as serious religious practice. This history is notable because it refrains
from some characteristic anxieties regarding religious images in our more
immediate monotheistic traditions.
Strictures against representing the divine in Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam are quite familiar to us, of course, but this is not to sug‑
gest a simplistic contrast between an image‑affirming Buddhism versus
 Seeing Like the Buddha 5

image‑fearing monotheisms. The Buddhist world has also had its episodes
of aniconism and iconoclasm but this similarity needs to be qualified
with the particular reasons why Chan/Zen monks, for example, counseled
against the use of religious images.4 Zen iconoclasts embrace a semiotic
worldview different from theists, as I have discussed elsewhere (Cho
2009), and although they express the familiar warning not to mistake
the image for what it signifies, the same semiotics is used by other
Buddhists to affirm the identity between artistic representations and the
original reality. This ability to pivot seamlessly between iconoclasm and
iconolatry is, paradoxically, the manifestation of a single logic. Some
Buddhists reject images on the grounds that they are empty of any inher‑
ent qualities and suitability, and other Buddhists—sometimes the same
person on a different occasion—embrace and sanction images because of
their inherent emptiness.5 We can begin to parse the reversibility of the
two positions by remembering that the purpose of the Zen attack on
religious icons is to point out the sacred in the profane, such as the world
of vegetables. The objective, in essence, is to get past the nirvana‑samsara
distinction and its apparent opposition. This is diametrically opposed to
theistic iconoclasm, which zealously guards the separation between the
worldly and the divine.
Such differences lead to an interesting contrast when it comes to
images of the Buddha and images of Jesus Christ. Depictions of Christ
and the controversies they engender help make this contrast clear, and
they might be summed up as an underlying anxiety about historical fidel‑
ity—given that Christ is understood as the flesh‑and‑blood embodiment
of the divine who walked the earth at a particular place and time. This
historical nature is a critical stipulation about who Christ was and central
to the logic of his redemptive power. Śākyamuni was also a historical
being but the early Buddhist tradition—as evident in the Pāli texts of
the Theravāda school—prioritizes the Buddha’s teachings over his per‑
sonhood. In contrast, his historical form‑body (rūpakāya) is relegated to
the realm of the ephemeral and the illusory, to which Buddhist thought
consigns all of phenomenal reality. When the Buddha’s follower Vikkali
complains that he has not seen the Buddha in some time, the Buddha
famously responds: “One who sees the Dhamma sees me; one who sees
me sees the Dhamma” (S III.120). This passage asserts the importance of
the Dharma (Pāli: Dhamma)—that is, the Buddha’s teachings—over the
person of the Buddha himself. This leads to a distinction between the his‑
torical Buddha, who cannot remain in the world, and the Dharma‑body
6 Seeing Like the Buddha

(dharmakāya) that does. This is a common explanation for early Buddhist

aniconism: the recognition of Śākyamuni’s impermanence dissuaded his
followers from producing images and fixating on him in favor of looking
instead to the body of his teachings. We will return to the permutations
and implications of this Buddhology below.
A more succinct and illuminating exercise for the moment might be
to compare Jakuchū’s Yasai Nehan to the 1999 photographic installation
created by the Jamaican‑born artist Renée Cox called Yo Mama’s Last
Supper. Like Jakuchū’s depiction of the Buddha’s parinirvana, Cox takes
on a significant hagiographical moment—this time in the life of Jesus
Christ—that is overtly modeled on Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic painting of
the Last Supper. The composition is actually made from five photographic
plates, with Cox herself, who is black and female—and nude—portrayed
in the center image as Christ. In each of the two photographic plates on
either side of the center piece, a triad of males aggregate into the twelve

Figure 1.2. The artist Renée Cox substitutes for Christ in Yo Mama’s Last Sup‑
per, 1999. (Courtesy of Renée Cox Studio)
 Seeing Like the Buddha 7

disciples—following da Vinci’s own compositional structure—except that

eleven of them are black and a lone white male sits in the position of
Judas. The exhibition of Yo Mama’s Last Supper at the Brooklyn Museum
in 2001 led then‑mayor Rudolph Giuliani to call for a decency commis‑
sion to regulate publicly funded museums. There were also expressions of
outrage from religious voices such as the Catholic League for Religious
and Civil Rights (New York Times, “Affronted by Nude ‘Last Supper,’
Giuliani Calls for Decency Panel,” Feb. 16, 2001).
The expressions of shock and accusations of anti‑Catholicism are
interesting for their inevitability, on the one hand, and the way they
distract from the substantive social and theological issues the photograph
provokes, on the other. Cox made this explicit in her response to crit‑
ics by invoking her Catholic school education and its teaching that all
humans are made in the image of God. This prompted the rebuttal that
it was simply the offence of her nudity—“There would be no problem if

Figure 1.3. The plate just right of the Cox/Christ image depicts a white Judas
in the triad of disciples. (Courtesy of Renée Cox Studio)
8 Seeing Like the Buddha

you had kept your clothes on,” stated William Donohue, President of the
Catholic League (New York Times, “ ‘Yo Mama’ Artist Takes on Catholic
Critic,” Feb. 21, 2001). But this reply conveniently deflects the histori‑
cal contradictions (and political tensions) in the alternatively accepted
norm of the blond‑haired and blue‑eyed Christ. As a historical being
Christ had a certain face and complexion, but social power determines
what he looks like and creates difficulties for the purported catholicity
of Christian salvation. Cox’s work pointedly raises these problems and
the expressions of outrage in response to it underscore them even more.
Tensions centering on historical fidelity in the representation of
Christ continue in the realm of film. As soon as film became a mass
industry in the United States, people began imagining its educational and
religious possibilities. A 1910 essay by the Reverend Herbert Jump, “The
Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture,” counseled Christians not to
be put off by the novelty of the medium or the secularism of the industry,
pointing out the potential of movies to function as lively sermons. Jump
pays particular attention to the engaging qualities of film: “[T]he picture
that is literally moving, that portrays dramatic sequence and life‑like
action, possesses tenfold more vividness and becomes therefore a more
convincing medium of education” (2002, 218).6 As this essay portended,
the power of film for religious ends has not been lost on Christians.
One recent and famous realization of this is Mel Gibson’s The Passion
of the Christ (2004), which was treated by Christians as a sermon and
a religious meditation in much the same way that paintings, sculptures,
and Passion narratives have been experienced since the medieval period.7
The Passion was engulfed in controversy, however, because of the
way it inflames anti‑Semitism. In this, the movie continues a long‑stand‑
ing legacy of both theological readings and artistic depictions that blame
Jews for Christ’s crucifixion. Hence, much of the pushback on the film
consisted of challenges to its historical accuracy on multiple counts—
not only the actions of Jews, but the languages spoken, the nature of
the torture and crucifixion, and the personality of Pontius Pilate. These
rebukes were induced by Gibson’s own claim to tell the story of Christ
as it “really” was, which reinforces the sense of realism that film drama‑
tizations already possess. New Testament scholar Paula Fredriksen writes,
“For better and (probably) for worse, Christianity in America is mediated
as much through popular media as through the traditions and institutions
of our various churches. Convictions both about the Bible and about
Christianity can be as heart‑felt as they are uninformed.”8 In Fredrik‑
 Seeing Like the Buddha 9

sen’s estimation, Gibson problematically purveys the standard Hollywood

blockbuster commodity, with its gratuitous violence and simplistic “good
versus evil” action, in the guise of religious history.
Accuracy becomes a big question because historical claims are inti‑
mately tied to spiritual and moral ones in the Christian conception of
Jesus. His story is linked to that of others, and when it comes to the
Passion, Adele Reinhartz observes, “filmmakers do have a responsibility to
think through the potential negative consequences of their films” because
Jews are indelibly written into that history (2004, 28). Furthermore,
the Christian understanding of Jesus is itself fraught, particularly in its
attempt to balance his human and divine natures. The Jesus film often
steps into this fray by making Christ either too superhuman or too
human (Deacy 2001). For that reason, the Jesus film is doubly vulnerable
to controversy, from the perspective of theological orthodoxy as well as
historical accuracy. The protests over Martin Scorsese’s The Last Tempta‑
tion of Christ (1988) for making the savior too recognizably mundane in
his longings are a case in point. Gibson’s own Christ, on the other hand,
survives such an excess of physical brutality that he is rendered into an
action superhero, compromising the theological view that it is Christ’s
very humanness that enabled the redemptive power of his suffering.
The sociopolitical and religious stakes in how one sees Christ, then,
impose qualifications on Reverend Jump’s enthusiasm for the motion pic‑
ture, which he sanctions on the grounds that Jesus himself preached by
means of exciting and accessible stories. He singles out Jesus’s parable of
the Good Samaritan because it was taken “from contemporary experience.
It was the sort of thing that might have happened any day and to any one
in the audience” (2002, 217). But this very approachability also creates
the justification for iconoclasm. As David Freedberg observes, the power
of images to attract and hold the attention is a double‑edged sword,
for, “What if the lingering is occasioned by color, line, and pleasure in
anatomy, and not by reflections of sacred history and dogma?” (1989,
187). The moving action that film provides only adds to this litany of
aesthetic pleasures. In the course of Christian history, the mesmerizing
powers of art have required interventions in order to “draw the mind
away from the attractive sign to the meaningful signified  .  .  .  [to] prevent
our dwelling on quality and form” (Freedberg 1989, 188).
The Buddha was also a historical figure, but his human existence
is contrasted to—and subsumed under—the ever‑present Dharma‑body
of his teachings, which appropriately includes the idea that all beings
10 Seeing Like the Buddha

are ultimately insubstantial, impermanent, and not to be clung to. As

theorizing about the nature of the Buddha progressed, the Buddha was
understood in terms of the ever‑present dharmakāya, understood both
as a transcendent realm such as the dharmadhātu (“dharma dimension,”
“dharma sphere,” dharma element”) and as a personified being such as
Vairocana, the Universal Buddha.9 The impulses that initially minimized
the historical Buddha through aniconism eventually gave rise to the view
that Śākyamuni is only one historical manifestation of the ever‑present
dharmakāya.10 Ironically, this provided a justification for reversing ani‑
conism on the grounds that even images of the Buddha—as yet another
historical manifestation—can also lead sentient beings to liberation.
This logic is demonstrated in the well‑known story of the first image
of Śākyamuni and its implication that there is no functional difference
between the image and the original person. This image was reputedly
commissioned by King Udayana of Kauśāmbī when the Buddha was
absent for three months preaching to his mother in the Trāyastrim . śa
heaven (“heaven of the thirty‑three”).11 Stricken by the absence of the
Buddha, the king had an artist transported to the heaven to create a like‑
ness in sandalwood. Quite interestingly, it is said that when the Buddha
returned to the palace, the sandalwood image rose and greeted the Bud‑
dha, who in turn responded to the image and said: “The work expected
from you is to toil in diligence to convert the unbelieving and to lead
in the way of religion the future ages” (Beal 1980, 255).12
This mythical tale encapsulates Buddhist historical practice, in
which the longing to see the absent Buddha has led countless follow‑
ers to recreate him in likenesses that are animated into “living images”
that are thought to be equal in every way to the original Buddha. The
Jowo Śākyamuni housed in the Jokhang temple in Lhasa, which is often
described as the most important image in Tibet, is another that was
supposedly constructed during the Buddha’s lifetime. It was purportedly
brought to Tibet by Wencheng Gongzhu (628–680) from the Chinese
Tang court as a part of her dowry when she was wed to the first Tibetan
emperor, Songtsen Gampo (d. 649). Its status as a living image means
“devotees do not view him as simply a statue but rather as a manifesta‑
tion of the Buddha himself ” (Warner 2011, 3). The Śākyamuni image in
Seiryōji temple in Kyoto is another statue that is invested with the same
status. It is supposedly a copy of King Udayana’s sandalwood image that
was brought from China to Japan by the monk Chōnen in the tenth
century (Henderson and Hurvitz 1956).13 Both the Jowo and Seiryōji
 Seeing Like the Buddha 11

Buddhas are venerated as “first Buddha images” that were carved from
life while the Buddha lived, and we can see a concern with historical
continuity here in that the veracity of the images is vouchsafed by the
claim that they were modeled on the actual Buddha.
But this conceit seems undermined by the fact that the Seiryōji
Buddha, for example, is acknowledged to be a copy of King Udayana’s
sandalwood image, which means that it cannot be a “first Buddha image”
that was modeled on the living Buddha. This apparent inconsistency actu‑
ally holds the key to understanding how the power of Buddha images
is rendered. A comparison to Buddhist relic worship provides helpful
illumination. The centrality and power of relics in Buddhist ritual practice
is tied to the fact that relics are either remains of the Buddha himself
or were in direct physical contact with him, such as his begging bowl.
Relics therefore make the absent Buddha present through the power of
synecdoche and contact. Buddha images are also recognized as a kind of
relic, but one that acts on a different kind of power:

Images  .  .  .  gain their authority by their capacity to re‑present

the Buddha visually. . . . Images, unlike relics, can be repro‑
duced endlessly, and they are accepted as worthy of venera‑
tion because they embody basic iconographic conventions.
Images are also, in many cases, ritually consecrated. . . . In
general, however, the ease of reproducing images allows for
their proliferation outside monastic control to an extent that
distinguishes them from relics, which are usually confined
within the ritually defined boundaries of monastic complexes.
(Trainor 1997, 30–31)

The power of images arises from the fact that they are ritually
consecrated in monastic ceremonies that bring them to life as living
Buddhas (Bentor 1996; Swearer 2004). Some images such as the Jowo
and Seiryōji Buddhas are given distinction by virtue of a lineage that is
traced back to the historical Śākyamuni. This logic works for the Seiryōji
Buddha because it is connected to Udayana’s sandalwood Buddha, which
in turn is connected to the original Buddha. This idea of an unbroken
physical lineage partakes in the logic of relics, which are also authenti‑
cated by chronicles of successive transmission from the Buddha down to
the present day. But this proximity to the actual Buddha, which seems
to guarantee the “likeness” of these images, has less to do with physical
12 Seeing Like the Buddha

similarity than with ritual efficacy. The consecrated images are “like” the
Buddha in that their presence has the same potency in allowing devotees
to generate merit.14 And unlike relics, each of which must be an actual
physical remnant of the Buddha, images can proliferate to the point
where the criterion of physical proximity becomes far less relevant. This
trend is reinforced by developments in theories about Buddhahood that
see the potential of multiple historical entities to function as manifesta‑
tions of the dharmakāya.
We can see this development in Buddhist locations that adhere
closely to Mahāyāna tradition. Yael Bentor’s study of Tibetan Buddhist
ritual texts reveals that consecrated images and stūpas (Buddhist reliquary
monuments) are “regarded as parallel to the emanation of a Buddha in
the sam. sāric world” (1996, 5) because the act of consecration “establishes”
(Sanskrit: pratis.t.hā; Tibetan: rab‑gnas) the dharmakāya in the physical
object.15 In Mahāyāna theory, the Buddha’s form‑body (rūpakāya) is only
one of many “manifestations” or “emanations” (nirmān.akāyas) that can
appear in the world.16 This signals an important shift in the conception
of Śākyamuni, who is demoted into merely one agent in a universe of
entities that function for the sake of liberating sentient beings. In the
Tibetan consecration texts:

[w]riters distinguish three types of emanation bodies. The

supreme emanation bodies are the Buddhas; the born ema‑
nation bodies are various incarnations of Buddhas and bod‑
hisattvas born in the world, such as the Dalai Lamas and
other incarnate lamas; finally, the made emanation bodies are
emanations made by artists and consecrated by lamas, such
as stūpas and images, and even bridges. (Bentor 1996, 5–6)17

The nature of the dharmakāya that is established in these objects

needs some parsing here. The Dharma‑body may simply be the physical
texts that preserve the Buddha’s words even though he himself is gone.
In the Pāli Nikāyas, the dharmakāya simply means the teachings of the
Buddha (Xing 2005, 22). But the Dharma‑body came to be understood
in a second sense as the qualities (dharmas) of the Buddha’s knowledge
and enlightenment.18 This enlarges the idea of the Buddha into some‑
thing more than a historical person or even a body of teachings, focusing
instead on the Buddha’s knowledge (adhigama) as an abiding possibility
that is ever‑present in the world: “By implication, it is also a place where
 Seeing Like the Buddha 13

the student or the worshipper can follow the Buddha’s example and real‑
ize the Perfection of Wisdom for himself or herself ” (Eckel 1992, 99). To
say that the Dharma‑body remains in the world, then, is to say that the
virtuous qualities that the Buddha attained are an ever‑present possibility
for all beings. As a result, the importance of the historical Śākyamuni
is diminished, as he is turned into one temporary manifestation of this
larger principle of an abiding Buddhahood. The early tradition’s aniconic
sign—such as the footprint of the Buddha—emphasizes the Buddha’s
absence as a reminder that his “importance lies precisely and only in
the effects he has upon those others to whom he appears to be present”
(emphasis added; Griffiths 1994, 94). The point of seeing the Buddha
is not so much to see him but rather to see what he sees.
In Mahāyāna Buddhism, the desire to see what the Buddha saw
deemphasizes Śākyamuni Buddha by creating a bewildering prolifera‑
tion of Buddhas. This trend actually begins in Theravāda texts, where
Śākyamuni recounts a lineage of six previous Buddhas who lived parallel
lives in prior cosmic ages.19 The Mahāsām. ghika, another early school, orig‑
inated the idea of numerous Buddhas living in other worlds. Mahāyāna
cosmology develops this idea to reveal countless simultaneously existing
Buddhas and bodhisattvas in multiple world systems and Buddha‑fields
(buddhaks.etra), or Pure Lands. Working around the early teaching that
only one Buddha can arise in a world system, the Mahāyāna emphasis
on innumerable bodhisattvas who strive for complete liberation fueled
the logic that there must be many Buddha lands for them to occupy
(Xing 2005, 166).
The preeminence of bodhisattvas in Mahāyāna Buddhism may have
created the need to provide realms for them to occupy, but the idea that
the universe is teeming with Buddhas and bodhisattvas in every direc‑
tion also exhibits a soteriological principle: if the eternal Dharma‑body
can manifest as one specific being in a particular time and place, then
there is no limit to the number and forms it can take. According to the
Daśabhūmika Sūtra (“Ten Stages”), when beings reach the eighth stage of
the bodhisattva path they are able to pervade “an unspeakable number of
universes and undertake manifestations in the forms of the beings there
according to their various inclinations, by means of knowledge of how to
appear as a reflection” (Cleary 1993, 768).20 In the twenty‑fifth chapter
of the Lotus Sutra, which focuses on Avalokites.vara, it is stated that this
bodhisattva can manifest in the form of a Buddha if needed, but also as
numerous other beings ranging from gods, kings, laymen and women,
14 Seeing Like the Buddha

boys and girls, and even demons. This ability to take on many forms
in order to respond to the needs of different beings is elaborated by the
fifth‑century commentator Vasubandhu through substance metaphors for
the dharmadhātu (“dharma element”) such as water or gold, which can
take many forms while still remaining itself (Eckel 1992, 102–105).21
The Pāli texts describe another version of Buddha‑proliferation with
the idea of “mind‑made bodies” produced by meditative concentration
for the purpose of performing Buddha works. Just as a sword can be
drawn from its scabbard, or a snake from its old skin, the monk “draws
that body out of this body, having form, mind‑made, complete with all
its limbs and faculties” (D I.77). As a fruit of the homeless life—that is,
the Buddhist path—this capacity to produce mind‑made bodies is shared
by Buddhas and bodhisattvas, who out of compassion for all beings
produce many efficacious Buddha‑bodies. The idea of mind‑made bodies
develops into an explicit theory of magically emanated bodies that appear
in human or heavenly Buddha realms for the purpose of liberating all
beings.22 In this manner, the Buddha “seems to be present to different
living beings in different ways, to different extents” (Griffiths 1994, 109).
In sum, all Buddha‑bodies are expedient illusions, or works of
art. This idea also proposes that there is no need to privilege one form
over another if they produce the same effects. This point is explicitly
affirmed in the Mahāyāna text On the Merit of Bathing the Buddha. The
sūtra begins with the Buddha at Rājagr.iha amid an immense assembly
of monks and bodhisattvas. There the Pure Wisdom Bodhisattva wonders
how it will be possible to see the Buddha once the latter has passed out
of this world. The Buddha responds by offering substitutions for his own
body. In the early tradition, the Buddha’s bone relics were placed in stūpas
as a way of extending the physical presence of the Buddha (Strong 2007).
In this text, the Buddha sanctions the use of a Dharma “relic” in the
form of a four‑line verse, replacing the physical Buddha with his teach‑
ings. Archeological evidence from India confirms that canonical texts
eventually replaced physical relics in stūpas. The rise of Dharma “relics”
and image worship eclipsed relic veneration in those parts of India under
strong brahmanical influence, with its abhorrence of corpses as ritually
polluting (Bronkhorst 2011a, 193–206). This led to the substitution of
images and verses for bodily remains.23 The rise of Mahāyāna Buddhism
also promoted the worship of texts as a way of bypassing the stūpa cults
under the control of more orthodox schools (Schopen 1975). This “cult
of the book” actively substituted texts for the relics of the Buddha, on
 Seeing Like the Buddha 15

the principle that the Buddha and the Dharma are equivalent.24 On the
Merit of Bathing the Buddha provides a spiritual rationale for the efficacy
of relic, text, and image veneration alike:

If men, women, or the five groups of mendicants would build

an image of the Buddha . . . it would be like doing homage
by offering up a rare jewel. If in accordance with one’s own
strength and ability one can be truly sincere and respectful,
it [the image or stūpa] would be like my present body, equal
without difference. (Boucher 1995, 65; emphasis added)

The sūtra affirms that all three forms of Buddha homage can pro‑
mote the ability to be truly sincere and respectful. Paying obeisance
to a relic, text, or image is uniformly equivalent to worshipping the
Buddha himself because they all enable Buddha qualities, such as atten‑
tion, compassion, and insight. This eighth‑century Chinese text, which
is purportedly based on an Indian Sanskrit sūtra,25 seems to reconcile
what were once competing practices by emphasizing a unified soteriologi‑
cal aim—that is, the experiences enabled by ritual veneration, which is
ultimately more important than the physical vehicles employed. In this
act of reconciliation, the text reaffirms the original principle that seeing
the Buddha is more a matter of the virtuous qualities attained, rather
than the actual bodies seen.

The Necessity of Form

The other side of this picture, however, is that the history of Buddhism
displays a need for concrete bodies that engage the senses and the imagi‑
nation. The Buddhist tradition has availed itself of every means of see‑
ing the Buddha—through stories, poetry, paintings, carvings, statuary,
and dramas.26 The necessity of concrete manifestations of Buddhahood,
in contrast to philosophical abstractions such as nonduality, no‑self
(anātman), and emptiness, has been felt by monastics and laypeople
alike. Rather than being a concession to human weakness, the use of
forms agrees with the Buddhist view that sensory perception is prior to
the conceptuality of words. This is particularly evident in the way the
sense of sight is emphasized. The vision metaphors that characterize the
Buddha’s enlightenment as “seeing” and “insight” are not just poetic
16 Seeing Like the Buddha

images but also describe the content of the Buddha’s wisdom as a “direct
perception” (pratyaks.a) of reality. To see the Buddha, in other words, is
not a matter of ideas and concepts but rather an actual seeing that is
unencumbered by conceptual labels.
In the Buddhist phenomenology of the person articulated in the
Pāli texts, sensory perceptions emerge from the body, and thoughts arise
afterward as a form of distortion. Hence, “perception [is] primary in
the sense that it reveals the world prior to the imposition of conceptual
elaboration” (McMahan 2002, 48). The sensations (sam . jñā) that arise in
the wake of contact between the body and external objects are observed
to immediately trigger a naming process that imposes categories upon
the world. This “cognitive process is based on not seeing things as they
really are: and this misperception is what constitutes the ignorance which
generates continued sam . sāric existence” (Hamilton 1999, 56). This phe‑
nomenon is later identified with the “proliferation” (prapañca) of concepts
set into motion by the process of naming, and which needs to stop in
order for liberation to take place. This results in Buddhism’s enduring
ambivalence toward words, doctrine, and scriptures even while it makes
ample use of them. But in the end, the point is clear: “Words may be
essential to convey certain types of meaning, but they are no substitute
for direct perception. To see something is to know it more directly than
to hear about it through words” (Eckel 1992, 149).
But a paradox arises here, in that the specificity and materiality
of the Buddhas seen are supposed to help one in apprehending an ulti‑
mately formless and empty reality. The physicality of the Buddha dis‑
perses first into a set of teachings and finally to a purely mental state of
understanding.27 This understanding is described as nondual knowledge,
which arises from the insight that the insubstantial nature of all things
(their “empty” quality) means there is no fundamental difference between
things. Thus, the Tibetan consecration texts, for example, acknowledge
that the act of consecrating an image as a receptacle of the dharmakāya
is only a conceit because the dharmakāya is “as vast as space” and there‑
fore non‑localizable in any single object. This also means that the quality
of emptiness is already in the image/stūpa without ever having to be
established there. This nondual knowledge undermines the necessity of
any particular receptacle and discerns the Buddha‑nature in all things.
To really see the Buddha, then, means letting the Buddha go—at least
as envisioned as a particular form.
 Seeing Like the Buddha 17

But even the practice of “direct seeing” means that one must look
at something. As Bentor observes, “It is not an easy matter to perceive
the omnipresent nature of the [dharmakāya], nor to regard the entire
universe as sacred. One prefers to confine the ultimate powers in certain
identifiable places” (1996, 18). The difficulty of visualizing the nondual
and the formless is not lost on those who construct sensory imaginings
of the Buddha. Consider the following poem by the Chinese poet Qiu
Wei (694–789):

On the precipitous peak, a bracken hut,

A climb straight up of thirty li.
I knock at the gate—no servant boy;
I peak in the room—only a table and bench.
If he’s not abroad in his covered cart,
He must be fishing in the autumn waters.
This way and that, we do not meet
After all that effort, in vain I gaze, awed.
The color of grass in the new rain,
The sound of pines in an evening window.
Arriving here at the summit of solitude,
Perfect contentment washes over my heart.
While there’s been no understanding of guest and host,
There is something of the sense of limpid purity.
When my desire abated, then did I descend the mountain,
What need is there to see the master?28

This poem rehearses the well‑known poetic theme of looking for

the Zen master and not finding him in. The popularity of this trope
testifies to how much the Buddhist challenge to see an unseeable “emp‑
tiness” spurred on the aesthetic imagination. In this poem, the absence
of the recluse is the main event and echoes the absence of Śākyamuni
himself. The success of the poet’s encounter with this absence pivots
on a series of substitutions that are both tacitly and explicitly invoked.
The master sought out for instruction is himself a substitute for the
historical Buddha, who in turn is merely an apparitional body of the
formless dharmakāya. In the absence of the master, the speaker finds
“perfect contentment” in the landscape, which now substitutes for the
master. But lest this gets misunderstood, it is clearly the speaker’s “awe,”
18 Seeing Like the Buddha

“solitude,” and “sense of limpid purity” that embodies his attainment.

What is crucial is the attentiveness of the poet in traversing the physical
landscape rather than the environment, per se.
This meditative attention is normally understood as the primary
means to enlightenment, but as the poem suggests, this practice is also
the substance of enlightenment itself. The dualism of subject and object
is dissolved because what the poet does is not separate from the stated
goal of his activity: meditative attention is both the means and end. Fur‑
thermore, the poem’s focus on nature, as the broadest reiteration of the
Buddha, signifies how readily we can find the means of liberation at our
disposal. This tacit exhortation to let go of particular forms and utilize
what is immediately at hand neutralizes dualistic distinctions between
“religious” and “nonreligious” objects. To see the Buddha everywhere is
a strategy for “seeing” the formless in all forms. The process of seeing
the Buddha is also the process that allows one to see like the Buddha
by exerting an attentive gaze that goes beyond conventional labels and
comes alive to the nature of things—to the point of seeing a universe
of Buddhas and bodhisattvas in the ordinary and even the abject. This
principle is a tremendous boon to aesthetic practice.

Visions of the Buddha

The medium of film—particularly its visual and temporal nature—stands

out for how it can attend to the sensory and phenomenal world. Film
can direct our gaze and form connections between things, which is a
way of telling a story, and it can also lead us to look at objects and
events that contribute nothing to the development of plot and that even
undermine the intelligibility of the narrative. The films examined in this
book do both, but they are ordered from the first kind to the second
in order to replicate how Buddhist traditions have patterned levels of
Buddhist insight. The first film, Kim Kiduk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Win‑
ter . . . and Spring (2004), is the most overtly Buddhist in content and
the film weaves its episodes together according to the narrative logic of
the doctrine of karma, which can be summarized as a postulated con‑
nection between actions and consequences. According to the East Asian
and Tibetan Buddhist schemas of doctrinal classification, karma doctrine
and its focus on reward and punishment is a preliminary teaching that is
ultimately superseded by the realization of emptiness and Buddha‑nature.
 Seeing Like the Buddha 19

For that reason, the final chapter examines the films of the American
director Terrence Malick, particularly The Thin Red Line (1998), The Tree
of Life (2011), and To the Wonder (2013), which lack any mention of
Buddhism. I construct this progression of works that increasingly erase
references to the Buddha and to Buddhism to make the point that film
itself can stand in for the Buddha and the kind of seeing he is under‑
stood to have attained.
My analysis of Malick’s cinema appears to participate in what might
be called “Buddhist film criticism,” in which contemporary Western films
such as Groundhog Day (1993), American Beauty (1999), and Donnie
Darko (2001) are analyzed through the lenses of Buddhist teachings
and values.29 John Whalen‑Bridge refers to such films as “draftees” that
have become Buddhist by virtue of being discussed in Buddhist terms
(2014, 46), and he suggests part of the reason for this phenomenon
(particularly in the context of the Buddhist Film Festival) is to appeal
to mainstream Western audiences. Hollywood feature films avoid the
potential turn‑off of films that are too devotional or hagiographical, such
as Martin Scorcese’s Kundun (1997)—a biopic about the current Dalai
Lama’s early life—and provide an accessible way of introducing Buddhist
teachings. My choice of Malick is a departure from this general feature of
the “draftee” Buddhist film because Malick’s cinema is hardly accessible
or representative of Hollywood filmmaking. Watching a Malick film can
require a fair amount of effort for the average viewer and it frustrates the
usual filmic norms of narrative sensibility. I choose these films as examples
of the highest and most difficult form of Buddhist vision precisely because
they defy thematic handling and put the emphasis on how the viewer
experiences the sensory filmic event itself.
Through the five chapters of film analysis in this book, I con‑
struct three progressive ways of seeing the Buddha loosely based on an
artistic precedent from the ancient Buddhist world—the temple known
as Borobudur on the island of Java in Indonesia. Constructed during
the late eighth and early ninth centuries, this stone temple is a rising
structure that peaks with a central stūpa. The bottom levels consist of
four nested galleries that progressively ascend toward the center. These
square‑shaped galleries are relatively enclosed spaces formed by high walls
on the sides that face the center, on the one hand, and by balustrades
on the sides that look out and away from the temple, on the other. All
four galleries feature highly elaborate relief carvings that are viewed by
circumambulating each level before moving up to the next gallery level.
20 Seeing Like the Buddha

Figure 1.4. Borobudur Temple, ninth century. Central Java, Indonesia.

After the fourth gallery, the pilgrim emerges onto three nested and cir‑
cular open‑air terraces. There are no view‑obstructing walls here but an
open space that offers panoramic vistas of the countryside. In addition,
a total of seventy‑two small stūpas sit atop the three terraces, each with
a sitting Buddha that can be seen through the latticed openings of the
stūpa covers. At the very top of the temple sits the main stūpa, made
of solid and visually impenetrable stone.
A notable feature of Borobudur is the way the depictions on
the relief carvings closely follow Buddhist scriptures, particularly the
Gan.d.avyūha, a Mahāyāna text that became part of the Avatam . saka Sūtra
in Buddhabhadra’s Chinese translation of 420 CE. But as Julie Gifford
points out in her study of the monument, it is a mistake to simply “read”
Borobudur as a visual illustration of Buddhist texts. This discounts how
Borobudur is meant to be experienced: “The visual program of Boro‑
budur as a whole was not designed precisely to be ‘viewed,’ but rather
to be contemplated in the context of ritual, devotional, and possibly
meditative practice” (Gifford 2011, 4). Taken in as a whole, the “visual
program” of Borobudur stages a progression of visions of the Buddha
from the particular to the ultimate. The experience of Borobudur moves
the pilgrim from discrete narratives about the Buddha to a final wisdom
in which the Buddha, as represented by the central stūpa, is completely
 Seeing Like the Buddha 21

obscured and replaced by an open and panoramic view of the world.

The visual and experiential program of Borobudur provides a blueprint
for how films can also be Buddhist.
Legend has it that when the Buddha attained enlightenment, he
gained the “divine eye” that allowed him to see the past and future of
all living beings, including his own past lives. This is the knowledge
of karma, or of the connection between events. The practice of seeing
connections between the past, present, and future encourages greater
awareness of how one’s dispositions in the present derive from the past
and in turn lead to future conditions. This karmic lesson has been con‑
veyed for centuries in both stories and visual representations of cause and
effect, particularly in the accounts of the Buddha’s past lives known as
jātaka (“birth story”) tales. Borobudur commences with such narratives
at its base by depicting scenes from the Karmavibhanga, which features
general tales of moral cause and effect.30 From there, the first two gal‑
leries of Borobudur depict the former and present lives of the Buddha
himself, based on the Jātakamālā and Lalitavistara, respectively. In the
Mahāyāna worldview that Borobudur embodies, the teaching of karma
is one of the most elementary, in the sense of a beginner’s meditation:
“The Buddha manifests in this way for the benefit of practitioners who
are capable of understanding morality only in terms of punishment and
reward” (Gifford 2011, 172). The visual logic of these sections is nar‑
rative and linear and in that respect resembles a movie. In fact, the
detailed temporal sequencing of the panels can be likened to a primitive
film in which “the eye elides the frames and runs the images together
so that the illusion of motion is achieved” (Gifford, 55). The first film
to be considered, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and then, Spring, is
likewise a vision of karma that offers a clear message about actions and
their consequences in the mode of a cautionary tale.
Spring is considerably more nuanced than this, however, and its
invocation of circularity (which is apparent in the title) ends up pos‑
ing a challenge to the distinction between (and transition from) the
“not‑enlightened” to “enlightened” that linear tales narrate. This parallels
the way linearity is also discarded in Borobudur’s third and fourth galleries,
where the images shift to scenes from the Gan.d.avyūha. The Gan.d.avyūha
concerns the story of the pilgrim Sudhana who visits the Bodhisattva
Maitreya (the future successor to Śākyamuni) at the climax of his jour‑
ney. The revelations at Maitreya’s palace—which Borobudur features in
221 relief panels—consist of the visions Maitreya creates of innumerable
22 Seeing Like the Buddha

Buddhas in their Buddha‑fields across the universe, and the totality of

Maitreya’s own past, present, and future in his career as a bodhisattva.
These visions are Maitreya’s own sermon in visionary rather than narrative
form, in which the distances of both space and time are collapsed to sug‑
gest that the cosmos is always and everywhere pervaded by the body of the
Buddha—the dharmakāya. At this point, Borobudur abandons narrative
images in favor of picturing one setting repeatedly—such as the interior
of Maitreya’s palace—by featuring different elements of the same scene
in successive panels. The point of the images clearly shifts from telling
stories to aiding the practice of focused seeing, tying such contemplation
to one’s ability to see the dharmakāya in one’s own world.
The second and third films to be analyzed likewise offer “visions
of emptiness” by provoking viewers to be mindful of what they see and
offering the insight that human conceptions of reality are ultimately illu‑
sory. The Buddhas and bodhisattvas that Maitreya conjures in his palace
are illusions, emphasized by the fact that they appear and disappear with
a mere snap of Maitreya’s fingers. When Sudhana asks where they come
from, Maitreya replies that “those supernal manifestations are not internal
or external, yet it is not that they are not seen, by the magical power
of the enlightening being, and because of your own capacity” (Cleary
1993, 1499). In other words, what we see attests to our own abilities,
inclinations, and foibles. Therefore, the question of what we see becomes
a question of what we choose to see, and its consequences. Nang Nak
(1999), by Nonzee Nimibutr, is a Thai film based on a popular folk tale
about the ghost of a devoted wife. Described as a “tale of horror,” this
commercially successful movie focuses on the taming of the intractable
and murderous wife‑ghost. Despite the “horror” billing, what the film
offers is two competing visions of Nang Nak: that of an unnatural and
murderous demon, on the one hand, and that of a piteous and very
human woman, on the other. The former vision, which is articulated by
the villagers, results in their own violent deaths. The latter vision, which
is depicted through the meditative insight of a Buddhist abbot, success‑
fully lays the ghost to rest. As the film demonstrates, the way we see
the world is its own karma and its own form of punishment or reward.
Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashomon (1950) established a landmark
in filmmaking with its consecutive and utterly conflicting versions of the
rape of a woman told from multiple viewpoints. The film’s refusal to
reveal the “true story” of what happened has been read as a condemnation
of human mendacity. The Buddhist roots of the film’s literary sources,
 Seeing Like the Buddha 23

however, suggest an alternative emphasis on the inevitable relativity of

all perspectives and the need to refrain from dogmatic renditions of “the
truth.” As Rashomon demonstrates, films have the capacity to propagate
this vision by refusing the “God’s‑eye” point of view. Film can hold
conflicting views in productive tension and encourage one to see the
humanity in each. This kind of relativism cultivates a more penetrat‑
ing and compassion‑inducing vision, and both the visions of emptiness
displayed in Nang Nak and Rashomon trump the question of what is
really real with inquiries about the compassion (or absence thereof ) in
our own ways of seeing things.
The open terraces on the top of Borobudur are ringed with stone
Buddhas that create a physical Buddha‑field. The central stūpa forming
the apex of the temple is made of solid stone, embodying an invisible

Figure 1.5. An exposed stūpa Buddha on the circular terrace of Borobudur.

(Photograph by Robert DeCaroli)
24 Seeing Like the Buddha

Buddha that is analogous to the invisible dharmakāya that cannot be

seen through ordinary vision. The pinnacle of Borobudur presumes that
the pilgrim has undergone a meditative journey by means of the temple
itself, and now the seeing of the Buddha can be replaced with seeing
like the Buddha that discerns him in all phenomena without requiring
his explicit form. The vista onto the surrounding landscape beyond the
temple points to the anywhere and everywhere that the Buddha can be
found. This is the final perspective that I call the “aesthetic vision.” In
Mahāyāna Buddhism, the inherently empty and open‑ended nature of all
phenomena has been expressed through poetic and artistic visions of the
intrinsic “Buddha‑nature” in all things. In this practice, art and religion
become indistinguishable because both draw attention to the infinite
openness of the ordinary world, which becomes a Buddha‑field when it is
seen properly. In East Asia, for example, composing poetry and brushing
paintings were ways of contemplating one’s immediate surroundings that
look past their conventional meanings. In examining poetry and land‑
scape painting during the Muromachi era in Japan (1336–1573), Joseph
Parker notes that these arts were taken to be Buddhist spiritual practices
sanctified by the Zen view that “there can be little distinction between
the sacred realm of the natural world and that of human civilization”
(1999, 158). Aesthetic practice, in short, is a way of liberating oneself
from limited and conventional ways of experiencing things.
The medium of film can actualize this kind of aesthetic practice
quite virtuously because as an experience that centers chiefly on the suc‑
cession of images, it has the ability to control how we look at something,
as well as what we look at. Many movies entertain us with rapid and
action‑centered images, but some capitalize on the camera’s ability to fix
our attention on what seems incidental or unrelated to the movement
of the plot. In so doing, the images tell their own story and become
the main characters. Maborosi (1995) by the Japanese director Hirokazu
Kore’eda, is about a young woman whose husband commits suicide for
no apparent reason. Although her life moves on, the young wife’s struggle
with this senseless death comes to a peak at the end of the movie. Rather
than resolving the mystery, the film is largely taken up with offering
images, particularly arresting tableaus of shadow and light that do not
advance the story in any discernible way. The title of the film, which may
be translated as “a trick of light” invokes the stock Buddhist metaphor
that life is nothing but a magical creation, a shadow, a mirage, and a
dream. The title also refers to the illusion of cinema, which is ultimately
 Seeing Like the Buddha 25

nothing more than an arresting play of light and shadow that has the
power to entrance. The way Maborosi insists on shifting away from dis‑
cursive explanations to sustained contemplation and appreciation of what
is ultimately illusory forms a version of the Buddha’s vision.
Finally, the films of Terrence Malick demonstrate how this aes‑
thetic vision is a possibility of film itself regardless of its geographical or
cultural origins. The central feature to note is how Malick’s filmmaking
favors images over attempts at a discursive moral and philosophical clar‑
ity. Utilizing film’s capacity for movement, Malick juxtaposes images in a
way that goes beyond the limiting “either/or” distinctions of both com‑
mon perceptions and intellectual formulations. Malick’s work instantiates
both a wholeness and ambiguity that transcend the necessary dualisms
of language and puts the emphasis on the question of what each char‑
acter—and viewer—chooses to see. In this manner, Malick’s cinema is
particularly virtuous in demonstrating the ability of film to convey the
world beyond the restrictions imposed by normal habits of mind. In
doing so, it offers the potential to train the viewer to see the world in
the same way.

Conclusion

This book illustrates the ways in which film instantiates traditional ways
of seeing the Buddha, and thereby becomes the latest artistic technology
within a long tradition of cultural practices that have seen art as religion.
This demonstration is modeled on the visual and meditative program of
Borobudur, which resembles a man.d.ala, or the stylized diagram of the
universe employed in Buddhist (particularly Tantric) ritual.31 A man.d.ala
is an “imaginative vision” that “harnesses the creative power of mind to
produce a new divine vision of reality” (Newman 2000, 588). In man.d.ala
meditation practice, the deities depicted are recognized as aspects of the
self as seen in purified form. These deities are in turn treated as mani‑
festations of emptiness, which comprises the ultimate vision. Although
there are many different man.d.alas in Buddhist traditions (not to mention
the rest of the Tantric world), they display a basic structure in which the
supreme transcendent/immanent principle (the dharmakāya) sits in the
center and radiates outward into differentiated forms. The discrete forms
in the outer limits “participate in the outward flow of the godhead, and
are in some way emanations or hypostases of the deity himself ” (White
26 Seeing Like the Buddha

2000, 9). In Buddhist language, the immanent and unseeable Buddha

at the center flows outward as innumerable enlightening beings of many
discrete and expedient appearances.32
It should be noted that my visualization of Buddhist films on the
model of Borobudur is an artistic creation of my own. This creation is
not meant to encapsulate all of Buddhist history or ways of defining the
Buddhist film. But all art—as well as life—must be experienced through
temporal moments and spatial locations that form a sequence. I have
arranged the films in this book to do just that in order to exhibit one
specific way in which films can replicate—and perhaps even improve
upon—how Buddhists have imagined the possibilities for seeing the Bud‑
dha, and seeing like the Buddha. I take encouragement in how readily
it is possible to identify works that fit into the schema that I construct,
and fancy that this book can offer a template for one way of identifying
and talking about Buddhist cinema. It is possible to add more works to
each of the three categories I identify, or to refine the categories further.
I hope to offer a skeleton that can be further fleshed in by others, par‑
ticularly when it comes to films with no explicit Buddhist references. The
template I create allows us to visualize the Buddhist muscles of filmic art
because the logic of Buddhist “manifestation bodies” affirms the possibil‑
ity of there being countless enlightening beings who are “equal without
difference” to those who are “truly sincere.” Hence, the celluloid bodies
of cinema validate the claim of the Gan.d.havyūha that “birth in all states
of being is phantomlike” but that at the same time these phantoms “are
tireless in guiding and perfecting all beings, because they are aware all
is selfless” (Cleary 1993, 1500).
 chapter 2

The Karmic Narrative of

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring

K im Kiduk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring (2004)

is a product of Korean cinema, which boasts a steady stream of
Buddhist‑themed films. Among these, the works of Im Kwon‑taek such
as Mandala (1981) and Come, Come, Come Upwards (1989) have been
oft‑noted, as is Bae Yongkyun’s Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East?
(1989). Im’s movies feature Buddhist monastic figures (both monks and
nuns) who negotiate the tension between world renunciation and social
engagement. Both Mandala and Come, Come, Come Upwards ponder the
same question: “What is socially at stake in the choice between a pure
ascetic life in the mountains and a life of active participation in the
world’s affairs?” (James 2002, 61). The righteousness of religious seclusion
is questioned in the face of social injustice and suffering, displaying a
contemporary vision of the bodhisattva ideal of acting in the world. Bae’s
Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East? also plays on the tension between
the worlds inside and outside of the Buddhist hermitage, suggesting that
one can never really leave one for the other, on the one hand, but pre‑
senting this as a conflicted experience for the main monastic character.
Social consciousness is at the heart of these films, mirroring the national
consciousness and political turmoil of Korean society during the 1980s.
Kim Kiduk’s film is the product of a different era, however. In
Spring, the Buddhist hermitage is not an escape from the world of sam‑
sara and its competing moral obligations, but rather a setting that pro‑
vides the space to truly see the world “outside.” Various characters come
in from and go back out to the world beyond, bringing their troubles

27
28 Seeing Like the Buddha

with them. The hermitage is not a place to escape worldly dilemmas but
rather a stage on which they are mirrored, magnified, and sometimes even
resolved. The unusual structure of the hermitage, which comprises a small
hut fronted by a proscenium‑like platform that floats unanchored on the
middle of a lake, enhances the suggestion that the hermitage is a stage
where one can watch worldly dramas unfold. The cast of characters that
enters this space all come to ends that are within the purview of tradi‑
tional Buddhist thought while surrounded by the scaffolding of overtly
Buddhist rituals and symbols. Furthermore, Spring translates canonical
Buddhist metaphors and long‑standing ritual techniques into cinematic
art. To the degree that Spring reflects its present cultural context—as all
art must—it conveys a transnational and contemporary Buddhist con‑
sciousness marked by the modern Western interest in doctrine, on the
one hand, and by traditional Asian symbols and tropes, on the other.
Front and center to both is the use of karmic cause and effect as a
narrative device that both structures the story and conveys Buddhist
religious lessons.

Observing the Buddhist Drama

Spring is set in a tiny Buddhist hermitage that floats in the middle of

a lake surrounded by mountains. The final shot of the movie offers a
perspective from the peak of those mountains, which reveals the distant
lake dwarfed and nestled within the folds of a vast landscape. The lake is
miniscule in comparison, and the people who occupy the floating temple
are likewise integrated into the vaster world of trees, rocks, and water. The
human characters—initially a young boy novice and elder master—are
appropriately unnamed, for the film evokes timeless patterns rather than
telling the stories of individuals. The scarcity of personalizing dialogue
reinforces this quality, and most of the spoken words observe perennial
realities. As the film (and seasons) progress, the little boy becomes a
young man in the flush of sexual awakening, then an older man in the
wake of violent disillusionment, and then finally returns to take the place
of the mature master, thus completing the cycle.
Kim Kiduk is a self‑taught filmmaker and was a painter before that,
which perhaps accounts for the cinematography of Spring and the way
it evokes the panoramic scale of classical Chinese landscape paintings.
Humans never dominate the canvas in such works, which include the
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 29

much larger environment within which human existence is embedded.

The Buddhist perspective on this existence is conveyed through a statue
of the Bodhisattva Guanyin who gazes upon the distant lake from the
mountaintop at the end of the film. Guanyin, the bodhisattva of com‑
passion, is the Chinese version of the Indian Avalokiteśvara, and the full
three characters of the bodhisattva’s name—guan 觀 (“observe, see”), shi
世 (“world”), yin 音 (“sound, cries”)—faithfully renders the meaning
of the Sanskrit version: “the one who looks down upon the cries of
the world.” This is precisely what Guanyin does in the film’s final shot,
signifying that everything below is encompassed within the bodhisat‑
tva’s vision. The lake‑top hermitage is far from the bustle of life in the
mundane realm of human strivings, but for that very reason it is a quiet
microcosm where human life is carefully observed rather than escaped.
The essence of what Spring observes, as a work of film, is the law
of karma. In this manner, the film replicates the vision of the Bodhisattva
Guanyin, who replays what the Buddha saw when he attained his divine
eye: the law of dependent arising. Canonically, this is expressed as a
simple observation of causality: “When this exists, that comes to be; with
the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not
come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases” (S II.28). According
to accounts of the Buddha’s enlightenment, he first attained knowledge

Figure 2.1. The Bodhisattva Guanyin looks down upon the world and hears
its cries.
30 Seeing Like the Buddha

of his former lives, and then he saw the births and deaths of all other
beings in the following manner: “These living beings who perform evil
deeds end up in miserable states; But these others who perform virtu‑
ous deeds, rise up to the triple heaven” (Olivelle 2008, 405). These two
visions then culminate in the Buddha’s knowledge of dependent arising
and the Buddhist law of cause and effect as the true nature of the world.
Reflecting this account of the Buddha’s own awakening, the Bud‑
dhist teaching of causality is frequently glossed as the law of karma in
which the moral nature of one’s deeds is recompensed in kind through
successive lives. The teaching of cause and effect naturally lends itself
to storytelling, and the many prior lives of the Buddha in the form of
various animals, kings, deities, and other figures form an important class
of literature known as the jātaka.1 Another form of Buddhist literature
called the apadāna, which, expanded into the later genre called avadāna,
tells the story of persons other than the Buddha by recounting their past
deeds in order to explain their present circumstances.2 The importance
and ubiquity of such narratives in the lives of ordinary Buddhists have
not always been appreciated by outside observers, who might consider
them inferior to doctrinal texts.3 Their fable‑like quality is self‑evidently
accessible to mainstream audiences but the lessons they convey seem to
be predictable and unvarying: good actions lead to good consequences,
and evil actions to sorrowful ones.4 The karmic drama appears to assure
us that everyone gets his just deserts in the end through the mechanism
of rebirth.
It is tempting to read karmic narratives as a Buddhist theodicy that
explains why bad things happen to apparently good people, but this in
fact misses their more profound meaning. What the Buddha sees with
his divine eye may assure us that justice ultimately prevails, but the
law of karma assumes a cosmic scale much grander than the concerns
of individual beings. Spring helps us to see this by scaling down its
temporal view: the cycle of rebirth is abbreviated into a single seasonal
circuit—from spring to spring. This synecdoche is layered, however, in
that the seasons also represent the chapters of the life journey of the
young boy, who evolves into the new mature master at the end of the
film. The story falls short of depicting rebirth, but the explicit allusion to
recycling seasons allied to life stages suggest multiple and interchangeable
scales of analysis: a single year also represents a full lifetime (from boy
to master), and even multiple lives (in the repetition of the pattern in
which boys become masters). This in turn indicates that what is actually
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 31

at the heart of the karmic drama is the natural mechanism of cause and
effect that drives the plot of human existence, rather than the particular
individuals who instantiate these recurring dramas.
In this, the karmic narrative differs markedly from the norms of
Hollywood storytelling in which the will of the protagonist drives the
mechanism of cause and effect. It is always the main characters who
drive the story, or perhaps clash in their desire to do so, but the agency
of such individuals is a given. Even when the characters are engulfed by
natural or historical forces beyond their control, these factors form a mere
backdrop that showcases the self‑determined actions of the main players.
Thus, in classic Hollywood cinema, “history [is] unknowable apart from
its effects upon individual characters. . . . A storm may maroon a group
of characters, but then psychological causality takes over. A war may
separate lovers, but then they must react to that condition” (Bordwell,
Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 13). In contrast, the characters in Spring,
who are not even identified by personal names, serve to illustrate the
inexorable processes that condition both human and natural existence.
The main character is the impersonal law of causality itself.
This impersonal law functions morally by highlighting what is com‑
mon to the human condition writ large. The frequent tales of the Buddha
as an animal in a former life operate similarly. By clothing the Buddha
in the form of multiple animals, he is divested of any social identity and
its bias‑inducing function, particularly in a society where caste status
automatically shaped estimations of a person’s worth. These tales convey
that there are no inherent properties to or differences between living
beings, but rather a single web of cause and effect. This “can help us
to perceive the generic nature of persons, such that we are better able
to perceive universal obligations and rights in a world characterized by
social diversity” (Hallisey and Hansen 1996, 316). The fruit of pondering
the karmic drama, then, is the cultivation of compassion for all beings
by enhancing one’s sense of a shared human predicament. The assurance
that everybody gets one’s just deserts in the end is a far less significant
aspect of the idea of karma.5
Spring’s vision of the cyclical human drama begins in spring, the
season of planting and sowing that will yield later fruits. This is a time
of excursions into the mountains to collect herbs, and, for the boy, to
play. After one outing, the master teaches the boy to distinguish between
nutritious and poisonous plants that appear almost identical—that is, to
see properly. But soon thereafter, the child engages in all manner of play,
32 Seeing Like the Buddha

some consisting of innocent idyll such as cavorting with a puppy, and

some ultimately cruel, when he ties stones to a fish, frog, and snake.
The boy is equally enthralled with his various pastimes because he can‑
not foresee their outcomes: in weighting down the small animals with
unbearable burdens, the fish and snake die as a result. The boy ends
the season in tears, already bearing out the master’s warning that the
stone he uses to harm others will become his own burden. Although the
master teaches the law of action and consequence by tying a boulder to
the boy’s back as punishment, the long‑term outcomes of his deeds do
not manifest themselves until the seasons progress through their cycle.
When summer opens, the boy is now a young man. New characters
are introduced in this season—specifically, a nubile young woman who is
brought to the hermitage by her mother to nurse an illness. The appear‑
ance of this woman suggests the ripening sexual consciousness of the young
man, for whom a female is now a new and powerful presence. After some
frustrated misadventures, the young man wins the woman’s sexual consent
and a whole new world of powerful attachments is awakened. The elder
master’s response is muted but decisive: he observes that this is merely a
matter of nature, but that lust and possessiveness soon lead to violent feel‑
ings. He sends the woman home since she has healed. The young man,
however, decides to leave the hermitage and follow her into the world.
With the opening of fall, we see a visibly older master to whom
the young novice of summer returns, now a bitter and enraged man of
thirty years. He has just murdered the woman he pursued at the end of
the prior season for betraying him with another man. The disillusioned
man—now murderer—is angry and racked with hatred. He has returned
to evade the police but also to seek resolution for his pain, which the
master treats by imposing punitive austerities and beatings. The final
penance the master levies on the man is to carve out the Heart Sutra
on the wooden platform of the floating hermitage. The carving of each
character, he says, will cut away the anger and kill the self, which is much
harder to accomplish than taking the life of another. The master persuades
the two detectives who arrive at the hermitage to wait until morning so
that the man can finish his labor of expiation. When morning arrives,
the detectives lead the man back into the world to serve his time. At
the conclusion of the season, the master also finishes his time—having
arrived at the end of his life—by immolating himself.6
With the arrival of frozen winter, the man who was led away at
the end of the previous season now returns as a much older and mature
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 33

person, ready to take the place of his master. He collects the relics from
his master’s cremation site and deposits them into a Buddha he carves
from ice. His accomplished gongfu training signifies his maturing practice,
but he has not yet completed his karmic cycle. This happens when a
veiled and troubled young mother arrives to deposit her infant child at
the hermitage. As she flees in the middle of the night, she falls into the
water hole the man had carved into the frozen surface of the lake and
drowns. Now the man has killed two women, mirroring the deaths of
the two animals he burdened in the spring of his life. These deaths have
now turned into the burdens he himself bears. Tying a millstone around
his waist, he retrieves the Guanyin Bodhisattva image from the cupboard
and makes an arduous and hindered climb to the top of the mountain.

The Bodhisattva’s Vision

Guanyin is the bodhisattva of compassion who looks down and hears

the lamentations of the world. Two of the three characters forming her
name refer to sensory perceptions—those of seeing and hearing. At the
beginning of the Heart Sutra, Guanyin meditates deeply on the Perfection
of Wisdom and sees the inherent emptiness of all phenomena. The text
goes on to state that the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind—that
is, all the sense faculties and their objects—do not ultimately exist. The
“perfection of wisdom” (Sanskrit: prajñāpāramitā) refers to a class of
Mahāyāna texts to which the Heart Sutra belongs. In this literature, cor‑
rect perception of the inherent insubstantiality of all phenomena (empti‑
ness) is of utmost importance, but this wisdom is also coupled with the
compassion of the bodhisattva for all suffering beings and the promise
that all will eventually attain liberation.
Spring alludes to classic Buddhist practices to underscore the theme
of heightened perception. The use of the Guanyin image at the end of
the film is an explicit reference to what a Buddha sees, and this theme is
repeated throughout the film through another icon—the Buddha image
that occupies the modest central alter within the hermitage. This location
gives the Buddha a vantage point for observing the major events that
unfold, because everyone who enters this space offers obeisance to him
in seeking resolution for their pains. Spring makes effective use of camera
techniques to enliven this Buddha: the “shot/reverse shot” sequence is
used to link what is seen (as established by the first shot) to a viewer
34 Seeing Like the Buddha

(as revealed by a 180-degree reverse shot), which is the Buddha himself.

The shot/reverse shot technique is in direct contrast to an establishing
shot, which reveals the subject of the scene from a disembodied god’s‑eye
perspective that is tied to no one. The reverse shot, on the other hand,
immediately identifies the one who is looking, and allies the perspective
with a particular subjectivity. With this technique, the camera reenacts
the Indian ritual practice of darśan, or seeing and being seen by the deity.
The very opening sequence of the film begins with a frontal shot of the
Buddha image, immediately followed by a reverse shot of the bowing
master from the vantage point of the image. The master looks at and
is seen by the Buddha, and in many sequences to follow, we see the
Buddha looking at as well as being seen by those who come before him.
The shot/reverse shot is used repeatedly throughout Spring to reveal
interaction between two characters with little or no use of dialogue. A
particularly charming instance of this technique appears very early in the
film, soon after the opening shot/reverse shot of the master and Buddha
image just described. The master and young boy board the small rowboat
that ferries them between the lake and the shore throughout the course
of the film. In the first shot we see the master rowing, looking directly
into the camera; the reverse shot reveals the boy looking straight back.
The two shots in sequence indicate their mutual gaze, their half smiles
and open faces signifying an affection that words cannot capture. Much
of their relationship is indicated in this scene—to each other and to the
film’s viewers—in an effective and economic manner.
The shot/reverse shot sequence is most often used, however, to
suggest that it is the Buddha who is watching the events unfold in this
quiet microcosm. When the young woman arrives to convalesce at the
temple in summer, she prays in front of the Buddha and the reverse shot
of the statue proposes that the Buddha is looking at her—an impression
that is reinforced a second later when the perspective switches to a view
of the woman from directly behind the Buddha. When the murderous
man of fall sits convulsing with torment before the Buddha, the reverse
shot suggests that the Buddha sees his suffering. Later in winter when
the veiled mother cries in front of the Buddha, the reverse shot of the
statue again implies that the Buddha is watching. Everyone looks at the
Buddha and the cries of each person are seen and heard by him in return.
The camera work renders the Buddha image into an active character
of the film that interacts with humans as much as they interact with
each other. The silence of this Buddha is rarely a hindrance, given the
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 35

Figure 2.2. The man looks at the Buddha and seeks resolution for his pain.

minimal dialogue in which the humans themselves engage. In the world

of Spring, it is the act of seeing and being seen that matters. This premise
actively retrieves the traditional ritual practice of treating Buddha images
as no different from the living Buddha himself. The countless legends of
Buddha statues that weep and perform miracles testify to a widespread
view of images as both efficacious and alive.7 Spring treats the Buddha

Figure 2.3. The Buddha is a live character who looks back at the people who
come before him.
36 Seeing Like the Buddha

image in this traditional manner by skillfully employing the technology

of film to maintain a classic religious premise. Melissa Conroy suggests
that the way the film employs the shot/reverse shot technique teaches
“the audience how to see themselves, and each other, in the way of the
Buddha” (2007, 6). The final shot of the Bodhisattva Guanyin gazing
upon the hermitage, lake, and surrounding vastness seems to reinforce
the idea that seeing the Buddha as alive can help the viewer to see what
the Buddha sees.
The audience is assisted in such seeing through the cues given by
the human master, which is a second way in which Spring takes up the
theme of heightened perception. The elder master witnesses the law of
causality unfold through the life of his young charge, and in watching
the actions of the latter, the film suggests a certain supernatural aspect
to the master’s powers of perception. When the young boy discovers
that the animals he has teased are dead, for example, the master is also
there—but in a rather mystifying manner, as the boy previously took
the rowboat necessary to cross unto land. It is not clear how the master
managed to traverse the water to follow the boy. Similarly, when the
boy‑turned‑man returns in the fall after murdering his wife, the master
inexplicably appears to see the man’s tormented rampage in the moun‑
tains. The master exhibits other supernatural abilities, such as the power
to call the rowboat across the water of its own accord and to momen‑
tarily halt its departure when the two detectives row the man away to
his prison term. These actions suggest the workings of the master’s own
mind: when he briefly immobilizes the boat to delay the man’s departure,
the master’s momentary regret and attachment are suggested.
This depiction of occult‑like powers faithfully reflects the Buddhist
idea that mental concentration produces various paranormal abilities. The
Samannaphala Sutta (“the fruits of the homeless life”) of the Digha Nikāya
describes many such powers, such as the ability to create a “mind‑made
body” so that “being one, he becomes many” and to “walk on the water
without breaking the surface as if on land.” He also attains the divine
ear with which “he hears sounds both divine and human, whether far
or near” and gains knowledge of others’ minds, discerning which one is
filled with passion, or hatred, or delusion, or concentration (D I.77–80).
The cultivation of mental concentration, in other words, enables superior
perception, very much like the ones the Buddha attained during the three
phases of his enlightenment. The multiplication of the body suggests
the ability to be “present” even where one is physically absent, as when
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 37

the master appears to witness the boy/man’s sufferings. It is the master’s

depth of knowledge that allows him to see and hear what is happening,
whether it is near or far, and to know the minds of others.
The particular nature of what the master discerns is worth examin‑
ing. Although he appears to have supernatural powers, the master does
not attempt to circumvent the various events—and their sorrowful con‑
sequences—that unfold. He does not stop the young boy from harming
helpless animals, and he does not attempt to interrupt the utterly foresee‑
able sexual dalliance between the young novice and the young woman.
The master’s admonitory words are never to condemn the actions as such,
but rather to foresee their outcomes. He does not try to disrupt the cycle
of existence but rather accedes to its inevitability and its drama. It is as if
he willingly consents to it and plays his own role within it, even though
he already knows what will happen—like a story he has heard many times
before. This too is indicated in the way the film title evokes repetition.
This idea of storytelling is explicitly suggested in Spring through
the visual motif that opens the beginning of each new season: the gates
to the hermitage magically open of their own accord, like the opening of
a book that leads the viewer into each chapter of the story. The presence
of these doors is patently symbolic—the gate is freestanding, with no
walls on either side, making its existence and use purely figurative. These
self‑operating doors clearly invite the viewer to come inside and watch
what happens, with the attention that is customarily rendered in reading
a book or watching a play. But for the person who is familiar with the
story, as is the master, the act of watching entails a balance between being
involved and being detached. One is involved because life must be lived,
but detachment is simultaneously possible through foreknowledge of life’s
inexorable patterns. This equilibrium between engagement and detach‑
ment can be described through the traditional Buddhist practice known
as “guarding the doors of the senses,” to which Spring overtly alludes.
The Salayatanavagga (“book of the six sense bases”) of the Samyutta
Nikāya describes the practice of guarding the sense doors in this manner:

Here, having seen a form with the eye, a bhikkhu does not
grasp its signs and features. Since, if he left the eye faculty
unrestrained, evil unwholesome states of covetousness and
displeasure might invade him, he practices the way of its
restraint, he guards the eye faculty, he undertakes the restraint
of the eye faculty. (S IV. 176)
38 Seeing Like the Buddha

The same instructions are repeated regarding the other sense fac‑
ulties. Guarding the sense doors does not mean shutting off the senses
and inducing insentience. Instead, the bhikkhu (monk) is instructed to
actively look, listen, smell, taste, and touch, in order to engage in a
deeper practice of sentience. This contemplation entails being aware that
all sensory experience leads to positive or negative responses on one’s
own part, which in turn activates craving or aversion. According to the
Heart Sutra, all sensory and mental objects are inherently empty and do
not possess the quality of being intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant. The
understanding of this truth begins with the practice of watching over
one’s response to sensory stimuli, as exhorted in the Samyutta Nikāya, in
order to discern the causal mechanisms behind it. Therein lies the begin‑
ning of detachment from it as well. The signs of this discipline populate
the imagery of Spring, particularly through the symbolism of doors.
The gate doors that open each chapter/season of the story invite the
viewer to open their senses to what will unfold within. But the open‑
ing doors simultaneously evoke caution via the guardian figures painted
on their surface. These traditional images of two fierce and warrior‑like
deities frequently guard the entrance of Buddhist temples in East Asia.
The iconography is a derivation of the Indian bodhisattva Vajrapān.i,
who functions in many images as a protector of the Buddha. The gates
open to allow entrance but they also demand discipline, which those
who enter the hermitage observe by vigilantly going in and out through
the doors. To ignore them is to become unmindful of one’s experiences,
which results in becoming disordered.
This conceit of the wall‑less doors that signify mental discipline is
repeated inside the hermitage, where the residents not only worship but
sleep. The sleeping area is simply demarcated by a door, again with no
anchoring walls. The master and boy dutifully use the door to pass from
one area and function to the other in the course of their ordered life.
The notable exception occurs when the young man of summer ignores
the door and breaches the invisible wall in his eagerness to share the
bedding of the young woman lying on the other side of the room. The
correlation between disrespecting the door and the breach of discipline
is overt. The transgressive act, which is outwardly manifested as sexual
congress within the hermitage, is not a matter of despoiling a sacred space
as much as it is the failure to maintain the clarity of one’s inner mental
space. The young man is too busy giving in to his desires to mind either
the physical or mental doors of awareness.
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 39

The most severe version of this discipline comes again through the
image of doors. When the young boy becomes the fugitive in fall, the
penitential austerities imposed upon him by the master are carried out
with the Chinese character for “shut” pasted over his eyes, ears, nose,
and mouth. The ideograph for the word “shut” (閉) depicts two doors
of a gate that are propped closed with a stick. The master admonishes
the man to shut the doors of his senses as recompense for having lost
control of them. This “discourse” is again pictured rather than uttered,
through what the camera shows rather than what the actors say. This
picture/word device is used one more time in the same season after the
man is led away to prison, leaving the old master behind. When the
master pauses the boat to exchange one last glance with the man, a
premonition is suggested in this fleeting act of attachment: the master
will never see his disciple again because he will die soon. As the master
sits over the cremation pyre he has constructed for himself, he too dons
the graph for “shut” over his sense faculties, but this time, it signifies the
natural conclusion of life rather than a compensatory rite.
And yet, the symmetry of the man and the master is distinctly
evoked and the theme of repetition sounded once more. Their parallel
natures are made explicit in the final chapter of Spring, when the film
returns to the opening season—spring—as if to pointedly assert that
the same story will unfold again. This time, the master is the newly
matured man we saw in winter, and he has his own young charge—the
infant child left behind by the mother who drowns in the lake. As the
second spring season opens, the new boy is the same age and played
by the same child actor who occupied the role in the previous spring.
The invocation of circularity seems to suggest an inescapable drama that
renders all individuals into generic repetitions. This cannot help but raise
a serious question and doubt about what the bodhisattva sees: the cycle
of life seems inexorable and ultimately futile, as wisdom continually
reverts back to ignorance. What, then, is the point of these repetitions?
The ever‑present nature of what the bodhisattva sees requires further
investigation in order to see how progress is possible in this universe.

Repetition and Awakening

The Buddhist Wheel of Life diagrams the cycle of death and rebirth
within the six realms of existence, which is driven by the twelvefold
40 Seeing Like the Buddha

chain of dependent origination (which is another way of imagining kar‑

mic cause and effect). This wheel is firmly held in the grip of Yama, the
Indian god of death appropriated in Buddhist cosmology to preside over
the realms of hell and determine the destiny of the dead. The Buddha
always stands outside of the wheel of samsara, frequently pointing to
the moon that symbolizes the possibility of liberation. The moon is also
pictured outside of the samsaric circle. This graphic rendition of basic
Buddhist teachings demonstrates how readily and easily the liberation of
nirvana is imagined in physical distinction and opposition to the seem‑
ingly endless repetitions of samsara. Quite simply, samsara is over here
and nirvana is over there—that is to say, somewhere else. In Mahāyāna
Buddhism, the length of time it takes to attain complete liberation was
fixed at three incalculable aeons.8
The difficult and distant nature of liberation seems to be signaled in
the theme of repetition that Spring persistently evokes. The circularity of
the seasons not only undoes the progress of a strictly linear narrative, it
seems to indicate something like reversion. This is strongly suggested by
the progression of animals that accompany each season, which gradually
climbs the evolutionary hierarchy and then abruptly reverts back to the
beginning of the scale. In the first spring season, the animals that the
young boy harms (fish, frog, snake) are cold‑blooded, egg‑laying species
associated with the water, where the earliest and most primitive forms of
life began in evolutionary history. The choice of these chordate varieties
parallels the nascent state of wisdom that the young child exhibits. When
the film moves into summer, the animal most prominently featured is
a rooster that makes its first appearance in the hermitage space. From
an evolutionary point of view, this clearly represents a progression of
species: fowls are land animals that evolved at a later point in time. But
its evolution in terms of Buddhist wisdom is still quite limited. The
first shot of the rooster appears when the young woman is rowed to the
hermitage platform, and it makes its second appearance immediately after
the young man attempts to grope the sleeping and prostrate woman.
The juxtapositioning of this scene, in which we see the awakening of
the young man’s lust, with the figure of the rooster pointedly refers to
its symbolic meaning in the Buddhist Wheel of Life: the rooster repre‑
sents lust and craving and is one of the three poisons that give rise to
the cycle of existence and rebirth.9 The rooster appears prominently in
the foreground of various scenes in which the amorous couple cavorts
and plays. When the master discovers their nude bodies sleeping in the
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 41

rowboat after a night of lovemaking, he tosses the tethered rooster into

the boat to pull it back to the temple. The animal is a clear emblem of
the couple’s activities. And quite noticeably, when the young man leaves
the temple at the end of the season to follow the woman, he takes the
rooster with him, literally carrying the burden of his attachment.
In the fall, yet another animal takes center stage—a white cat that
is immediately introduced as the master returns from an excursion to the
outside world for provisions. The cat’s head pokes out of the top of the
rucksack the master bears on his back. This image is a striking parallel to
the scene in which the young man of summer leaves the hermitage—with
the head of the altar Buddha also sticking out of the top of his sack. The
master appears to be replacing the Buddha with the cat. Juxtaposing the
cat with the Buddha suggests both an evolutionary and spiritual leap.
The cat—or rather the cat’s tail—also serves as the master’s writing brush
when he copies out the Heart Sutra on the hermitage platform for his
penitential charge to carve. The master dips the cat’s tail in ink to trace
out the characters, rendering the animal into a direct instrument in the
ritual process toward healing.
But at the end of the fall season, when the old master immolates
himself, a water snake emerges from the blazing pyre (built on top of
the rowboat in the lake) and climbs unto the hermitage platform. In the
next season, the snake can be seen coiled on top of the old master’s robes.
The snake seems to be an incarnation of the master, who reappears rather
unexpectedly in lower rather than advanced life form. The snake is also
an embodiment of the poison of hatred and aversion in the Buddhist
Wheel of Life, making the idea of spiritual reversion quite explicit. It
is as if even the master’s religious progress was only temporary and that
he too must begin all over again from the bottom of the cycle. Spring
does not seem to allow for the possibility of true progress from samsara
to nirvana, trapping all of existence in a repetitive and futile cycle—like
the endless labor of Sisyphus who was also burdened with a boulder that
had to be hauled up a hill.
What the Bodhisattva sees, then, appears to be forbidding, and
perhaps also accounts for why most Buddhists have considered the goal
of nirvana to be beyond their present capacity. But it is important to
remember that Spring, by virtue of its Korean provenance, operates
within the Mahāyāna Buddhist universe of compassionate bodhisattvas
and assertions of emptiness. A prominent feature of these Mahāyāna
institutions is their skepticism regarding the samsara‑nirvana polarity,
42 Seeing Like the Buddha

with its linear conception of the Buddhist path in which one makes
slow and steady progress toward a distant goal. There is an alternative
version of Buddhist practice, then, that is built upon the foundations of
Indian Mahāyāna literature that speak of such things as emptiness and
Buddha‑nature, and which further evolves in East Asian Zen postulations
of innate Buddhahood. In this version of things, enlightenment is not a
far‑off destination but rather the prior and innate condition that makes
Buddhist practice and progress possible at all.10 When framed from this
point of view, the apparent futility of the cyclical world of Spring can
be read in an entirely different way.
If Buddhahood is already innate to sentient beings, as Zen teaches,
then the passage of seasons represents neither progress nor reversion on
the spiritual path. Rather, it is the stage on which both ignorance and
defilement, on the one hand, coexist with the Buddha‑nature of all
beings, on the other. Carl Bielefeldt describes the Zen attitude in this
manner: “Once we are assured of liberation, there is nothing to do but
be liberated; once we have put the issue of awakening behind us, there
is only the waking life before us” (1992, 499). The movement of the
seasons, then, is an ever‑present opportunity to surrender the distinction
between liberated and not‑liberated; between nirvana and samsara. The
idea of “guarding the senses” that the film repeatedly invokes appears to
distinguish between right and wrong, counseling dispassion over passion.
But the old master never rebukes his young charges for their preoccupa‑
tions; he merely foresees the resulting discriminations—between life and
death, between possession and loss—that will bring pain. Guarding the
senses means being aware of sensory discriminations and the inevitable
pleasure and grief they bring. Neither can be avoided, only accepted. In
Zen parlance, this is the state of “no‑mind” in which one outgrows the
preferential attitude that is normal to human beings and instead accepts
both sides of the equation. This then provides the Zen adept with a
“moment‑to‑moment means for taking the world as it comes to him, in
all its ambiguity. For no‑mind, then, the karmic law of birth and death
in samsara holds no fear” (Bielefeldt 1992, 499).
When the murderous man in winter carves out the Heart Sutra on
the temple platform, something like this nondiscrimination is attained,
which allows him to conquer karma even while under its yoke. This
scene depicts the rather undramatic turning point of the adept’s life, in
which his rage and anger give way to acceptance. There is no magical,
mystical, or spectacular transformation: only the exhaustion of carving
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 43

all through the night that wears the pain away. In the oft‑invoked Zen
image, mental defilements are like clouds that obscure the bright moon.
Clouds are wispy and insubstantial, and the moon is always there. Thus,
parting clouds are not monumental or rare events, and the gathering and
obscuring clouds must also be countenanced. Both are really all of apiece.
The carving man uses the knife with which he slew his wife—its history
made clear by its conspicuous bloodstains. But in carving the Heart Sutra,
the instrument of death is now the means of redemption. The knife is
not inherently good or evil, and its nonduality also muddies the putative
distinction between enlightened and not‑enlightened.
A closer look at the cyclical structure of Spring reveals this Zen
tendency to collapse the distance between nirvana and samsara. In the
course of one full seasonal cycle from spring to spring, we see a young
boy grow into a mature master, replacing and taking on the role of his
prior caretaker for a new young child. In abbreviating a full life into one
seasonal rotation, the film compresses the time scale that is traditionally
posited for any discernable religious progress to take place. It is as if to
live and mark time is to necessarily awaken, as a function of time itself.
The pain of samsara is not the negation of some utopic nirvana but the
inherently empty condition that is necessary to precipitate enlighten‑
ment. The rebirth of the old master as a snake then need not mean the
near‑impossibility of nirvana. Rather, it extinguishes the illusion of the
distance between here and there to suggest that this apparent opposi‑
tion always works together. As we plainly see late in the winter season,
the development of the young novice into the mature adept does not
exempt him from the residue of his prior karma—a second woman dies
as a result of his presence, by falling into the hole of the icy lake. In
his self‑imposed penance, the monk elevates the Guanyin Bodhisattva to
the top of the mountain so that she may look down upon the cries of
the world. The power of her vision does not transform the condition of
sentient beings, because that condition does not require transforming.
Instead, her compassionate vision of what is already within all beings
encourages others to see the same thing.

The Collapse of Time

In the third and fourth galleries of the temple Borobudur, the exquisitely
detailed stone relief carvings noticeably shift from a linear narrative mode
44 Seeing Like the Buddha

to one that collapses time into simultaneous visions of past, present, and
future. This transition in vision reflects a development in Buddhist texts
on the nature of the Buddha and his appearance in the world. Accord‑
ing to narrative accounts such as Aśvaghos.a’s Buddhacarita (“life of the
Buddha”), Śākyamuni undergoes a transformation from an ordinary being
to the enlightened Buddha. This creates certain tensions for Buddhist
soteriology. As Mark Woodward states:

While [Buddhism] makes universal claims and presents itself

as the only path leading to salvation, it is grounded in the
religious experience of a single individual. This presents a
number of problems, among which is that of establishing the
truth of the [dharma] as prior to the person of the historical
Buddha.” (1997, 50)

The historical Buddha Śākyamuni is first an ordinary unenlightened being

(although quite handsome and noble) and then becomes a Buddha at the
age of thirty‑five. What does this mean about the nature of enlightenment
and its possibility before and apart from the path taught by Śākyamuni?
If the Dharma is universal, how can it be tied solely to the life and teach‑
ings of one man? The problem is resolved by “describ[ing] the true nature
of Buddhahood (insofar as it can be described) in partly metaphysical
and completely atemporal terms” (Gifford 2011, 59). The path to this
atemporality is paved with stories about past and future Buddhas, and
Buddha‑fields in which countless Buddhas and bodhisattvas can be seen
simultaneously. The resolution is clear: the possibility of liberation cannot
be localized to a particular time or place. Even more, the moments of
liberation are likewise no longer tethered to a chronological and dualistic
conception of “before” and “after” states.
Spring collapses the linearity of the karmic drama by abbrevi‑
ating the vision of countless lives on the gradual path to nirvana to
an ever‑cycling story in which action and its outcomes are themselves
liberating. In the most common view of karma, good actions lead to
worldly rewards that are in turn inducements to follow the Buddhist
path.11 This immediate enticement paves a very long road to eventual
liberation in which one is supposed to transcend the concern with such
mundane benefits. A deeper view of karma, however, suggests that the
inherently empty and malleable nature of the self means that “being”
a person amounts to nothing more than the qualities of one’s actions
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 45

in the present. One’s intrinsic emptiness is what makes progress and

liberation possible in the first place, and, in some readings, comprises
the Buddha‑nature that is already a reality rather than a distant goal. In
that case, the karmic lesson of action and its consequences is a continu‑
ous and ever‑repeated awakening to who one is—of how it feels to be
where one is presently and to activate the possibilities of what one might
become. Spring depicts this endless process, which might be thought of
as the action of liberation itself.
This version of karma collapses time and deflects concerns about
both the near and distant future, with their fear of punishment or hope of
reward. That is because all actions are their own forms of liberation or suf‑
fering that do not require a future time: the concept of karma “highlights
a structure of personal accountability in which every act contains its own
internal, natural rewards or consequences” (Wright 2007, 30). Conversely,
the way each act shapes one’s character and dispositions means that the
past is always present because persons are essentially the accumulation of
their actions. But this does not result in the ironclad determinism that
some imagine karma to be. Dispositions and intentionality also function
in the present so that “there is always room for improvisation with respect
to where and how things are heading. . . . Karma is not just the experi‑
enced result of prior purposeful actions. Karma is also the inflection of
things as‑they‑are‑coming‑to‑be” (Hershock 2007, 183). Every time one
utilizes this knowledge to attain the internal rewards of action, one accesses
the Buddha‑nature of both self and others to change their present world.
As Spring demonstrates, film compresses time and eliminates the
great distance that appears to separate the present from the desired end
of nirvana. The result is a meditation on the constant malleability and
open‑endedness of human experiences, and to suggest that it is ulti‑
mately the actors themselves who determine the nature and meaning
of their actions. The compression of time is a capacity inherent to film,
which gives this medium an advantage in exploring the interconnected‑
ness between events and in juxtaposing the possibilities of experience.
Therefore, it is not surprising to find other films that have borne out these
themes. Three Times (2005) by the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao‑Hsien
also utilizes the technique of using the same actors cross‑temporally to
suggest the repetition of cycles: it features two lead actors (Shu Qi and
Chang Chen) who portray different couples in three different eras—the
years 1911, 1966, and 2005, to be exact, all in different Taiwanese loca‑
tions. Three Times invokes the traditional Chinese idea of the karmic
46 Seeing Like the Buddha

bond between couples that requires multiple lives to play out, which
is the framing premise of the eighteenth‑century classic novel Dream
of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. Interestingly enough, each of the
three stories in Three Times has its own title that features the word dream
(meng), mimicking not only Cao Xueqin’s novel but a plethora of classical
Buddhist‑themed literature.12 The English subtitles do not reflect this use
of the Chinese character for “dream” (夢) however. The 1966 episode
is subtitled “A Time for Love” when it is actually “Dream of Love”; the
subsequent 1911 episode is titled “A Time for Freedom” rather than the
literal “Dream of Freedom”; and the final 2005 episode is titled “A Time
for Youth” rather than “Dream of Youth.”13
The choice to eliminate the dream reference is unfortunate because
it erases the symbolic evocation of the Buddhist teaching that life is
fleeting and illusory. But the cinema of Three Times maintains the theme
by depicting three different and equally possible versions of the couple’s
relationship as modulated by the impact of context and time. The 1966
episode is the most hopeful, suggesting the burgeoning of possibility,
whereas the 2005 story is bleak and the ubiquity of modern social
media communications only broadcast messages of disconnectedness and
despair. Hou’s choice to move back and forth chronologically (from 1966,
to 1911, to 2005) discourages the notion of a progressive narrative arc,
suggesting instead a range of experiential possibilities. The immediate
recognizability of the lead actors (despite their varying dress and hair‑
styles) juxtaposes their different relationships as side‑by‑side options that
are equally conditioned by circumstance and therefore equally possible.
There is no true version of their relationship, and in all three episodes
the actions and images of transience abound as if to accentuate the insta‑
bility of all events: characters always seem to be arriving and departing,
and there are constant images of movement across bodies of water and
bridges. Everything is in a state of flux, which means that happiness
is always temporary, but no more or less significant than experiences
of alienation. Hou’s lingering visuals and limited dialogue seem most
interested in how such varied moments emerge and feel, instantiating
these possibilities for the viewer as well.
Cloud Atlas (2012), by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, features
an ensemble cast that reappears in six different stories that straddle
the years 1849 to 2321 in locations all over the globe. Unlike Three
Times, Cloud Atlas runs in chronological order and establishes a connec‑
tive thread between adjacent stories, whether it is a character, a musical
 The Karmic Narrative of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring 47

composition, or a political manifesto. In this sense, Cloud Atlas resonates

with the idea of karma in more mainstream fashion (in the way that
Spring does as well) by showcasing the links between events across time.
The scale of the cast and historical settings creates a plot‑driven focus
that is more typical of Hollywood filmmaking, and its narrativity is
enforced throughout its length of almost three hours. Though overlong
by general movie standards, the number of stories folded into Cloud Atlas
again displays how film can compress time and create a meditation on
the interplay of the actions within it. At the same time, we also see a
moral progression in the characters played by the same actor—such as
Tom Hanks—which juxtaposes the vast range of possibilities that can be
occupied by the same person. Spring exhibits both the cause‑and‑effect
connections featured so robustly in Cloud Atlas, and the possibilities of
experiences captured so delicately in Three Times. The next two films to
be examined in this book focus on the latter theme by depicting how
the multiple possibilities in experience means that humans ultimately
exercise a choice in what they see.
 chapter 3

The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak

N onzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak (1999) is a ghost story based on a folk

legend set in the nineteenth century about a young wife (Nak) who
dies in childbirth while her husband (Mak) is away at war. Nak material‑
izes as a ghost to resume her life with her husband after his return, and
she terrorizes and murders the villagers who attempt to enlighten the
unsuspecting Mak about the spectral nature of his wife and baby. The
story of Nak is familiar to the Thai people, and has been the subject
of radio broadcasts, live opera, comic books, graphic novels and some
twenty‑three films. Some of these versions cast Nak as a vengeful and
bloodthirsty demon. Nonzee’s telling, however, is a touching love story.
To be sure, Buddhist warnings against domestic attachment are regularly
sounded in the film—in the advice of monks and in Mak’s ultimate entry
into the monastic order. In this manner, the conventional view of women
and domesticity as hindrances to Buddhist liberation is expressed. The
villagers’ view of Nak as a demon also reflects folk religion with its fear of
restless female spirits, which arise from the tragic ends to which women
were historically prone—particularly death during childbirth. At the same
time, Nak and Mak’s love for each other is poignantly portrayed, and the
suffering it brings is sympathetically rendered. This compassionate vision
of the human condition is manifested by the Buddhist abbot Somdet
To at the end of the film, which succeeds in banishing the demon that
is terrorizing the village. The abbot’s meditative vision is yet another
way of understanding karma, with its discernment of cause and effect.
But it distinguishes better from worse ways of understanding it, and the
consequences that each brings.

49
50 Seeing Like the Buddha

Nonzee’s Nang Nak was a great artistic and commercial success,

becoming the third highest grossing film of Thai cinema. It has been
described as a Thai “heritage film,” marked by high production values
and promoted by a marketing campaign that conveyed it to international
audiences (May Adadol 2007). This boost to Thai prestige has led schol‑
ars to see the film in terms of nationalist aspirations and anxieties. May
Adadol Ingawanij, for example, sees it as a response to cultural anxieties
about the loss of native identity due to the infiltration of global forces:
“Because films such as Nang Nak reanimate the past as an expression of
the nostalgic sentiment of Thai filmmakers, they then connect with Thai
film viewers who harbour a yearning to relive bygone days” (2007, 187).
The film indeed offers a ravishing and romantic vision of the agrarian
past, centering around Nak and Mak’s traditional home‑on‑stilts by the
Prakanong canal in southern Thailand. Another observer notes, “These
images serve the dual function of elegizing the past and broadcasting the
film’s national origins; they loudly and clearly tell us, ‘Made in Thailand’ ”
(Knee 2005, 144).
The film is also seen as reflecting gendered anxieties about mod‑
ernization, as new social and economic arrangements erode traditional
images of women even as it reignites deep‑seated cultural fears of female
sexual power. The classic literary motif of the lustful female ghost who
possesses human males, it is asserted, dramatizes contemporary anxieties
about women’s autonomy and freedom of movement. Fear of female
ghosts, “with their rapacious and uncontrollable appetites, translate these
same characteristics of modern womanhood into frightening harbingers
of death and destruction” (Mills 1995, 259). The difficulty of exorcising
Nak “points to a fear of feminine recalcitrance and willfulness, of female
agency as a threat to patriarchal systems of power” (Knee 145). But
the complexity of Nak is that she is also a paragon of wifely duty and
devotion. Her ghostly incarnation and transgressions are a function of
her desire to serve her husband—a feminine quality for which she is still
revered by Thai people at shrines in her honor (McDaniel 2011). Arnika
Fuhrmann reads Nak, then, as “an icon of updated traditional femininity”
and Nonzee’s film as “a strong example of Buddhist‑nationalist cultural
recovery in the domain of sexuality” (2009, 222).
These insights into the national‑cultural context of the film are
firmly trained on the contemporary era and the ghostly Nak is read as the
embodiment of distinctly modern anxieties. But stories about malevolent
ghosts and spirits—and their intersection with Buddhist practice—go far
 The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak 51

back into the past. Although Buddhist teachings about suffering and its
resolution do not require belief in the supernatural, Buddhist literature is
full of the ghost, spirits, and demons that populate cultures across Asia.
From the inception of Buddhism in India, there are tales of monks pos‑
sessed or killed by menacing spirits as well as of monks who are able to
exorcise them. Robert DeCaroli’s consideration of early Buddhist literature
shows the depth and complexity of the relationship between Buddhism
and spirit cults (2004). Spirits and demons function as foils that demon‑
strate the protective powers of Buddhist discipline against spirit possession
and the danger of unbridled desire and emotion, which the malevolent
demons are made to embody. Buddhist tales often function to bring these
minions of folk belief under the Buddhist yoke, resulting in coexistence
rather than the eradication of native spirit cults. In Buddhist tales, demons
and spirits sometimes call upon the Buddha or the sangha (the monastic
community) for aid and protection, which they receive, and malevolent
spirits converted to the Buddhist path even turn around to police undis‑
ciplined monks. While Buddhists evidently utilized widespread belief in
the supernatural to advertise the curative and protective powers of their
own rites, it is also clear that Buddhist monks and followers themselves
took the existence of this nether world for granted.
Contemporary Thai Buddhism is a perfect example of this situ‑
ation. The figure of Somdet To (d. 1872), the famed abbot of Wat
Rakhang who figures largely in the tale of Nang Nak, is a well‑known
personality due to his reputation as a powerful magician and healer. He
is indelibly linked to Mae Nak (“Miss Nak”) as the monk who tamed
her, and the two in turn occasion a popular religious cult of sorts. Justin
McDaniel describes the centrality of these two figures in contemporary
Thailand, and the kind of Buddhist religiosity they exemplify:

As with many Irish and Mexican Catholics, and Chinese

Taoists, among others, magic and ghosts are part of a Thai
Buddhist’s normal life. Many of the practices of religiosity
associated with Somdet To and Mae Nak are so pervasive
and popular that they can only be called mainstream expres‑
sions (neither aspects nor features) of central Thai Buddhism.
(McDaniel 2011, 10)

Biographical accounts of Somdet To differ significantly but his pop‑

ularity in Thailand draws in large part from his reputation as a magical
52 Seeing Like the Buddha

healer—a power that he reputedly acquired by training with the Lao

people along the northern Thai border. One way Somdet To’s popularity
is channeled is through the cult of protective amulets, for which there
is an active market in Thailand. The amulets attributed to Somdet To
are particularly valuable, given his reputation for protective powers. To
is also known as a fierce nationalist who defended Thai autonomy dur‑
ing an era when most of its neighboring states fell to colonial rule. To’s
outspoken nationalism articulates the pride felt by contemporary Thai
people in having avoided the yoke of colonialism. Fuhrmann (2009)
therefore interprets To’s appearance in Nang Nak as another sign of the
film’s nationalist and cultural agendas. Somdet To’s reputed religious pow‑
ers are also a significant reason for his presence, however, along with his
close association with Mae Nak. In the following analysis of Nang Nak,
my focus will be on Somdet To as a Buddhist religious figure and the
way his persona exemplifies long‑standing traditions of ritual technology
and meditative practice within Thai Buddhist culture.

The Karma of Ghosts

The centrality of ghosts, demons, and other supernatural beings through‑

out the Asian Buddhist world is evident in the literary record. Early
Buddhist scriptures teem with Indian spirits and deities, and as Buddhism
traveled to other parts of Asia, the native spirits of those regions were
incorporated as well. What Bryan Cuevas says of premodern Tibet holds
true broadly across Asia: “There was widespread consensus that the world
of human beings was overrun by a host of malicious spirits and roam‑
ing manifestations of the dead” (2007, 318). In East Asia, the didactic
Chinese Buddhist tales known as zhiguai (“accounts of the strange”) and
their Japanese adaptations called setsuwa (“explanatory tales”) are short
narratives that purport to account for actual supernatural events.1 Trips to
hell, ghostly retribution, and human interactions with animals and spirits
feature prominently in these stories and were popular ways of teaching
the Buddhist doctrine of karma. Zhiguai and setsuwa tales became the
subject of later performance traditions, such as the Japanese Nō drama
and the late medieval storytelling performances that produced the lit‑
erature called otogizoshi (“companion tales”).2 Tales of ghosts and spirits
provided exciting and compelling subject matter for Buddhist sermons
and medieval dramas. Not surprisingly, they also translate well into the
 The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak 53

modern medium of film. Kenji Mizoguchi’s classic 1953 film Ugetsu

(“Rain and Moonlight”) has particular resonances with Nang Nak and
is therefore worth a brief consideration.
Mizoguchi’s film draws upon Ueda Akinari’s (1734–1809) Ugetsu
Monogatari (“Tales of Rain and Moonlight”), which consists of nine
stories adapted from medieval Chinese and Japanese Buddhist sources.
Mizoguchi’s film features two female ghosts attached to a potter named
Genjuro. The first is the ghost of Lady Wakasa, a beautiful noblewoman
who died young before getting the chance to enjoy the pleasures of love
and marriage. This ghost seduces and possesses the unsuspecting Genjuro
when he travels far from home to sell his pottery.3 The second ghost is
that of Genjuro’s abandoned wife Miyagi, who is murdered by soldiers
while he is away. Miyagi reappears as a ghost to spend one last evening
with her husband when he finally returns home, having learned of Lady
Wakasa’s true nature.4 Nak is in many ways a composite of these two
female ghosts in Ugetsu. Like Miyagi, Nak is a devoted wife who is
cheated by war of a full life with her husband. Her devotion survives
even death so that she reappears to him, in the land of the living. And
like Lady Wakasa, Nak dies before she can fully experience the joys of
marriage and domesticity, and her unfulfilled desires drive her ghostly
manifestation. These female ghosts personify the Buddhist idea that it
is the power of desire that drives existence within the cycle of samsara.
Simultaneously, these spectral figures materialize the widespread fear of
restless spirits throughout Asia, especially of those who die young, tragi‑
cally, and unfulfilled. Lastly, in both films it is a Buddhist monk who is
capable of seeing beyond the surface of things to their underlying nature.
No literary source for the story of Mae Nak has been identified to
date, and the tale is likely the product of oral storytelling.5 But its basic
elements suggest a lineage that begins with Indian literature and develops
into a native vernacular story driven by Buddhist sensibilities. One clear
evidence of this pattern is provided by the Thai collection of stories called
the Nang Tantrai, which are based on the third‑century BCE Indian
collection of animal fables known as the Pancatantra.6 The Pancatantra
derives from the same folklore tradition that produced the Buddhist
jātakas and it also features didactic stories with talking animals. The Thai
Nang Tantrai features a section of “ghost stories” (the Piśācapakaranam)
about a spirit king who wants to marry a human princess. He is advised
against it through a series of embedded tales that illustrate the disasters
that result from such unnatural liaisons. The Nang Tantrai was thought
54 Seeing Like the Buddha

to teach wisdom and bring merit, and was actively promoted by both
Buddhist monks and kings.
But what, exactly, is the nature of the wisdom gained by tales of
ghosts and demons and the way they menace the living? The tale of
Mae Nak, especially as rendered by Nonzee’s film, displays a contest of
interpretations and ritual technologies that are typical in the history of
Buddhist practice throughout Asia. The first interpretation underscores
pervasive cultural fears of the dead, and the dangers thought to arise
when the proper ritual and moral boundaries between the living and
the dead are not observed. The competing Buddhist interpretation takes
the form of a wisdom tale that illustrates the suffering that arises when
one is unable to look more deeply into this fear and see an alterna‑
tive reality therein. The Buddhist perspective accepts but at the same
time redefines these cultural anxieties about supernatural menaces. And
if belief in ghosts is largely gone from rationalized societies such as ours,
the Buddhist translation of such specters makes them relevant still.

The Buddhist Taming

A good part of Nang Nak is occupied with Nak’s ghostly wrath toward
those who infringe upon her domestic happiness with her husband and
baby. Fears of ghostly ire are particularly ignited by those who suffer
untimely and violent deaths, such as Nak who dies during the agony of
childbirth. In northeastern Thailand, mothers and newborns who die in
this way are singled out as a class of spirits that remain strongly attached to
the life‑world (Hayashi 2003, 213). Nak has been deprived of motherhood
and her full measure of domestic happiness. The same sort of deprivation
attends Prig, the friend with whom Mak goes off to war: Prig dies painfully
in the war and subsequently haunts Mak in his dreams. These restless spirits
are aggrieved, and their power to cause illness and to trouble the living is
enabled by the horror and pity of those who survive them.
Buddhist cosmology has its own category of ghosts that is adapted
from general Indian mythology. In this tradition, the dead are known as
pretas (“the departed”) and are believed to haunt their descendants unless
the appropriate rites (śrāddha) are performed that transform them into
proper ancestors. If the living do not perform the rites, or if the preta is
guilty of evil deeds during his or her human life, then these departed spirits
are believed to be condemned to hell. Buddhist cosmology adopted the
 The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak 55

preta as one of six possible forms of rebirth. The preta realm is not actually
a hell, which Buddhism counts as a separate domain, but it is certainly a
very wretched realm of rebirth. The Petavatthu, contained in the Khuddaka
Nikāya of the Pāli canon, contains fifty‑one stories of people who acted
reprehensibly and became pretas. In later Buddhism, pretas are generally
known as “hungry ghosts” because their needle‑thin necks condemn them
to perpetual hunger and thirst. This suffering mirrors their transgressions
during their human lives, when their enormous greed led them to stinginess
and lack of charity. The fourteenth‑century Thai Buddhist cosmological
text known as Trai Phum Phra Ruang (“Three Worlds According to King
Ruang”) provides many graphic descriptions of these “suffering ghosts”—all
of whom are racked with hunger as punishment for their uncontrollable
appetites.7 As we will see, this motif of monstrous desire is key to the
way Buddhist sources understand the origins of ghosts and demons alike.
In the realm of ritual practice, however, Buddhist monks have fully
accommodated the desire to appease the dead in Asian societies. In the
Buddhist ritual economy, charity toward the sangha was extolled as a way
of making merit that could be transferred to ancestors—particularly to
hungry ghosts—to send them on to better destinations (Teiser 1988; Holt
2007). Buddhist ritual, then, taps into this anxiety about the dead that
predates Buddhism but which presents an opportunity to extol its own
efficacy. The calculus of karma and the ritual potency of monks combined
to promote a system in which communal support of the sangha assured
that restless and tortured spirits could be laid to rest. The degree to which
Buddhist monks have been involved in mortuary rites across the Asian
world is therefore not surprising, even though it has entailed accepting
classes of spirits that are outside of original Buddhist soteriological con‑
cerns. In addition to the Indian and Sri Lankan preta, these native spirits
also include the Thai phi, the Burmese nat, the Chinese guei, and the
Japanese kami. According to both Buddhist reformers and early Western
scholars, the widespread funerary services provided by Buddhist clerics are
driven by finances and inconsistent with the fundamental Buddhist goal
of nirvana. Contemporary scholars, however, are more sympathetic to
this admixture of Buddhist and indigenous practices in Asia, seeing “the
very tensions between them as itself constitutive of Buddhist approaches
to death” (Cuevas and Stone 2007, 8).
Nang Nak exemplifies these tensions in a way that establishes a
clear ritual and moral hierarchy regarding the treatment of the trouble‑
some departed. This hierarchy might be articulated using the Buddhist
56 Seeing Like the Buddha

strategy of distinguishing between provisional and ultimate teachings, in

which conventional views are initially utilized but then dispensed and
replaced by a deeper wisdom. The Buddhist embrace of local spirit cults
can be seen as an example of this pedagogy in action, in which anxieties
about the dead are engaged because of their powerful hold on the human
imagination, but subsequently “rehabilitated” into a distinctly Buddhist
vision of the universe. This vision is uncompromisingly orthodox in
understanding the presence of ghosts and demons as the embodiments
of our own karma. This redefines their genesis as the human fears, guilt,
and regrets that empower them.
There are three moments in Nang Nak when villagers fall prey to
the demon Nak. The first victim is the midwife Urb, who botches Nak’s
delivery and pilfers Nak’s wedding ring after her death. The second is
Um, the friend who attempts to persuade Mak that his wife and child
are really unnatural apparitions. The third is the inflamed posse of young
men who decide to purge the ghost by burning down her house. In
these scenes, Nak is envisioned as an evil menace, although she is not
actually depicted as such until the scene where the young village men
torch her house. Here, Nak emerges to confront her antagonists in a
spectral and menacing form, with her home in brilliant flames against
the night sky. The young men upbraid Nak for her murderous deeds,
but she retorts that it was the victims’ own karma that brought about
their deaths. Nak’s inhuman appearance seems to undermine her protest
of innocence, and yet she speaks a Buddhist truth that the film reiterates
in the way it depicts each death.
The villagers are possessed by a reckless terror that seems to be the
actual cause of their undoing. Hence, the violent storms that seem to
indicate Nak’s vengeful presence before somebody dies can just as eas‑
ily indicate the internal turbulence that drive the fearful to their own
demise. Urb is scared to death in her own home as violent winds tear
open her doors. But is the vengeful ghost (whom we never actually see) a
preternatural entity or an externalization of Urb’s own guilty conscience?
As a lashing storm whips up the village, Um and his wife argue furiously
about the ghostly ire his actions may have provoked. Mad with anger and
panic, Um defies the spirit of Nak to come and get him and runs out
into the wilderness. Shortly thereafter, he is discovered dead, floating in
the water. Was Um done in by a ghost or by his own recklessness? Nak
appears to the posse determined to banish her by destroying her home,
but their wild actions only create avalanches of burning beams that crush
 The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak 57

and immolate them instead. None of the villagers can heed the village
abbot’s admonition to “remain calm” and their turbulent states of mind
determine their fates. The realms of rebirth within Buddhist cosmology
“can be seen as distinctive types or categories of embodied sentience asso‑
ciated with specific qualities of consciousness” (Hershock 2007, 183).8
This is a way of accounting for Nak’s own identity as a ghost and the
villagers’ fate as victims. The interdependence of these two roles creates
an ambiguity about the true nature of the supernatural and how it arises.
The figure of the village abbot who resides locally in Thonburi
provides another opportunity to make this point. His strength of per‑
ception is emphasized in contrast to the husband Mak, who manifests
the classic Buddhist diagnosis of one who lives in a dream by the power
of his own desires. When Mak returns from war and believes that he
has been reunited with his wife and baby, the camera depicts the world
through his eyes: he not only sees his family but a clean and tidy home,
frequently bathed by the camera in a romanticizing and glowing light. In
contrast, when the village abbot visits, he sees that the seat he is given is
covered with dust and dead leaves and that the entire house is desolate
and disarranged. Mak’s blindness to the truth is further displayed in the
food he offers, which is petrified with dust, and the cradle he rocks,
which is filled with nothing but cobwebs. The dialogue plays overtly on
the contrast between the abbot’s perception and Mak’s blindness. Mak
implores the abbot to “see for himself ” the baby in the cradle and to
“see with his own eyes” his wife who will soon be home, which only
emphasizes his own inability to truly see. The abbot in turn tells Mak
that he must concentrate if he wants to “see the truth.” He advises Mak
to bend over and look between his legs to truly see, and when he eventu‑
ally does so, Mak finally sees Nak’s preternatural form.
But the abbot’s perception is itself limited, which accounts for the
limited power of his rituals. The abbot believes in the conventional real‑
ity of ghosts, which he himself fears and seeks to flee. In this, the abbot
exemplifies a lesser understanding in contrast to “accomplished monks
[who] fare better against spirit‑deities than those who easily give in to fear”
(DeCaroli 2004, 134). The Buddha Śākyamuni is the exemplary model,
particularly during his enlightenment when he overcomes the visions that
Māra generates of both his tempting daughters and his menacing plagues.
The one who attains full Buddha knowledge is swayed neither by desire
nor fear. The village abbot, in contrast, is unnerved by Nak, and his
attempts to council his flock are amusingly peppered with flabbergasted
58 Seeing Like the Buddha

interjections such as “To hell with it!” The abbot is not fully capable
of mental mastery and his own fear surrenders the greater power to the
spectral Nak. This is evident in the merely deflective powers of his protec‑
tive rituals. His chanting and the sacred string he uses to surround the
huddled novices succeed in fending off Nak’s apparition at the monastery
where Mak has taken refuge. But the exorcism is only temporary.
If the villagers exhibit ordinary ignorance, and the village abbot only
partial mental discipline, the greatest foil to Buddhist vision is provided by
the Brahmin priest hired by the villagers in a last ditch attempt to exorcise
the ghost. The figure of the Brahmin, who is clearly brought in from
outside regions, evokes a social reality going back to ancient India when
Buddhism and Brahmanism formed competing ritual systems. Brahmins
specialized in the sciences of mathematics and astronomy, which reput‑
edly gave them divinatory abilities. Their use of formulas and incantations
based on Vedic mantras also gave Brahmins their reputation for wielding
powerful rites of exorcism. Johannes Bronkhorst states, “Buddhists could
not compete with Brahmins in this respect, and there are indications to
show that they did not wish to” (2011, 108). In the early Buddhist Pāli
canon, it is stated that the Buddha refrained from “base arts” such as pre‑
dicting the future, interpreting signs, and casting spells. But as Brahmins
became more politically and socially influential based on these reputed
powers, Buddhists eventually offered their own protective rites, particularly
with the rise of Tantrism in the seventh century.
This response to Brahmanism, along with performing rites for the
dead, demonstrates the Buddhist responsiveness to local demands. The
literary sources reveal that when most people approached the Buddhist
sangha, it was “more often than naught . . . for two basic reasons: either
they [were] seeking merit through donations or they needed help in
dealing with a supernatural problem” (DeCaroli 2004, 38). The reputa‑
tion of Buddhist monks for possessing protective and thaumaturgical
powers greatly enhanced the reception of Buddhism in regions outside
of India, particularly in the courts of Tibet and East Asia. But as Nang
Nak demonstrates, this expediency does not necessarily mean capitulating
to the moral and symbolic meanings of these external ritual systems. In
Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia where the Brahmin presence
remained strong, Brahmanical and Buddhist ritual systems form directly
competing ones.9 Nang Nak portrays this reality by depicting the inef‑
fectual nature of the Brahmin’s ritual as a penultimate staging ground
for the appearance of Somdet To and his ultimate resolution.
 The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak 59

The Brahmin priest’s technique is to exhume Nak’s corpse and crush

her skull with a rock. This violence goes beyond fear to ritual aggression
and violation, and the consequences are immediate: as the priest pounds
the skull with a rock, Nak possesses him and aims the blows at his own
head, causing his death. This symmetry between transgression and con‑
sequence evokes the standard Buddhist notion of karmic retribution. As
the priest violates the corpse, the demonic Nak materializes through the
sound of preternatural and maniacal laughter that possesses the Brahmin
and turns his blows against himself. His vision of Nak as an evil power is
exactly what animates her in that manner—to his own doom. The failure
of his exorcising ritual is due to the faulty nature of his own perception,
similar to the village abbot and the villagers themselves. The Brahmin is
distinguished only by the catastrophic degree of his ignorance. The film
accentuates this point by sharply contrasting the priest’s violence with the
reactionary visions of the husband Mak: every strike the Brahmin makes
against the corpse is countered by Mak, whose memory flashes back to
the very human and vulnerable wife he has lost. The sequencing evokes
pity and questions the Brahmin’s proposal that Nak is a fearsome entity
that must be destroyed. Mak’s competing images hint at the necessity of
a much deeper vision of Nak.

The Eye of Wisdom

In contrast to the hysteria of the villagers, Somdet To is the eminently

calm and efficacious monk who arrives from Thonburi and succeeds in
“banishing” the ghost. This is not the first time Somdet To appears in
the film, however. He is introduced earlier as the monk who heals Mak’s
battle wounds, which allows the latter to return home to his village and
begin the saga of his unnatural domestic life. The depiction of Somdet To
in the first half of the film neatly bookends his appearance in the second
half by displaying his healing powers, again in pointed contrast to a com‑
peting ritual technology. In crosscutting scenes, we see the Venerable To
attend to Mak’s battle wounds, while in a parallel space the midwife Urb
administers much less successfully to Nak’s birthing pains. Both Mak and
Nak are in a fight for their lives, their mirror circumstances signifying the
depth of their karmic connection. But Mak is in much better hands: in
closely intercutting scenes, we see the monk attending to Mak’s wounds,
uttering his signature mantra (the Jinapañjara) and dressing Mak’s body
60 Seeing Like the Buddha

with herbs. Mak is soon fully healed. Urb, on the other hand, attempts
to deliver Nak’s baby by adhering to folk customs such as opening the
window and avoiding bad omens. In the final parallel segment, Somdet
To spits on Mak’s wound, which aids the healing process; Urb spits on
Nak to prepare for a cut but Nak bleeds out and dies instead.
The introduction of Somdet To immediately testifies to his cura‑
tive powers, which includes the use of herbal remedies. This reflects the
Buddhist practice of medicine as a legitimate science—in contrast to
its condemnation of spells and incantations as an illegitimate one. It
also distinguishes Buddhist practice from Brahmanism, which denigrated
medicine as lowly and impure. When Somdet To appears at the end of
the film to lay Nak to rest, however, he turns to yet another and perhaps
more distinctively Buddhist remedy: he meditates. As Nak is already dead,
it is too late for medicine or other physical treatments. The monk’s cure
consists of doing nothing to Nak except to see her. The ultimate Buddhist
prescription is the curative power of perception, which, in transforming
the perceiver also transforms and tames what is perceived.
The first thing Somdet To does upon approaching Nak’s open grave
is to call her to arise, reconstituting her in human form, cradling her
baby. What comes next is a sequence of highly structured scenes, com‑
prising four cycles of a tryptic. The first part of each cycle is always a
black and white flashback to Nak and Mak in earlier and idyllic days;

Figure 3.1. Somdet To sees Nang Nak through meditation on the cycle of life.
 The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak 61

the second part cuts to an image from nature; and the third returns to
the present where Somdet To sits chanting and meditating before Nak.
These last anchor scenes, set in the present, suggest that the first and
second vignettes are the monk’s meditative insights. In the first flashback,
he sees Nak and Mak in the idyll and pleasure of their courtship; in the
second, he sees them cavorting in the river in front of their house; in the
third vision, Mak bends his ear to the belly of his pregnant wife; and in
the fourth, we see Nak again in her labor pains, just at the point of her
expiration. The black and white sequence suggests a cycle of a hopeful
but all‑too‑brief life. The cyclical theme is reinforced by a sequence of
nature shots that immediately follow the black and white images of Nak
and Mak: the first displays a close‑up of a verdant leaf with a dewdrop
gliding off its surface; the second is a wider shot of lush green grass,
fresh with moisture; the third pans up the trunk of a magnificent and
mature tree and visualizes its spreading boughs; the final scene tracks a
withered leaf that falls before Somdet To, bringing us back to the present.
The flashbacks and nature scenes closely parallel each other in
displaying the cycle of life and death, and their symmetry integrates
human and natural existence. The dew on the young leaf evokes a classic
Buddhist symbol of evanescence, completed by the brown and shriveled
version that is the destiny of all life. The effect is powerfully moving and
transforms Nak into a most ordinary yet tragic figure. In Somdet To’s

Figure 3.2. Nang Nak as seen through the humanizing vision of Somdet To.
62 Seeing Like the Buddha

perception, she is not a malevolent power. She simply suffers the pain
attendant upon everything that lives—accentuated by her short existence
and traumatic death. The demise of a young woman in childbirth evokes
the universal fragility of life, which, when approached with lesser vision,
is rendered into something fearful and even monstrous. It is Somdet To’s
penetrating insight that overcomes the specter of ghosts to see instead a
natural condition that evokes a quiet sense of pity and acceptance. This
vision brings peace to both the restless spirits of the dead and the fearful
anticipations of the living.
The final scenes of Nonzee’s Nang Nak are a remarkably virtuous
visual translation of a long‑standing Buddhist discourse on menacing
spirits. The Maitrībala Jātaka, for example, is the story of the Buddha
in his prior life as King Maitrībala, whose ability to protect his kingdom
from demons is said to come from the strength of his moral qualities
rather than his sword. One day, five yaks.a demons disguise themselves as
humans and demand an offering of human flesh and blood, which is the
only food that satisfies them. King Maitrībala sees through their disguise
for what they are, and is instantly filled with compassion. He observes:

By living off this type of food,

These pitiless, evil‑hearted demons incinerate
Their welfare in this world and the next.
When will their sufferings end? (Meiland 2009, 175)

The king recognizes that the yaks.as’ abnormal appetites are a symp‑
tom of their uncontrollable desires, which imprisons them in the cycle of
suffering. This reading of the yaks.as is significant: the conventional view
of demons as inhuman monsters is translated into the Buddhist idiom of
suffering and understood primarily as a mental rather than supernatural
affliction. The Thai Trai Phum blends the Indian yaks.a with the native
Thai spirit known as phi su’a, and classifies it as one kind of hungry
ghost (Reynolds and Reynolds 1982, 96). This suggests that demons
are essentially equivalent to humans whose insatiable appetites condemn
them to penance as pretas.
Akinari’s Ugetsu Monogatari displays strikingly similar themes. In
the tale “The Blue Hood” (Aozukin), the abbot of a mountain temple
falls in love with a young acolyte. The latter’s untimely death drives the
monk crazy with grief, so that he actually eats the corpse. This triggers
a demonic rampage in which the abbot raids the village for fresh corpses
 The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak 63

to consume, terrorizing the villagers. When the situation is explained to

the Zen Master Kaian, he notes, “There are countless examples, from the
past down to the present, of those who, led astray by the karmic obstacles
of lust and wrong thoughts . . . turn into demons or serpents to take
retribution” (Ueda 2007, 193). Again, demonic identity is explained as
a function of outsized desires—in this case, the transgressive attachment
of the abbot to the acolyte. Master Kaian continues:

It was probably his single‑minded nature that caused him

to turn into a demon when, once having entered the maze
of lust, he was burned by the karmic flames of unenlighten‑
ment. He who fails to control his mind becomes a demon; he
who governs his mind attains to Buddhahood. (ibid., 194;
emphasis added)

The equating of monstrosity with the untamed mind is made

explicit in the Zen Master’s words. In Buddhist cosmology, all forms
of birth within the cycle of life are the results of unwholesome mental
states, normally condensed into the three “poisons” of greed, anger, and
delusion. The Trai Phum states, “When any of these . . . kinds of evil
mind occur to anyone he will, as a result, be born in an evil place,
for example, one of the four realms of loss and woe” (Reynolds and
Reynolds 1982, 64). The four realms of loss and woe refer to birth as
hungry ghosts, hell beings, animals, and the bellicose demigods known
as aśuras. Although the realms of rebirth are often described as distinct
and separate places, the ease with which humans and fiends intermingle
in Buddhist narratives suggests that different forms of life are largely a
matter of psychic reality.10
In these tales, such uncontrollable desires are neutralized by the
powers of compassion and generosity. Master Kaian tames the hapless
abbot by first offering him his own flesh to feast on. The abbot is awed
and humbled by this selflessness and accepts instead the Master’s blue
hood and a koan, which the abbot is found reciting uninterruptedly even
a year later. Master Kaian’s manner of taming repeats the strategy of King
Maitribala: unable to relinquish his compassion or charity, the king drains
his own blood and slices his own flesh to satisfy the yaks.as. The yaks.as
are so amazed by this that they become followers of the king. On its
face, the purpose of this tale is to demonstrate Śākyamuni’s perfection
of virtues in his previous life. At another level, however, it also testifies
64 Seeing Like the Buddha

to the way Buddhist tradition encompassed spirit cults by redefining the

malevolence of ghosts and demons as the suffering brought about by
unbridled desire. In this view, they are to be won over by compassion
rather than defeated by force.
A key ingredient in taming and converting demons, then, is the
ability to see their true nature by looking beyond their immediate appear‑
ances. As the Prince Sutasoma in another jātaka tale, the Buddha con‑
fronts the cannibal king Kalmaśapada. As with the yaks.as, the desire
to eat human flesh signifies the demonic, which in turn connotes the
untamed mind: “He has lost all self-control,” Prince Sutasoma observes
of the cannibal king (Meiland 2009, 337). This insight into the true
nature of “demons” allows the Buddha to transcend the fear that possesses
everyone else and respond with generosity: Prince Sutasoma willingly sur‑
renders himself to the cannibal. The prince’s insight—and the actions it
allows—in turn liberates the demon. Kalmaśapada declares, “Now that
I see my hideous conduct reflected in the mirror of virtue, I may feel a
strong impulse to yearn for morality” (Meiland 2009, 369). The Bud‑
dha’s depth of perception is the standard against which the shortcomings
of others become clear. These shortcomings are not only exhibited by
demons, but by the people who fear and become victimized by them.
The Buddha’s insight proves to be the superlative technology for taming
fiends. In this way, the Buddhist tradition incorporates spirit cults by
employing its own distinctive understanding of them.
In the final scenes of Nang Nak, we see Mak with the shaved pate
and robes of a Buddhist monk, first presiding over Nak’s cremation and
then collecting alms as a religious adept. The voiceover narrates how Nak’s
spirit was tamed and transferred into an amulet that Somdet To created
from a fragment of her skull. Here the film invokes a major reason for
Somdet To’s popularity today—the reputed powers of the amulets he
manufactured. The film ends by alluding to the monk’s magical efficacy,
but this power clearly flows from the strength of his meditative percep‑
tion. The overall framing of Nang Nak—a tale of lost love that ends
with world renunciation—is a modern rendition of the Buddhist‑inspired
morality tale. Such tales are related to the Buddhist tradition of confes‑
sion or revelation in which the events that precipitate such awakening
are revealed (Childs 1987). Contrary to the Christian sense of confession,
however, it is not specific acts of wrongdoing or the goal of redemption
that are at play. Instead, it is recognition of the nature of human life and
of its inevitably painful ties. Such revelation is a contemplative act rather
than a condemnation of sins. Somdet To’s religious potency is outwardly
 The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak 65

manifested in the power of his amulets and filmically depicted in his

meditative vision of Nak.

Keeping It Real

Buddhism has coexisted with spirit cults for its entire history in Asia,
and has engaged in rituals designed to appease, tame, and exorcise the
dead. This ubiquitous practice is often referred to as “folk religion,” which
gives the false impression that it was limited to rural populations and
disparaged by the upper echelons of the sophisticated and educated. But,
as DeCaroli notes, “There are numerous literary accounts that represents
individuals such as kings, brahmans, and even members of the samgha at
times turning to these spirit‑deities for help” (2004, 14). Aside from the
problematic “folk” designation, the label “religion” is perhaps confusing
because it creates the impression that talk of ghosts and spirits form a
creed sanctioned by institutional authorities. This creates the apparent
problem of two separate traditions—Buddhism and folk religion—being
practiced together, thereby mixing and adulterating them.
This is not very helpful, however. Stories about ghosts and spirits
do not form a confessional faith but are rather the language that enables
people to express certain sensibilities and experiences. These expressions
may be anxieties and regrets about the dead, or a keenness to the life
that animates the world—including the domain of trees, mountains,
rivers, and the like. The assumption that these sentiments are “beliefs”
that conflict with the rational tenets of Buddhism entails a very limited
view of how language and imagery function, and it limits what can
be recognized as important and therefore “real” in human experience.
But the long tradition of visionary experiences cultivated by Buddhist
practitioners suggests an attempt to move in the opposite direction—to
expand the human capacity to inhabit extraordinary states of mind and
therefore realities. Both visionary and “commonsense” experiences arise
in the same manner, due to causes and conditions that depend on the
quality of mind. But Buddhist visionary practice understood that “the
everyday perception of the subject is overpowered by the imaginative one”
(Shulman 2012, 59). Stories of “supernatural” phenomena help illustrate
this aspect of human experience in a vivid and arresting way.
To embrace fantasy is very fitting for Buddhists, given their habit
of proclaiming that “reality” itself is an illusion. The baselessness of all
phenomena is precisely because of the transience of all things, in which
66 Seeing Like the Buddha

the difference between dream and fantasy, on the one hand, and waking
life, on the other, is only a matter of degree. This is perhaps the reason
why Buddhists are not so fastidious about distinguishing between the
real and the unreal. Given this metaphysically level playing field, “the
imaginaire of rebirth is employed as a support for seeing all beings as
part of a ‘moral economy’ in which their individual and collective ‘for‑
tunes’—not only within, but across lives—correspond with patterns of
sustained values‑intentions‑actions” (Hershock 2007, 182). The power
of such values, intentions, and actions renders each individual into a
magician and conjurer in relation to his or her own life.
If ghost stories do not have the same presence in the modern West
as in traditional Asian cultures, there are other fantasy genres such as
science fiction that can function in similar ways. The Russian filmmaker
Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Stalker (1979) is a story about the Zone, an area
that has the mysterious property of being able to fulfill a person’s deepest
desires. A writer and a scientist are guided into the Zone by a “stalker”
who knows how to approach the dangerous territory. In the course of
their journey, they discover that the true treachery of the Zone is that it
grants the hidden and unconscious desires of its visitors rather than their
overt wishes. Because these deep‑seated thoughts and desires are unknown
to their possessors, they bring about their ruin. Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972)
has the same theme. The film depicts the strange occurrences manifested
by the sentient ocean of the planet Solaris, which causes the crew of the
planetary base to go insane. Tarkovsky again uses a supernatural vehicle
as a mirror of the psyches that confront it. The realm of fantasy can be
used to demonstrate that all life forms are the reflections of our own fears
and desires, and subject to the same law of consequences. This is another
version of karmic cause and effect and the idea of the interconnectedness
of all things. Stated in terms of traditional Buddhist cosmology, hellish
and heavenly existences are heightened visions of human possibilities
rendered in the most vivid and didactic of forms.
 chapter 4

Rashomon and the

Indiscernible Emptiness of Being

R ashomon (1950) was made by the acclaimed Japanese director Akira

Kurosawa (1910–1998), who is perhaps better known in the West
for his epic warrior dramas such as Seven Samurai (1954) and Ran (1985).
Rashomon has had its share of Western attention, however, garnering the
Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival (1951) and an honorary Oscar
at the 1952 Academy Awards. Rashōmon is the name of the main city
gate of Kyoto during the Heian period (794–1185), Japan’s glorious and
prolonged reign of peace and refined court culture before its long descent
into the age of samurai rule. Built in the eighth century, Rashōmon
stood at an imposing seventy‑five feet wide and twenty‑six feet tall, with
multiple pillars and a roofing enclosure. By the twelfth century, which is
the setting of the film, Rashōmon was in disrepair paralleling the disin‑
tegration of Heian imperial rule. At this point, the gate is nothing more
than a repository for corpses and, reputedly, ghosts. Thus, it functions
as a physical mirror of the social and moral chaos that is the underlying
theme of the film. The ruined gate also evokes the immediate post–World
War II era of the film itself, which was made a mere five years after the
atomic holocausts that brought Japan to military defeat. In the opening
scenes at Rashōmon, a Buddhist priest refers to the earthquakes, famine,
fire, plague, war, and wind that have ravaged the country—a description
that applies to the end of the modern Japanese imperial era as well as
to the disintegration of the Heian dynasty.
This multilayered reference to social chaos appears to stage a story
about human mendacity and weakness. The main event in question is

67
68 Seeing Like the Buddha

Figure 4.1. The Rashōmon gate reflects the social and moral disintegration of
the twelfth century and the fall of the Heian dynasty.

the rape of a woman by a bandit and the subsequent death of her

samurai husband. The rape is not as central as the circumstances of
the husband’s death afterward. We get the testimonies of the bandit,
the wife, the dead husband (speaking through a spirit medium), and a
bystander. The anchor of the film is how much these accounts contradict
each other, particularly on two critical points: the character and actions
of the wife in the wake of the rape, and the manner and weapon with
which the husband was killed. The first three testimonies are given to
court authorities, but the actors address the camera as if the film’s audi‑
ence is the judge. This effect is accentuated by the fact that the voice
of the interrogator is never heard, and the characters face the camera to
respond to the questions that arise in the mind of the viewer, as if they
are hearing our thoughts. Maintaining this premise, the film does not
conclude by solving the mystery, but rather leaves the question of what
actually happened to the audience. Unlike the Western “whodunit” genre,
the film does not offer clarity but rather invites second‑order reflections
on the nature and possibility of truth itself.
 Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 69

Buddhist Origins

Kurosawa based his film on two short stories by the writer Ryunosuke
Akutagawa (1892–1927), entitled “In a Grove” (Yabu no naka) and
“Rashōmon.” “In a Grove” is written as a series of testimonies, with no
framing narrative, regarding the murder of a samurai in a bamboo grove
near Kyoto. The accounts provided by the bandit, the wife, and the
samurai form the core of the depositions and they are faithfully repro‑
duced in the film. Kurosawa’s adaptation of “Rashōmon,” on the other
hand, departs more substantially from Akutagawa’s story. The original tale
focuses on an unemployed servant who takes refuge at the dilapidated
gate and contemplates his bleak life prospects: he debates whether to
starve or turn to thievery. Quite unexpectedly, he stumbles upon an old
woman ripping out the hair from the corpse of her former mistress to
make a wig and sell at market. When the old woman justifies her viola‑
tion based on her need to survive and her mistress’s own dishonesty while
alive, the servant parlays this rationalization into a justification to rob the
old woman in turn of her robes and flees into the night.
In Kurosawa’s film, the characters at Rashōmon are changed into a
Buddhist priest and woodcutter who narrate the conflicting testimonials
about the rape they witnessed at the court. The segments at Rashōmon,
then, create the frame narrative lacking in Akutagawa’s “In a Grove”:
it is where the film begins and ends, and it is where each character’s
story—including the woodcutter’s own eyewitness account—is told in a
series of flashbacks. These tales are narrated to a commoner who takes
refuge at Rashōmon from the pouring rain. In hearing these tales of
perfidy, the commoner then justifies stealing the robes of an abandoned
baby discovered at the end of the film, reprising the essential element
of Akutagawa’s “Rashōmon” story.
So far, there is nothing in Kurosawa’s film or its source materials
that suggest a Buddhist pedigree or intentionality. The Buddhist priest at
Rashōmon is not the one who supplies the superlative vision, as in the
previous two films. This priest is immobile with confusion and despair,
and badgered by the loud opinions of the commoner. To see the Buddhist
associations of Rashomon requires looking deeper into the film’s literary
sources. Akutagawa was a modern fiction writer who was interested in
vivid articulations of the human condition rather than any religious didac‑
ticism. But his short stories are based on much earlier tales, the nature
of which merits some attention. “In a Grove” and “Rashōmon” are based
on medieval Buddhist setsuwa (“tales” or ­“legends”) from the Konjaku
70 Seeing Like the Buddha

monogatarishū (“tales of long ago”), which was compiled around 1100

by an unknown Buddhist monk.1 With 1,039 extant tales in thirty‑one
books, the Konjaku is the largest collection of stories that recount the
history of Buddhism, celebrate the miraculous powers of Buddhist images
and texts, and preserve didactic tales about karmic cause and effect.
Setsuwa literature is a written record of the oral storytelling that was
critical in the broad dissemination of Buddhism in Japan.2 The ubiquity
of these tales is suggested by the thirty major setsuwa collections from
the Heian and Kamakura (1185–1333) eras.3 Setsuwas are marked by
their short length, their focus on miraculous or unusual events, and their
claim to be historically true. This leads to their frequent characterization
as “legends.” This kind of storytelling predates Buddhism in Japan and
frequently focuses on miraculous occurrences, such as human encounters
with native deities and spirits. As Buddhism was introduced to Japan,
Buddhist images, texts, and underworlds took the place of native spirits
as the subject of miracle tales. In setsuwa, we can see the conversion of
native gods to Buddhism and the gradual displacement of indigenous
myths and values with Buddhist ones. In this, the setsuwa parallels Indian
Buddhist jātaka literature and the way it enveloped native yaks.a and nāga
spirits into the Buddhist fold.4
“In a Grove” and “Rashōmon” can be found in the “secular” sec‑
tion of the Konjaku (Books 21–31), which is given that label by the
original compiler because there is no overt Buddhist content to the tales
therein. The inclusion of such secular tales may seem puzzling and create
the impression of disunity in the Konjaku collection. But in fact, the
work is characterized by a very purposeful editorial intent to address
the social and moral chaos of the times. This explains why Book 29,
where the two tales are located, specializes in descriptions of thefts, rapes,
and murders. In the words of one Konjaku scholar, the compiler‑monk
sought to “illuminate the nature of the world . . . and to provide spe‑
cific strategies for coping with [that] world” (Kelsey 1982, 157). This
entails, first, providing a systematic account of the history and teachings
of Buddhism beginning in India, then moving to China, and finally to
Japan. Then the secular tales are added, which serve “to provide practical
guidance and teachings for daily life” (Kobayashi 1979, 17).5 The secular
tales probably originated and circulated outside of the Buddhist fold
but were included for the purpose of illustrating Buddhist lessons. In
medieval China and Japan, Buddhist monks routinely collected unusual
stories to add interest as well as fodder to their sermons. Hence, “it is
 Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 71

often the case that zealous Buddhist preachers have appropriated stories
told originally in totally different context and given these stories a new,
Buddhist interpretation in telling them” (Kelsey 1982, 19). Monks across
East Asia were important agents in preserving oral literature and turning
them to overt Buddhist purpose as well.6
Akutagawa was taken with the literary freshness of the Konjaku
tales, which he developed even further. Along with “Rashōmon” and
“In a Grove,” his most well‑known stories, such as “Nose” (Hana) and
“Hellscreen” (Jigokuhen), are probing exposés of human psychology and
perversion.7 The setsuwa version of “In a Grove” is comparatively tame,
consisting of a very brief account of a rape. There are no conflicting
narratives offered up by its various dramatis personae, but only some
intimations of its emotional aspects. The bandit confesses attachment to
his female victim, leading him to spare the husband’s life, and the woman
in turn expresses impatience with her husband’s fecklessness, which led
to the rape in the first place. The compiler’s only summary comment is
that the husband was foolish for entering a grove with a man he barely
knew. On the basis of this skeletal account—one of the shortest in the
Konjaku—Akutagawa’s version explores the full gamut of emotional pos‑
sibilities the situation offers, making each testimony a fully embodied and
subjective reality against which the factual details become lost.
It is easy to see Kurosawa’s resulting film as a general observation
about human deception rather than an overtly Buddhist tale. The com‑
moner in the film voices the theme of human mendacity upon hearing
of the testimonies from the priest and woodcutter. The commoner also
deduces that the woodcutter stole a valuable dagger from the murder
scene, casting doubt on even the latter’s innocence and neutrality. Thus,
the impossibility of honesty and the ambiguity of “truth” are suggested
in contrast to the moral clarity of medieval Buddhist literature. But
these themes fulfill the Konjaku compiler’s desire to address existence as
we know it, which is what the Buddha himself claimed to do. What
Kurosawa’s Rashomon cries out for, at this point, is an overt application
of Buddhist language and concepts to what it depicts.

The Subjectivity of Perception

In keeping with the setsuwa genre, Rashomon is an account of strange

occurrences made compelling by its claim to be true. For what can be
72 Seeing Like the Buddha

more true and unsettling than the fact that our stories radically con‑
flict, even when they are about the same event recounted by the prin‑
cipal participants themselves? This insight prompted Kurosawa to some
unprecedented and startling filmmaking, by breaking the linear mode
of storytelling and depicting the same incident multiple times. The film
was greenlighted with considerable reluctance by Daiei studio, whose
executives and production staff feared that the unconventional narrative
would confuse audiences.
It could be suggested, however, that such radical filmmaking actu‑
ally reprises a genre of Buddhist literature that David McMahan calls
“symbolic fantasy.” Mahāyāna Buddhist sutras, such as the Gan.d.avyūha
depicted on the third and fourth galleries of Borobudur, are notable for
how frequently they depict meditative visions of vast Buddha assemblies
and cosmic lands. Two aspects of this literary genre are relevant here.
First, it is a translation of Buddhist teachings into visual form, which
“imagines the experience of beings who have developed the human tech‑
nologies of meditation and self‑cultivation . . . to their fullest capacity”
(McMahan 2002, 131). Second, these visions disintegrate time by depict‑
ing a totalistic “Buddha‑verse” that is continuous with our own tainted
samsaric world. As an enlightened vision, the temporal distance between
samsara and nirvana is erased to give us an immediate experience of
what the Buddha sees.
At Borobudur, the Gan.d.avyūha panels abandon the prior linear
mode and depict meditative visions through a series of “small, clearly
realized parts that must be mentally assembled to arrive at the whole
panorama” (Gifford 2011, 76). Nineteen panels are used to depict the
vision of Maitreya’s palace, for example, in which each panel pictures a
different decorative embellishment of the exact same setting. One panel
depicts the palace with bells, the next with banners, the next with lotus
ponds, and so on. These are not different palaces but rather different
details of the same scene, painstakingly constructed for our own careful
and piece‑by‑piece visualization. The multiple depictions of Rashomon
are not of a fantastical Buddha‑verse seen through meditative vision, of
course. Instead, it is of ordinary beings who seem weak and self‑deluded.
But with its multiple visions the film offers an equally important Bud‑
dhist observation into the nature of the self and the stories we construct.
The multiple sequences, like the multiple panels that parse Maitreya’s
palace, allow us to mentally assemble this vision into a panorama that
is not ordinarily available to us. Just as the visions of Buddha‑verses are
 Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 73

projected by those who have developed the technology of meditation, the

technology of film is able to reverse the linearity of ordinary experience
into a totalistic and penetrating insight.
In the Buddhist analysis of the self, our mental perceptions arise
at the behest of our sensations, and sensations in turn are rooted in our
bodies. Being spatially and temporally confined, the perceptions that arise
from such bodies discriminate what is good or bad, desirable or undesir‑
able, in an egocentric and embodied manner. Our combined physical and
mental apparatus is not conditioned to take in the world as such, but rather
to assess it relative to our individual wants and needs. The self‑interested
bidding of our bodies is not just biological in nature. Bodies are also
located in social space, which differentiates the values and functions of
different bodies. This social differentiation creates diverging and often con‑
flicting demands that can result in radically opposing perceptions of reality.
The social setting of Heian Japan, as with many traditional societies,
is particularly discriminating when it comes to the sex and class of bodies.
Noblewomen are defined by their virtue, and warriors by their honor.
Even bandits aspire to valor and principle, while commoners struggle
to survive as supposedly lesser moral beings. Strong social norms add
a thick layer of prejudicing perspective in addition to the fact that no
two bodies, no matter how alike, can occupy the same place at the same
time and perceive the exact same thing. Kurosawa’s Rashomon depicts the
emotions and meanings produced by these differentiated bodies as they
interact with each other in the same space. We can briefly recount these
diverging experiences in turn.
The first testimony is given by the bandit Tajumaro, who boasts
of how the woman he coveted quickly succumbed to his embrace. He
had his way with her even without killing the husband, he asserts, who
had to helplessly witness the defilement of his wife. The bandit reports
that in the wake of the rape, he was ready to take his leave when the
wife intervened, demanding that one of them must die as two living
men cannot have knowledge of her womanly “shame.” This results in
a duel between the bandit and the samurai, depicted quite heroically
with dramatic music. “We crossed swords twenty‑three times,” Tajumaro
boasts—the most any opponent has gotten of him—before he prevailed
and killed the samurai. In the bandit’s tale, the duel is honorable and his
opponent’s death commendably courageous. He confesses no weakening
attachment to the woman but admits to the murder of her husband as
a matter of stoic honesty and bravado.
74 Seeing Like the Buddha

In the woman’s story, the bandit is far less significant and plays no
role in the events that occur after the rape. She testifies that he simply
ran off after forcing himself upon her: he literally disappears from the
scene. The wife’s focus is on the humiliation and pain of her husband,
who is helplessly bound in ropes. She ran to her husband to release him,
she reports, but was arrested in her tracks by his expression. This is the
most consequential and central moment of her story. She sees a chill‑
ingly contemptuous stare for her on her husband’s face that drains her
of sentience and reason: his unspeaking coldness drives her to a madness
that causes her to faint. When she wakes up, she sees her dagger buried
in the body of her now dead husband. In this manner, she confesses to
having taken his life. But the woman’s tale emphasizes her own vulner‑
ability as a violated woman, and the ensuing ambiguity of her social
and personal status. To be turned upon by the person on whom she
most depends—her husband—is the greater transgression, tantamount
to execution by his lack of mercy.
In the dead man’s tale, the victim and victimizer are reversed, dem‑
onstrating the quixotic nature of perception, particularly where power is
involved. In his eyes, there is a suggestion of conspiracy between his wife
and her violator. According to the dead man, the bandit begs the wife
to run away with him, and after some inconsolable tears, she suddenly
agrees. She looked as if in a trance, the dead man reports, and was more
beautiful than he had ever seen her. But his pain does not end there. In
his version of events, his abjectness is brought to inhuman proportion
through the direct agency of his wife: in mid‑flight, she halts, turns back
to point at her husband and demand that the bandit kill him before they
depart. They were the most hateful and damnable words ever uttered by
humankind, the dead man declares, turning even the bandit against her
in disgust. She runs off, with the bandit giving chase, leaving the hus‑
band to his abandonment. Realizing that the sound of crying he hears
is his own, he takes his wife’s dagger and stabs himself. After some time
in the darkness and silence of death, he feels someone pull the dagger
from his body and depart.
The film version of the woodcutter’s story is much more elabo‑
rate than in Akutagawa’s tale, where he simply testifies that he found
the body—without a dagger or weapon of any kind on the scene. In
Kurosawa’s film, the woodcutter stumbles upon the immediate aftermath
of the rape, thereby presenting a forth version of events in the guise of
the outsider’s disinterested perspective. The woodcutter affirms the dead
 Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 75

man’s claim that the bandit courted the wife, but in his version, her
response is markedly different. “How could I, a woman, say anything?”
she demands, and cuts her husband’s ropes. The bandit takes this as a
request for a duel, but the husband refuses to fight, saying the wife ought
to kill herself in her shame. The bandit then wavers in his own desire
for her, and for a long moment the woman is poignantly and desperately
caught between the rejection of both men. At this point, the wife exhibits
a ferocious transformation: in a fit of hysterical laughter, she maniacally
taunts both men for their weakness, saying the bandit should fight to win
her and the husband should fight to keep her. She badgers and shames
them into a duel, but this time it is shot as a prolonged, clumsy, and
cowardly effort. There is no music, and the whole sequence unfolds in
silence except for the sounds of the two men’s desperate scrambling and
labored breathing. When the bandit finally pierces the samurai, it is in
terror of his own act as the samurai piteously begs for his life. When
the bandit turns to the woman to claim her, she runs off.
Among all of the discrepancies between the testimonies, the most
overtly empirical question concerns the agent and weapon of the sam‑
urai’s death. Interestingly, the bandit, wife, and husband all implicate
themselves rather than one another, suggesting that there are matters far
more significant than being guilty of murder or suicide. For all three, the
primary issue is how they experience and constitute themselves—to be
exact, as the valiant fighter, the rejected wife, and the betrayed husband,
respectively. All three self‑imaginings may be deluded, but they are also
socially and emotionally mandated given the identity of their respective
bodies. The bandit’s career trades on his reputation for fierceness and
his own brand of honor. He will willingly hang for murder as long as
he can preserve this identity for himself as well as for others. For the
wife, the soiling of her sexual virtue is of the greatest import, and to
suffer her husband’s coldness upon her violation is her worst fear and
consequence. It signals the end of her life, compared to which killing
her own husband—and admitting to it—adds little of consequence. In
the husband’s experience, his initial failure to protect his wife is fully
and egregiously exacerbated by his fear that she may prefer the coarse
but stronger villain, completing his debasement as a man. His suicide
merely finalizes his social death.
The jeweled dagger that is the agent of the wife’s murder, the
husband’s suicide, and the woodcutter’s theft embodies an important
Buddhist image. It evokes the Buddhist notion of the “second dart,” or
76 Seeing Like the Buddha

the psychological and conceptual dagger that adds the greater damage to
the natural piercings of sensory experience. The metaphor of the dart is
ubiquitous in Pāli Buddhist sources, where it usually refers to the addi‑
tional pain that humans inflict upon themselves through mental opera‑
tions.8 In the Salla Sutta (“the dart sutta”) of the Sutta Nipāta, death is
a natural sorrow but it is increased by our attachment to death in the
form of unreasoning grief. This is the second dart. But, “The man who
has taken out the dart, who has no clinging, who has obtained peace of
mind, passed beyond all grief, this man, free from grief, is still” (SN 593).
The variability of the characters’ stories and the fragility of truth is
perhaps most apparent in the portrayals of the young wife. Is she a cold
and manipulative conniver, or the powerless and weaker sex? Even in
contemporary liberated society, female sexuality provokes the most irrec‑
oncilable of subjectivities. Women may be physically and socially weaker,
but powerful men—professors, mentors, even presidents—seem to grow
witless in their midst. These men might consider themselves bewitched,
as if by a cunning spirit, but at the same time they can be accused of
abusing their stronger position. The young wife and her husband nar‑
rate one such version of the “he said, she said” testimonial, which our
own judicial system is helpless to parse. But Kurosawa’s inclusion of
the woodcutter’s account, as the comparatively objective view, suggests
a deeper paradoxical insight that perhaps both opposing accounts are
equally true. In the woodcutter’s perception, the woman’s ferocity roars
into being at the moment and behest of her greatest vulnerability, when
both men are ready to dispose of her. Her weakness begets a strength
that is both pitiable and formidable, both victimized and victimizing.
The woodcutter’s more complex view cannot settle upon a single essence
or definition of her personhood. As with the wife in Nang Nak, we see
that women across cultures are the site of male projections and fears. The
social location of women and their female bodies admittedly constrains
their possibilities, but even that constraint cannot be exhausted by a
single version of their nature.
To be sure, the woodcutter himself does not embody perfect objec‑
tivity. His own interested storytelling is divulged in his fib concerning
the dagger. In addition, his perception of the inglorious duel between
the bandit and the samurai taunts the supposed valor of these men who
are supposed to be his physical and social superiors. But his humane and
sympathetic view of the wife conveys a sense of subjectivity as something
more than self‑delusion or outright deceit. Instead, it suggests that the
 Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 77

relativity of all perspectives compels us to recognize the humanity of

each. But this leads us to a further possibility—that is, the possibility of
giving up the distinction between truth and falsity to recognize that we
always live in a space between them. What this ultimately recommends
is detachment from all views, even as we entertain them. According to
Buddhist teachings, as well as the outcome of Rashomon, it is only then
that moral action becomes possible.

The Perception of No‑Perception

The opening scene of the story in the forest begins with a direct shot of
the sun filtered through leaves and branches. The shot is dynamic from
the beginning, as the moving camera tracks the steady sun against a
foreground of flowing branches and trees. The shot then cuts to the axe
slung on the back of the woodcutter, who is steadfastly moving deeper
and deeper into the forest. This long and continuous sequence cuts back
and forth between the quick pace of the woodcutter and the passage of
thick forest vistas that measure and mark his movement. The combina‑

Figure 4.2. The woodcutter descends into the woods where light and shadow
are inextricably entangled.
78 Seeing Like the Buddha

tion of sun, forest, and movement creates a remarkable dance of light

and shadow that portends the flickering play of human subjectivities to
come. The scene halts its pace as the woodcutter comes upon various
signs of the crime that took place in the forest, including, finally, the
body of the samurai. But the moral of the story has already been told
through the visual medium, in which the dappled light intertwines and
tangles with the darkness and suggests the impossibility of any clear dif‑
ferentiation between what is true and what is false.
This descent into wilderness reprises the title of the original story,
“In a Grove,” and both, in turn, evoke the Buddhist metaphor of the
“thicket” or “wilderness” of views.9 These images, among others, are used
to characterize the Buddhist notion of “wrong view,” which does not refer
so much to false doctrines but rather to the attachment that human views
can foster, and its subsequent ill‑effects. A proper understanding of this
depends on the proper appropriation of Buddhist doctrine itself. The
first component of the eightfold noble path of Buddhism is “right view,”
which generally refers to the Buddhist teaching that suffering exists, that
all is impermanent, and that all things lack inherent existence or sub‑
stance. Thus, Buddhism has its central tenets and posits an unambiguous
set of proper beliefs. But the rightness and wrongness of “views” (dr..st.i)
are defined by their effects above all else: “A view can be doctrinally
correct but if, through giving rise to attachment, it distorts the holder’s
response to the world, it is a wrong‑view” (Fuller 2005, 79). The right‑
ness of Buddhist views, then, has less to do with their correctness than
the actions encouraged by them.
The At.t.hakavagga (“chapter of the eights”) of the Sutta Nipāta, one
of the earliest sources in the Theravāda Pāli canon, gives us a clear sense
of the actions fostered by right views:

The noble one who wanders in the world, liberated from views,
does not grasp them and enter into arguments.  .  .  .  That wise
one does not become conceited through views or knowledge,
for he is not attached to that sort. . . . There are no ties to
him who is free from ideas, there are no delusions to him
who is delivered by wisdom. Those who grasp ideas and views,
wander about coming into conflict in the world. (SN 845–47)

The significant idea here is that the noble one is liberated from all
views and therefore does not enter into philosophical disputations. This
 Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 79

seems to be at odds with the fact that Buddhism itself preaches essential
tenets: without knowledge of suffering, karma, dependent arising, and the
insubstantiality of all things, Buddhist enlightenment is not possible. And
yet, the Sutta Nipāta extols the need to rise above all views. Moreover,
this exhortation is made in tandem with such propositions about the
truth of cause and effect, and the insubstantiality of the self.
In order to make sense of this situation, it is necessary to question
the idea that the principle tenets of Buddhism are actually doctrines or
statements of metaphysical truth. Instead, they may be understood as
observations that induce a particular kind of practice—to wit, the practice
of overcoming greed, hatred, and delusion, or the “three poisons” that
give rise to suffering. The common denominator of these observations
is the empirical insight that nothing in human experience is enduring.
Therefore, clinging to any of these transient phenomena only ends in
grief. The idea of “no self,” as a result, is not a metaphysical assertion
that the self or soul does not exist, but rather an exhortation to detach
from and be free of the idea of the self as a fixed and singular entity.
The “doctrine” of karma can certainly be interpreted as a metaphysical
assertion about the truth of rebirth, but it is also the practice‑driven
observation that a mind submerged in greed, hatred, and delusion per‑
petuates this experience into the future, thereby prolonging suffering.10
What Buddhist teachings prompt is the practice of detachment from
unwholesome mental states. The exhortation to give up all doctrines,
then, is not in opposition to Buddhist teachings but rather harmonious
with them. The Buddhist concept of right view does not mean believing
in the right propositions as opposed to the wrong ones, but rather the
freedom from slavish or self‑serving attachment to dogmas.
The At.t.hakavagga chapter of the Sutta Nipāta is particularly focused
on the dangers of dogmatism. It begins with discourses warning against
attachment to sensory delights, which are initially defined as worldly pos‑
sessions and sexual pleasures. But doctrines and views are also included
in what a person “sees and hears” (SN 778), and therefore count as a
sensory delight. This may be counterintuitive to our own cultural logic,
which separates the mind and body as qualitatively different phenomena.
In Buddhist logic, however, the mind is the sixth sensory organ that
apprehends its own brand of sensory objects. Akin to visual objects such
as beautiful women, and gustatory delights such as tasty food, mental
objects such as ideologies and doctrines can engender attachment and
self‑indulgence. The At.t.hakavagga observes, “The debaters, having entered
80 Seeing Like the Buddha

into the gathering, start disputes calling each other fools”; they seek
praise, which is often frustrated, and, “In defeat he becomes downcast
and, seeking for flaws in others, becomes enraged by their criticism.”
Those who successfully defend their views “thrill with joy” but “elation
itself is the ground of his downfall; for still he talks with pride and
arrogance” (SN 825–30). Clinging to views, as much as grasping for
wealth and other worldly delights, is a “dart of passion” (SN 779). The
standard Buddhist image of the dart that wounds evokes the dagger in
the rival stories of Rashomon, which always functions as the object or
agent of each person’s attachment. In contrast, the wise and noble person
“has ceased to associate with dogmas for he no longer requires the solace
that dogmas offer” (SN 801).
A “right view,” then, can be defined as a form of action, particularly
moral action that comes after giving up the thoughts and rationalizations
that inhibit compassionate responses to others. This is clearly depicted
in the outer frame tale at Rashōmon, where the woodcutter, priest, and
commoner debate the significance of what has happened. The interlocut‑
ers at Rashōmon, like the characters in the grove, are also engaged in
telling stories. But unlike the stories concerning what happened in the
thicket, the interlocutors at Rashōmon tell tales that signal their own
actions to come. The woodcutter and the priest form the initial voices in
this debate. The woodcutter repeatedly expresses his despair over human‑
ity, while the priest insists that one must maintain faith in the goodness
of human beings. He proclaims that he simply cannot live in the hell
that would otherwise result. From the opening scene up until the pen‑
ultimate end, these two dejected and inert figures frame the film with
their paralysis—a paralysis that results from their very need to ascertain
some grand “truth” about humanity. This irresolvable and futile pursuit
renders them hapless and weak.
The commoner, in contrast, confidently proclaims the evil nature of
human beings. He declares that “[i]t’s human to lie” and that “[g]oodness
is only pretend.” The cynic essentially holds court in these sequences,
badgering the woodcutter and priest with his energetic views. For the
casual observer, he might also be taken as the authoritative voice of the
film that articulates its lessons and conclusions. What he does during
these disquisitions is telling, however. As the cynic speaks, he strips wood
from the gate structure to build a warming fire, conspicuously disman‑
tling the civic and moral order that the gate symbolizes. This depiction
provides an insight and a caution: the commoner’s actions mirror his
 Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 81

words, for his assertions about the naturalness of human evil also foster
and enact his own immoral actions at the end of the film.
The final act of the film centers on an abandoned baby discovered
in a remote corner of Rashōmon. In attempting to fathom how the baby
came to be there, the infant functions as a Rorschach that throws into
relief the subjectivities of the individuals who encounter it. The cynic,
remaining true to his worldview, concludes that its parents simply aban‑
doned their responsibilities after their sexual sport. The woodcutter, on
the other hand, divines anguish in this desperate act: “See how they left
an amulet to protect the baby!” he counters. These speculations reveal the
affective reality of the speakers rather than the reality they presume to
describe. Most importantly, interpretation leads to corresponding actions.
The cynic uses his story to justify stealing the baby’s cloak as his parting
act. When the woodcutter calls him evil, he counters that it is the parents
who are evil for abandoning the infant. The cynic’s action makes the
intent of his storytelling clear: the declaration that humans are naturally
evil justifies his own selfish actions as morally neutral. He is only liv‑
ing within the rules that others have established, he rationalizes, so his
behavior is justified given the precedent of others. He tells the story of
human evil in order to mask his own moral agency—an agency that is
clearly demonstrated and exercised by his choice of what story to tell.
With this denouement, Kurosawa faithfully captures the essence
of Akutagawa’s original “Rashōmon,” which depicts the way cognition
and thought are inexorably linked to actions. Before the impoverished
servant discovers the old woman ripping hair from corpses abandoned
at Rashōmon, he engages himself in a debate about his own options
in the world—whether to starve to death or turn to theft. When he
encounters the old woman in her gruesome act, he is initially repulsed
and furious to the point of violence. But when she justifies herself by
pointing to the evil of others, the servant reaches a turning point: “A
new kind of courage began to germinate in his heart,” we are told. The
servant then exclaims to the old woman, “You won’t blame me, then, for
taking your clothes. That’s what I have to do to keep from starving to
death” (Akutagawa 2006, 9). Akutagawa’s tale revolves around this astute
psychological portrayal of how thought enables corresponding behavior.
It is at this point that the woodcutter is able to overcome his own
paralysis and take action. Most significantly, his agency is awakened only
after his claim to moral righteousness is resoundingly silenced: when he
upbraids the commoner for taking the baby’s cloak, the latter trumps
82 Seeing Like the Buddha

him by deducing that the woodcutter himself stole the dagger in the
grove. The cynic gleefully reveals the woodcutter’s own guilt and arrests
any further criticism. He taunts the woodcutter with the words, “Do you
have anything more to say?” which is met with dejected silence. But this
turn is significant in an unexpected way. By having his subjectivity fully
disclosed, the woodcutter is freed from the cynic’s own conceit of seeing
the truth and the self‑deception this allows. The woodcutter’s awareness
of his own limitations paradoxically allows him to act in a morally trans‑
formative manner. He decides to take the baby home, observing that one
more mouth to feed in his large family is of no matter. This turn comes
about after he gives up the quest for understanding: He observes, “I don’t
understand my own heart.” This admission of ignorance is a liberating
confession that frees him from both self‑deception and debilitating words.
The scene at the end of the film is particularly striking in depicting
this transformation and forms an explicit bookend to the long sequence
of the woodcutter descending into the woods at the beginning. In this
early segment, the woodcutter strides at a rapid pace into the woods and
forms a part of the tableau of light and shadow that parallels the lack
of narrative clarity in the film. At the end, after the cynic has exposed
the woodcutter’s secret and fled with the baby’s cloak, the woodcutter
and priest are shown standing in both physical and intellectual paralysis
against the wall of Rashōmon. Their absolute stillness is in stark contrast
to the woodcutter’s rapid movement at the beginning, and accentuated
by a series of cuts that hone in on the silent and unmoving figures.
The actions have moved from energetic debates to a stillness of both
body and mind. This hiatus is suddenly broken by a sharp cry from the
baby, which galvanizes the priest to pace back and forth in an attempt
to soothe the infant. At this point, the woodcutter moves to take the
baby from the priest. The priest initially mistakes the woodcutter as
intending further harm to the child but is disabused of his confusion
by the woodcutter’s words. The cry of the baby, like the physical blows
that Zen masters are renowned for dispensing on their followers, func‑
tions as the non‑semantic wake‑up call—or “sudden enlightenment”
in Zen parlance—that signals movement from paralyzing thought to
awakened action.
At this point, the moral resolution of the film is reached. The priest
declares that his faith in humankind has been restored. The fact that the
common woodcutter rather than the Buddhist cleric enacts the resolu‑
tion is also very Zen in flavor, with its view that institutional religion
 Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 83

tends to ossify into dogmatic formulations that are inattentive to the

present. The priest has not been able to draw on his career to gain any
true understanding and presents as a particularly helpless figure. It is the
simplicity of the woodcutter, perhaps, that enables him to move more
quickly to right action. This transition is signaled by the sudden halt
in the incessant rain right before the baby’s cry. The breaking sun and
woodcutter’s beatific expression as he carries the infant away is the final
image of the film and the only sense of certainty it offers. His ability
to act obliterates the specter of innate human corruption that has been
entertained and enacts a very different reality.
The conclusion of Rashomon demonstrates that the ability to
take moral action is quite separate from—and perhaps even contrary
to—adherence to grand abstractions and conceptual constructions. The
conflicting stories told by the bandit, man, and woman in the grove
cannot be resolved by themselves alone, and, furthermore, they cannot
be resolved by those who debate them. Such debaters may be removed
from the bias of the original three, but their attempts to illuminate

Figure 4.3. The woodcutter emerges from the Roshōmon gate into the clear
light of moral action.
84 Seeing Like the Buddha

the situation are only trapped in further bias. We are all caught in an
endless chain of limiting perspectives. But Rashomon insists on making
us, the viewers, the final arbiters. In doing so, it does not invite us to
further declaim on the nature of the world or the inherent morality of
human beings. The Sutta Nipāta informs us that “There is a state where
form ceases to exist. . . . It is a state without ordinary perception and
without disordered perception and without no perception and without
any annihilation of perception” (SN 874). That is to say, it is possible
to attain a state beyond ordinary perception that neither obliterates nor
succumbs to it. All of us cannot help standing somewhere, but it is our
attachment to our own perceptions that hinders our awareness of the
very limited places on which we stand. This is what inhibits our ability
to act correctly. The moral resolution of the film suggests that appropri‑
ate actions can come only when we set aside the impulse to elevate our
limited view of things, and attain the perception of no‑perception.

The Emptiness of Being

A Hollywood screenplay manual plainly states the norm of cinematic

storytelling: “In the beginning of the motion picture we don’t know
anything. During the course of the story, information is accumulated,
until at the end we know everything” (Vale 1972, 64). Omniscience is
a pleasure afforded by narrative, and its clarity about the world has the
power to move people to action. It is this very same capacity, however,
that raises controversy over Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004),
whose clarity of vision tells people that Jews should be treated as the
enemy of Christianity.
The Buddhist conception of karma, with its emphasis on actions
that create merit and demerit, is easily taken to differentiate between
good and evil. In fact, karma pivots on the concept of kusala, translated
as “wholesomeness” and “skillfulness,” and its opposite akusala, “unwhole‑
someness” and “unskillfulness.” Kusala is difficult to render in terms of
positive content, for “far from denoting a static good or a generic whole‑
someness or skill, it denotes acutely context‑sensitive movement in the
direction of increasing good . . . [which] implies situationally apt, inten‑
sifying excellence” (Hershock 2007, 190). Our examinations of karma
in the previous chapters testify that this “context‑sensitive movement”
happens when insight into the inherently formless nature of being makes
 Rashomon and the Indiscernible Emptiness of Being 85

it possible for actions to become their own natural reward, and our
perception of suffering enacts compassion rather than condemnation.
The root of akusala—unwholesomeness and unskillfulness—is con‑
sistently identified as something that runs deeper than the usual immo‑
ralities of greed, hatred, and the like. These roots of suffering have their
own root—prapañca (Pāli: papañca)—which is the process of mental
proliferation instigated by conceptual discriminations (D II.277). The
idea of proliferation is consonant with the image of a “thicket” of views,
and it connotes the natural tendency of the mind and mental construc‑
tions to self‑enlarge and multiply. This proliferation of mind becomes the
impediment to the moment‑by‑moment awareness of which wholesome‑
ness consists. Cinema is considered escapist at times because it supplies
the comforting clarity that lived experience often lacks. But Rashomon
demonstrates that film can also move in a different direction toward
a different kind of excellence. Such excellence is difficult to appreciate
from a narrative sensibility that strives toward a finality in which all is
revealed and all is resolved. For this reason, to see the Buddha and the
nonlinear and interpenetrating reality that is attributed to his vision, one
must ultimately move to an aesthetic modality, to which we turn next.
 chapter 5

The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi

M aborosi (1995) is the first feature film of Hirokazu Kore’eda, who

began his career as a documentary filmmaker. The cinematography
of this film has elicited comparisons with the iconic Japanese director
Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963), particularly in its limited use of the camera:
Maborosi has almost no panning or tracking shots, and no close‑ups or
zooms. Another point of similarity is the “still life,” or scenes of every‑
day objects that in Ozu’s case, “serve not to symbolize but to contain
emotions” (Richie 1974, 136). Kore’eda pays overt homage to Ozu by
replicating his signature shot of a steaming water kettle, but Maborosi is
particularly notable for non‑diegetic scenes of people engaged in ordi‑
nary activities—cleaning, napping, mending a fence, washing dishes, and
looking out a window. The high frequency of such shots reflects the fact
that Maborosi does not offer much in the way of dramatic action or plot
development—again, much like the films of Ozu.
Maborosi tells the story of a young woman named Yumiko whose
husband commits suicide on the train tracks when their baby is only a
few months old. Some years later, Yumiko marries again and relocates
to her new husband’s seaside town. The dramatic height of the film
comes at the end, when a visit back to Osaka triggers depression over
the unintelligibility of her first husband’s death. She finally voices her
incomprehension to Tamio, her second husband: “Why did he do it?”
she asks. “It just goes around and around in my head.” Tamio replies that
the sea has the ability to beguile. His own father has seen a beckoning
light far out in the water when he was a fisherman. It can happen to
all of us, Tamio concludes. His reference to the sea may be triggered by

87
88 Seeing Like the Buddha

the fact that both of them are standing on an ocean jetty during this
conversation. But the dominance of the images and sounds of water in
the second half of the film makes Tamio’s allusion to the sea much more
significant. William LaFleur suggests that it paints “a contrast between an
ever widening visual spaciousness on screen and what we cannot avoid
perceiving as the protagonist’s narrowly focused mind” (2002, 160). The
spaciousness of the ocean provides a visual alternative to the inevitably
limited vistas of human perception.
The emotional center of Maborosi lies in human incomprehension
and the frustrated desire to know—both for Yumiko as well as for the
audience. This is triggered by the fact that the suicide is never explained
or resolved in the film. Instead, we have references to the depth and
vastness of the sea, whose unfathomability has the power to beguile and
draw us in. The artistry of Maborosi as a film lies in the way it renounces
explanations, which merely feign comprehension and light, in favor of
an aesthetic appreciation. There is an overt similarity between Maborosi
and Rashomon in that both refuse to tell us what happened. But whereas
Rashomon provokes philosophizing about the nature and possibility of
truth itself, Maborosi relinquishes debate for the task of looking at things
that becomes possible only after we unburden ourselves of the strain of
intellectual understanding. This aesthetic attitude, then, is supported by
the Buddhist one that says, “Just as we cannot physically hold in place or
in stasis that which is passing away, so too we cannot hold in mind that
which ultimately runs far beyond our mental grasp” (LaFleur 2002, 159).
In LaFleur’s telling, it is the film’s “complex play of light” that
promises an “intense epiphany of things” (2002, 161). The full Japanese
title of the film is in fact maboroshi no hikari, which translates as “illusory
light” or “phantom light.”1 LaFleur suggests that an intense experience
of “the seductive power of light” that is film itself is what Maborosi ulti‑
mately gives us (164). But, in fact, the dominant visual characteristic of
this film is the way it favors shadows. This results partly from the fact
that Kore’eda shot the movie with no artificial lighting. But his choices to
set his scenes so frequently at night and to clothe his actors in black also
contribute to the darkness. Of course, light and shadow necessarily arise
together, and one cannot exist without the other. This fact is displayed
through brilliant visual compositions in scene after scene. In one striking
vignette, we see Yumiko engaged in the mundane task of washing the
basement stairs. The darkness of the room showcases the almost tangible
and thick shafts of light that pour in from the open trapdoor above. In
 The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 89

another scene, a pitch‑black room is pierced by the grey light of the early
dawn when Yumiko opens the solid wooden window. The brilliance and
beauty of the light we see in Maborosi is enabled by the shadows, just as
the glint of sun on ocean water is offset by the darkness of its depths.
This essay focuses on the shadows, because our natural attraction to
the light often leads us to overlook the darkness that is the prerequisite
of light. The choice between light and shadow is not just an aesthetic
one, and the Buddhist tradition at play here moves purposefully from
the light to the shadows to make a philosophical as well as artistic point.
The focus on shadows, as we shall see, is paralleled by an injunction
to relinquish discursive meaning in favor of mystery. These values are
embodied in the Buddhist‑derived aesthetic concept known as yūgen.
This chapter will trace the medieval origins of this concept and bring it
into the contemporary world of Maborosi. Giving up the explicit signs
and symbols of discursive meaning also allows us to transition from
overtly Buddhist figures to the potential of secular signs to function in
a Buddhist way. The ultimate trajectory is to go beyond Maborosi into
non‑Asian cinema, where the next chapter will take us. It is this link
between Buddhism and aesthetics that creates the ability to see the Bud‑
dha without any overt religious icons. The fecundity of the shadow, with
its absence of light and forms, opens up the potential for endless forms
to function religiously.

The Preference for Shadows

The ubiquitous shadows that appear in Maborosi are the results of the
film’s cinematography. The use of long shots frequently turns the char‑
acters into dark silhouettes, as in the penultimate scene of Yumiko and
Tamio on the jetty. Another striking example is when their children run
along a lake and are reflected into mirror images in the water that are
brighter than the silhouettes formed by their physical bodies. Whereas
close‑ups of faces require sufficient lighting, long shots need not worry
about illuminating visual expression or emotion. Humans become one
part of the scene rather than its center, often moving in and out of the
frame of the stationary camera. We are made to look at places well before
and long after people occupy them, which calls attention to the larger
patterns of darkness and light that compose the world. In the absence
of the anthropocentric focus, the screen turns into a play of chiaroscuro
90 Seeing Like the Buddha

Figure 5.1. The running children are more distinct as shadows reflected in the
bright surface of the water.

in which humans meld into the darkness and are obscured by the light
coming in through a window, reflecting off the water, or illuminating
the sky.
To a certain degree, the merging of person and shadow reflects a
somberness of mood, particularly in the case of Yumiko. When she dis‑
lodges from the bus that takes her to the ocean in the penultimate scene,
it takes a while for the viewer to locate her in the depth of the shadows

Figure 5.2. In this long‑distance shot so typical of Maborosi, Yumiko’s figure

is hidden in the bus stop enclosure as the bus slowly winds its way out of the
still camera frame.
 The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 91

of the bus stop enclosure. Her immersion in darkness very much mirrors
the abyss of her depression. Kore’eda acknowledges the somber cast of
the film as a whole in his statement that “[f ]or my generation, there is
a feeling of a lack of certainty about anything—a universal undefined
feeling of loss” (DVD special features interview). But the descent of
humans into the shadows of the space they occupy is also noticeable in
scenes of intimacy and connection. In perhaps the warmest depiction of
conjugal happiness, Yumiko and Tamio sit entwined after lovemaking on
a hot summer afternoon in the coolness of the dark beneath a window.
Although the scene is shot at medium range, they are too enveloped in
darkness to be clearly discernable from the shadows or from each other.
Intimacy is suggested by this use of shadow to blend husband and wife
together. This technique echoes a much earlier scene of Yumiko and her
first husband Ikuo riding astride a single bicycle, which is filmed in a
rare tracking shot. This time, nighttime provides the cover of darkness
so that it is difficult to distinguish where one person ends and the other
begins. In both scenes, the warmth of the conversation reinforces the
impression of interconnectedness.
Overwhelmingly, however, Maborosi does not create a sense of con‑
nectedness and identification for the audience. The literal distance of the
characters from the camera distances the viewer from the human action,
which does very little to make one feel a part of it. The length of time
that is expended on the scenes, which contain minimal human move‑
ment, encourages the eye to wander all over the screen—partly because
one is not sure of the location of the narrative focus, and partly because
there is nothing else to do. The effect is voyeuristic and depersonalizing.
We are given a vista into the lives of others without being told what
any of it means. William LaFleur suggests, quite rightly, that there is
no attempt to explain the death at the center of the story because any
intellectual rationalization of suicide is ultimately inadequate and unsat‑
isfying. Instead, the camera induces a contemplative stance that “respects
and relishes what may forever remain unknown in things” (2002, 159).
The humans in Maborosi are defined by the spaces and objects around
them, which have the effect of decentering them and their questions.
They are small and distant within this framing, and both literally and
figuratively covered in darkness.
In the evolution of his own interpretation, however, LaFleur focuses
on images of light to ultimately offer an explanation of the suicide. He
does so by turning to a piece of Buddhist history to float the possibility
92 Seeing Like the Buddha

of being attracted to the moment of death. This is quite different from

the desire for nonexistence. Rather, LaFleur focuses on the moment right
before death “as possibly providing an absolutely unparalleled experi‑
ence of being connected to the panoply of things” (2002, 162). LaFleur
alludes to medieval accounts of Japanese Buddhist devotees who set sail
for the island of Fudaraku (Sanskrit: Potalaka), which is the legendary
abode of the Bodhisattva Kannon (Sanskrit: Avalokiteśvara). Between the
ninth and eighteenth centuries, there are accounts of people who sailed
off and never returned, having drowned themselves for the purpose of
being reborn on the other shore of Fudaraku.2
Some are said to have been prompted by sightings of a wondrous
light far out in the ocean, which is perhaps the precedent for the mabo‑
roshi no hikari to which Tamio refers. LaFleur suggests Ikuo experiences
a version of such alluring light in an early scene when he stops at a
railroad crossing. He looks up to see the flashing interior lights of the
passing train lit against the nighttime sky. The scene offers a striking
image of light, again enabled by the enveloping darkness. This is Ikuo’s
experience of maboroshi no hikari, in LaFleur’s view, and it culminates
in his death. Maborosi itself never suggests this, of course, and LaFleur
concedes that most viewers are apt to miss the film’s possible allusion to
the Fudaraku suicides. As previously noted, the film does not operate
in an explanatory mode but rather creates an experience. In LaFleur’s
reading, Maborosi itself duplicates the experience of maboroshi no hikari
for the viewer. To watch the film leads to the possibility that “we too
could find ourselves caught in the powerful grip of an amazing, alluring
play of light” (2002, 164).
The beauty of the light in Maborosi has an indisputable power to
draw the viewer in. What is less clear is the degree to which this beauty
can be associated with a call to death. To be sure, LaFleur emphasizes
the attentiveness with which we might experience the world if we were to
choose to die. We might see the world at that moment with an intensity
that the images of Maborosi provide. But LaFleur’s detour through the
Fudaraku episode rather distracts from this idea because it suggests an
explanation for Ikuo’s death rather than training our attention on the
experience of the film. Furthermore, the religious incentive to end one’s
life for the sake of rebirth in Kannon’s Fudaraku or Amida’s Pure Land
does not automatically produce a beatific vision at the moment of exit.
Medieval accounts of religious self‑immolation attest to the problem of
botched attempts because of an all‑too‑common loss of nerve.3 Suicide
 The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 93

is not usually conducive to contemplative attention, and for this reason,

it is prohibited in Buddhist teachings.
LaFleur is prompted by the invocation of light—the hikari of the
title—and is thus led to a particular episode in Japanese Buddhist his‑
tory connected with the embrace of death. However, the other half of
the title—maboroshi—conveys a more pervasive Buddhist meaning that
also has a substantial aesthetic dimension. The meaning of maboroshi is
“illusion” and “phantasm,” which is what Buddhists are in the habit of
calling our world of sensory experience. Both light and shadow create
the phantasm of experience and Maborosi invites us to marvel at its own
celluloid instantiation of it. Any diegetic approach to Ikuo’s death, on
the other hand, negates the space to simply contemplate this play of
light and shadow. This aesthetic approach is also religious, and derives
from the medieval Japanese concept known as yūgen. This aesthetic con‑
cept can be traced to Buddhist and Daoist sources that explicitly invoke
darkness to suggest a depth to things beyond intellectual explanation.
Through this concept, the link between the religious and the aesthetic
becomes quite overt.

The Religious and the Aesthetic

The reference to light and shadow makes its earliest appearance in the
Chinese cosmological terminology of Yin and Yang, which literally mean
shadow and light, respectively. As cultural rubrics they signify consider‑
ably more, however, being associated with an endless list of opposing yet
correlative concepts. “Female” and “male” is a prominent example, but
more abstractly, Yin is the negative principle whereas Yang is the positive.
Above and beyond any particular instantiation, the most important idea
is an aesthetic one about the phenomenological patterns into which our
sensory and social worlds are organized. Light and shadow are comple‑
mentary pairs, as demonstrated by the constant succession and alterna‑
tion of heat (summer) and cold (winter) in nature. The human order is
thought to follow this pattern with a string of complementary pairings
such as male and female, parent and child, ruler and follower, and so
forth. This seguing from the natural to the human order integrates aes‑
thetic patterns to moral ones. Just as the mutuality and interdependence
of Yin and Yang are evident in nature, it is believed that they must be
respected and nurtured in human society. This patterning of morality
94 Seeing Like the Buddha

on the model of the sensory world is key to the blending of aesthetics

and religion.
In the Daoist text of the Daodejing,4 a concerted preference is
expressed for the negative principle of Yin. It emphasizes what is ordi‑
narily overlooked in sensory attention, which is typically drawn to overt
forms. In response, the Daodejing reasserts the absent and negative side
of things as the necessary condition for what is present:

Knead clay in order to make a vessel. Adapt the nothing

therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use
of the vessel. Cut out doors and windows in order to make
a room. Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand,
and you will have the use of the room. Thus what we gain
is Something, yet it is by virtue of Nothing that this can be
put to use. (Laozi 1963, 67)

For the Daodejing, this insight also applies to the political and
religious realms. To accomplish human purposes, the negative principle
of Yin is again favored as superior to the overt forms of Yang. Therefore,
in getting things done, one should adhere to “the deed that consists in
taking no action,” and for leading others, one should utilize “the teach‑
ing that uses no words” (Laozi 1963, 58). This is the Daoist path of
wuwei, which is often translated as “non‑action.” More accurately the
term signifies an effortless action that becomes possible only after one
has overcome the concern with overt forms and rules. In this schema,
preoccupation with forms is a sign of amateurism that has yet to attain
true creativity and skill. Therefore, “The five colours make men’s eyes
blind; the five notes make his ears deaf; the five tastes injure his palate”
(1963, 68). The five colors, notes, and tastes refer to sensory perceptions
but they represent social values as well as because they are “the particular
colors, tones, and flavors that are selected out of the total spectrum and
assigned special values and ‘names’ ” (Ziporyn 2012, 148). With aesthetic
and moral practice alike, attaining “the Way” (Dao) means transcending
such distinctions and tapping into the original emptiness that is the
fertile cradle of all recognizable forms. “The way is empty, yet use will
not drain it,” the Daodejing observes, “Deep, it is like the ancestor of
the myriad creatures” (Laozi 1963, 60). The Yin, then, is the emptiness
that is prior to and the precondition for all forms. It is hard to describe
because it is itself shapeless and formless. Nevertheless, it is characterized
 The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 95

as the fertile “mysterious female” and paired with images of dark and
empty spaces such as the valley.
The language of the Yin principle produced an immediate synergy
between Daoism and Mahāyāna Buddhism’s own concept of emptiness—
particularly the emptiness philosophy of Nāgārjuna and his Madhyamaka
(“middle way”) school. This version of emptiness extends the earlier teach‑
ing of anātman and dependent arising to all phenomena and avers that
everything is empty of an intrinsic essence and existence. Despite this
negation of substance and essence, Buddhist emptiness signifies the innate
condition that allows the myriad phenomena of the world to arise at
all. Buddhist thought does not render this emptiness into a cosmogonic
fountainhead in the manner of the Daodejing, which talks about the
“valley” as the literal root of heaven and earth. Mādhyamika philoso‑
phers were in fact keen on preventing the reification of emptiness into
a metaphysical entity or realm. But this entailed the similar strategy of
deconstructing the world of overt forms in order to look more deeply
at it. Daoist thought does this by subsuming the “myriad creatures” (all
phenomena) into the infinite potentiality of absence—all things are born
from the void and ultimately return back to it. Buddhist thought focuses
on the intrinsic absence (of essence and substance) within each form,
which makes emptiness the causal condition and source of all phenom‑
ena. The absence of an intrinsic identity at the center of each and every
thing allows for their constant coming‑to‑be. Both Daoist and Buddhist
thought points to absence as the source of everything that is present to
us. The Daodejing directs us to look literally at the absences with its
preferential Yin images, whereas Buddhist thought looks beyond the illu‑
sion of substance and essence in all things to see the emptiness within.
These religious ideas are combined and appropriated in Japanese
discourses on the purpose of poetry and drama, particularly through the
aesthetic concept of yūgen. The term was originally used in China to
refer to the depth of Daoist and Buddhist teachings.5 The first character
for “yu” (幽) means “dark” and “dim,” and suggests something hidden.
The second character for “gen” (玄) refers to a dark color, and connotes
something silent, subtle, and profound. The Chinese usage was imported
into Japan and around the tenth century the term surfaced in poetic
theory to refer to the profundity that poetry can capture. In terms of
actual poetic practice, this meant a subtle evocation of feeling rather than
explicit descriptions: “Yūgen—a sense of profundity—emerges paradoxi‑
cally from incomplete expression” (Konishi 1991, 183). Fujiwara Shunzei
96 Seeing Like the Buddha

(1114–1204)6 discusses yūgen in his Korai fūteishō (“notes on poetic style

through the ages”) by invoking Tendai Buddhism and its articulation of
emptiness (Japanese: kū) to describe a “dimension of depth” in poetry.7
But echoes of the Daodejing are sounded in his emphasis on subtlety.
This depth cannot be overtly described through words but merely evoked
through the surface reality of what is depicted. The surface reality, or
the overt subject of the poem, is important because the depth of yūgen
does not consist of a hidden meaning that is somewhere beyond the
overt phenomenon or sign. The yūgen aesthetic adheres to Madhyamaka
Buddhist teaching—mediated by Chinese Tiantai and Japanese Tendai
Buddhism—that emptiness paradoxically resides in apparent forms rather
than beyond and apart from them.
The favored technique to evoke the depth of yūgen is typically
the Daoist “less is more” approach. Kamo no Chōmei (1154–1216)8
articulates this by describing the power of spareness in his Mumyōshō
(“nameless notes”): “On an autumn evening, for example, there is no
color in the sky, nor any sound, and although we cannot give a definite
reason for it, we are somehow moved to tears” (Chōmei 1968, 408). The
preference for the colorless and the soundless is in direct lineage with
the Daodejing, and Chōmei applies it explicitly to poetry:

Completely to display your feelings in words by saying of the

moon that it is bright, or by praising the cherry blossoms,
declaring that they are pretty, how can that be difficult?
Where would there be the virtue of the uta [song], which is
to be more than an ordinary statement? (Chōmei 1968, 409)

Singing about what is colorful and bright is to produce ordinary

conversation, which focuses on what is immediately engaging and overt
to the senses. In order to attain the deeper level of poetry, one is again
advised to look at the absences, or at least at the subdued and the com‑
monplace. Then one can “exhaust your mind in all its depth,” according
to Chōmei, in the moment when “thinking does not lead anywhere and
words are inadequate” (1968, 409). Shunzei’s own son, the poet Fujiwara
Teika (1162–1241), created subtlety in his own distinctive manner and is
considered a master of the yūgen style. He subverted the poetic demands
of kokoro (“heart”) and hon‑i (“essence”), which conveyed conventional
meanings for set poetic topics, and used understatement to suggest an
essence that deviated from standard understandings. For this reason, his
poems were often judged to be incomprehensible by other poets. Teika
 The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 97

described his own verses as “Zen nonsense poetry” (daruma‑uta) because

for him, “the essence of a topic could only be grasped at a deep mental
level” (Konishi 1991, 196).
Suggestiveness and restraint are also promoted by Zeami Motokiyō
(1363–1443) in his treatises on the Nō masked drama. Zeami and his
father Kannami Kiyotsugu (1333–1384) are credited with transforming a
humble folk tradition into “an experience of profundity and almost reli‑
gious exhilaration” (Rimer and Masakazu 1984, xvii). Nō evolved from
sarugaku (“monkey entertainments”), a combination of comic mime,
song, dance, and acrobatics that originated in China. In the thirteenth
century, a strand of sarugaku dramas developed with plots borrowed
from Buddhist temple performances known as shushi. Shushi died out
as an independent art form but was absorbed into sarugaku dramas,
giving them the solemnity that is the hallmark of what became Nō in
the fourteenth century.9 Zeami’s treatises theorize this newly elevated art
now patronized by shoguns, and Zeami’s work is filled with references
to yūgen as Nō’s highest achievement. In Kakyō (“a mirror held to the
flower”), Zeami channels the ethos of the Daodejing by writing about the
power of the moments when the actor is still, in the interstices between
two physical actions:

The actor must rise to a selfless level of art, imbued with a

concentration that transcends his own consciousness, so that
he can bind together the moments before and after that
instant when “nothing happens.” Such a process constitutes
that inner force that can be termed “connecting all the arts
through one intensity of mind.” (Zeami 1984, 97)

References to mind and concentration regularly appear in exposi‑

tions of yūgen, reflecting its close association with Buddhist meditative
discipline and insight. Shunzei compares the depth of yūgen to Bud‑
dhist meditation in which one first brings ordinary thoughts to a stand‑
still, which then enables insight into the truly empty nature of things.10
Zeami’s reference to “a concentration that transcends his own conscious‑
ness” is actually mushin (無心) in Japanese, which is the Zen concept of
“no mind.” Mushin refers to a deep level of consciousness distinct from
ordinary awareness, which overcomes the conventional meanings and
values attached to the identification of “names” and forms. Attaining
“no mind” is to “see” the un‑seeable emptiness that is present in these
very same forms.
98 Seeing Like the Buddha

Throughout the medieval period, poets and dramatists consciously

fused together Buddhist and aesthetic practices. Zeami claims that the
Nō drama originated in India when the Buddha himself staged perfor‑
mances of flute and drum music during the dedication of the Jetavana
Monastery.11 Zeami adds that the Japanese Prince Shōtoku (574–622)
confirmed that the “wild words and embellished phrases” (kyōgen kigo
狂言綺語) of the drama “will serve to praise the Buddha and provide
the means to spread his teachings” (Rimer and Masakazu 1984, 34–35).
Kyōgen kigo is a stock phrase that originated with the Chinese poet Bo
Zhuyi (722–846) to refer to his poetry, which he said might function to
honor the Buddhist Dharma in spite of its apparently frivolous nature
(LaFleur 1983, 8). The impact of this idea on Japanese aesthetics was
immense. Shunzei defends the kyōgen kigo of poetry in the Korai fūteishō,
stating, “It is exactly here that the profundity of things is demonstrated.
This is because there exists a reciprocal flow of meaning between such
things [as poetry] and the way of Buddhism, a way that maintains the
interdependence of all things” (quoted in LaFleur 1983, 90). In the
Yūgaku shūdō fūken (“disciplines for the joy of art”), Zeami also affirms
that the art of Nō arises from the Buddhist truth of emptiness, here
glossed in the Zen language of mu (無), or “non‑Being”:

Being might be said to represent an external manifestation

that can be seen with the eyes. Non‑Being can be said to
represent the hidden, fundamental readiness of mind that
signifies the vessel of all art [since a vessel is itself empty]. It
is the fundamental Non‑Being that gives rise to the outward
sense of Being [in the Nō]. (Zeami 1984, 118–19)

Zeami invokes the empty vessel that we originally saw in the

Daodejing, using it to understand art as a wellspring for the forms and
configurations that arise from emptiness. Zeami unites this image with
the Buddhist language of mu to add the idea that art cultivates the mind
that can look directly at this original source of all things. The unity of
aesthetic and religious experience is affirmed.

From the Medieval to the Modern

The medieval Japanese world self‑consciously affirmed the nondualism

of Buddhist and aesthetic pursuits, fusing the contemplative life of the
 The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 99

monastic with the worldliness of poetry and drama. This effort came
from both Buddhist clerics and secular literati because of how frequently
and easily these social realms overlapped in the progression of individual
lives: literati often entered the monastic order at some point and fulltime
monks were addicted to the cultural practice of poetry. As Bo Zhuyi
wrote in 817:

Since earnestly studying the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness,

I’ve learned to still all the common states of mind.
Only the devil of poetry I have yet to conquer—
Let me come on a bit of scenery and I start my idle
­droning. (2000, 88)12

Taking their cue from Bo Zhuyi himself, Japanese theorists deci‑

sively affirmed the indivisibility of aesthetic and religious practice until it
became a truism. Hence, the haiku poet Bashō (1644–1694) could speak
unself‑consciously of himself and others who “had given over their whole
lives to the search for truth in art” (2000, 69), and the Zen poet‑monk
Ryōkan (1758–1831) versified that “[t]he mind of poetry, the mind of
Zen; Come together effortlessly” (1996, 110). As a direct result, overt
references to Buddhism and Zen were gradually erased and rendered
unnecessary in discussions of art. This cultural trajectory faithfully fol‑
lows what Buddhist emptiness doctrine overtly demands: the collapse of
the nirvana and samsara distinction, particularly through a reversion to
ordinary, nonreligious forms. In East Asia, this process was abetted by
strident Zen iconoclastic rhetoric against Buddhist religious signs and
institutions as actual hindrances to liberation. This self‑erasing impulse
of Buddhist teachings has historical significance and impact. William
LaFleur makes a trenchant observation in this respect, particularly regard‑
ing the advent of the modern era:

Because the critique of the Buddhist symbol‑system came

in part from Buddhism itself, the clash of rival systems as
Japan moved into the modern era was much less overt than
that which characterized Europe’s torturous move from the
Catholic medieval epoch to the “secularized” modern one.
This is to say that a move toward the secularization of
Buddhist symbols may have taken place fairly early in Japan,
coming out of the heart of Buddhist philosophy itself.
(1983, 25)
100 Seeing Like the Buddha

LaFleur’s chronological narrative here parallels the spatial progres‑

sion of the temple Borobudur, which in turn serves as the model for
the sequence of films in this book. In all three cases, the more successful
one is in seeing the Buddha, the more one does not need to see him at
all. Maborosi, needless to say, features no overt images or other signs of
the Buddha, demonstrating instead the cultural practice of painting (in
words, actions, or imagery) what disciplined contemplation of the world
is thought to perceive—a seeing in the manner of the Buddha himself.
In the twentieth century, this goal is often translated into “secular”
aesthetic practices, reflecting the so‑called modernization of Japan. The
aesthetics of Maborosi might be linked to the novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s
1933 essay, In Praise of Shadows, for example. This work is the product
of the early modern era in which the nativist thesis of “Japaneseness”
(nihonjinron) opposed Western claims of cultural superiority with its own
rhetoric of uniqueness and justified political ambitions. Tanizaki’s essay
displays the essentializing idioms of the “Oriental” versus the “Western,”
which creates the temptation to dismiss his observations as a mere exercise
in counterhegemonic rhetoric. It would be regrettable, however, to allow
the politically chauvinistic framing of his essay to blind us to the value
of its cultural and semiotic observations.
Tanizaki echoes the flavor of Maborosi’s visual aesthetic when he
states, “We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surround‑
ings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they
are; and so darkness causes us no discontent” (1977, 31). Tanizaki traces
this preference for shadows to the architecture of traditional Japanese
homes, with their deep overhanging eaves that block the sun. He explains
how this practical feature was parlayed into an aesthetic preference and
a kind of moral value. The basic elements of Tanizaki’s secular‑aesthetic
disquisition reflect the traditional values of yūgen but the “East ver‑
sus West” scaffolding politicizes it by bringing it into a modern global
and comparative discourse. Tanizaki sees the West as representative of
a will‑to‑power over nature and fellow humanity, which he distills into
an aesthetic penchant for everything that gleams and shines with light.
Tanizaki adduces the example of the modern Western bathroom clad in
shining white tile as a testament to this cultural desire to triumph over
nature. Tanizaki then presses home the difference in the “Oriental”: “The
quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities
of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came
to discover beauty in shadows” (1977, 18).
 The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 101

Tanizaki’s polarization of cultures reflects the discourses of his day

and displays a reverse‑Orientalist strategy that seeks to transform the
image of the passive and fatalistic Oriental into the hallmark of another
kind of virtue. This is willfully blind to the intracultural diversity of both
East Asian and European American societies, to be sure, but the compara‑
tive framing offers an interesting taxonomy of aesthetic‑moral orienta‑
tions. The aggressive economic and infrastructural development current
in China and the growing ecological movement in Western nations negate
the idea that Asians always embrace the “less‑is‑more” way of nature, and
that Western societies always seek to impose their will on the environ‑
ment. But it is also true that Zen Buddhism and Daoism now function
as resources and inspiration for contemporary Western ecological move‑
ments. Not all quarters of East Asian society practice Zen and Daoist
values but these Asian traditions serve as icons of a now‑global ideal of
ethical living. This too reflects the relative ease with which Buddhist
practices have moved into the modern age. Their aesthetic and moral
sentiments easily shed traditional religious trappings—for better or for
worse—and readily integrate into secular worldly activities.
Before we turn to the implications of this secularization process in
seeing the Buddha, let us examine a still later instance of comparative
observation. Roland Barthes’s The Empire of Signs, which is a collection
of short essays on Japan, comes decades after Tanizaki and exhibits an
evolution in critical consciousness. Originally published in 1970, Barthes
is careful not to reify the actual country of Japan into an essence. As a
semiologist, he is aware that this is often the effect of language and dis‑
course, and so he begins by admitting to the fact that he is constructing
a fantasy by isolating certain notable features in order to “deliberately
form a system” called “Japan” (1982, 3). And what Barthes constructs
is noticeably familiar. One exemplary case should suffice for our pur‑
poses. In his examination of the city of Tokyo as a sign—particularly its
physical layout and the way it directs the movement of bodies—Barthes
notices the conspicuous emptiness of its center. It is not literally empty,
of course, for the Imperial Palace occupies this space. But for that very
reason, the sizable area of one‑and‑one‑third square miles in one of the
most densely populated cities in the world is off‑limits to the public
and empty of people except the emperor, who is rarely seen. Ringed by
moats and walls, traffic is forced to make perpetual detours around it,
and so “the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and
returns the length of an empty subject” (Barthes 1982, 320). As with
102 Seeing Like the Buddha

the empty stūpa at the center of Borobudur, one is forced to return to

the periphery of the world and its panoply of signs. Nirvana mandates
the return to samsara. This recursion, Barthes helpfully notes, resists both
the structural and metaphysical logic of the idealized Western city, where
“the center is the site of truth”:

[T]he center of our cities is always full: a marked site, it

is here that the values of civilization are gathered and con‑
densed: spirituality (churches), power (offices), money (banks),
merchandise (department stores), language (agoras: cafés
and promenades): to go downtown or to the center‑city is
to encounter the social “truth,” to participate in the proud
plenitude of “reality.” (1982, 30)

What Barthes conveys in his own comparison of cultural signs is yet

another version of the Yin/Yang dynamic, in which systems can be readily
classified into coherences based on the empty or the full. The Daodejing
originally applied the distinction to Chinese schools of thought: it recom‑
mends the virtue and power of the way of Yin as that which subsumes
and engenders the overt Confucian path of Yang. Given this original
usage, it is manifestly silly to characterize all of Asia as inherently Yin and
Western civilization as Yang. But the human use of signs such as “Yin”
and “Yang” always abstracts imagined systems from the messiness of lived
experience, as Barthes does, and creates intelligibility by helping to focus
our attention. The way Barthes expands the sense of this organizing sign
system suggests substantial and important differences in what Yin and
Yang convey—at least to the human intellect. It also suggests that the
“intelligibility of non‑intelligibility” and the Yin sensibility expressed by
Buddhist and Daoist systems can appear beyond these original religious
sites. We can then look forward to the possibility of seeing this aesthetic
in other cultural contexts, including the contemporary West.

From National Cinemas to Buddhist Cinema

Maborosi is our transition point from Asian cinema to Buddhist cinema,

meaning a cinema that is not bound by any particular cultural location.
The movement from the empty center to the signed periphery means
encompassing multiple cultural sites. Film studies itself has recently
 The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 103

turned away from the idea of national cinemas, which has produced
some rethinking about Japanese cinema within a global context:

The paradigms of Orientalism have tended to emphasize the

Japaneseness of Japanese cinema at the expense of its modernity.
The framework of vernacular modernism, however, enables us
to move beyond the binaries of East and West to recognize
the modernity of this cinema as a discourse of mass culture,
(Russell 2011, 3–4)

This trend is reflected in Christine Marran’s reading of Maborosi, of

which she claims that “there is nothing that marks this film as aestheti‑
cally related to anything Japanese except for a kind of obeisance that it
seems to pay to Ozu who is consistently, and erroneously, framed spe‑
cifically as a ‘Japanese’ director” (2002, 167). Catherine Russell agrees,
stating that Ozu “captured an ideal of Japanese identity that doesn’t quite
hold up to scrutiny. Not only can Westerners understand these films,
they can be moved by them” (Russell 2011, 20). All fifty‑three Ozu
films, which are domestic dramas (shomin‑geki) about ordinary people,
do nothing more than face the inevitability of transition and change—
particularly death, marriage, and the distancing between generations.
These are uneventful stories that provoke us to see the intense drama
in the ineluctable passage of time. The events are universal by virtue of
their ordinariness. Turning to Maborosi, Marran suggests that reading it
through Buddhist lenses unnecessarily “Japanifies” it, thereby “leading
us away from the underlying trans‑existentialist and minimalist tone of
the film” (2002, 167).
It is also worth noting that the penchant for depicting shadows
is not a monopoly of the East. The Hollywood tradition of film noir is
too diffuse to be called a genre, but it is readily identifiable as a visual
style that favors darkness, chiaroscuro, and patterns of light and shadow.
This look goes along with a characteristic bleakness of mood and subject
matter. The hardboiled detective and femme fatale are the typical leads,
but more broadly the focus is on crime, corruption, and cynicism. Paul
Schrader notes a particular parallel between lighting and tone:

The actors and setting are often given equal lighting emphasis.
An actor is often hidden in the realistic tableau of the city at
night, and, more obviously, his face is often blacked out by
104 Seeing Like the Buddha

shadow as he speaks. . . . When the environment is given an

equal or greater weight than the actor, it, of course, creates
a fatalistic, hopeless mood. There is nothing the protagonist
can do; the city will outlast and negate even his best efforts.
(1996, 57)

Flourishing from the 1940s to early ’50s, film noir is interpreted

as a reflection of postwar disillusionment, with its depictions of the
underside of modern American life. Schrader deems film noir to be first
and foremost a visual style rather than sociological commentary, however,
which for him explains why film critics—in their preference for theme
over style—have neglected it. If this is the case, then perhaps the depic‑
tion of shadows is not inherently indicative of a “fatalistic” and “hope‑
less” mood. The look of film noir is somber by Hollywood standards,
to be sure, and owes its largest aesthetic debt to German expressionism,
which was brought to the American screen by expatriate directors such
as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, and Robert Siodmak. But
the phrase “film noir” is used to describe the visual look of films well
beyond this era of filmmaking, and it is perhaps possible to put the lens
of the yūgen aesthetic to cross‑cultural use.
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is a cyberpunk tale about a
near‑future dystopia that is heavy in the ambiance of film noir (Doll and
Faller 1986). Set in Los Angeles in the year 2019, the city is beset with
urban decay and density, as well as a perpetual rain and haze. Nighttime
appears to be the ubiquitous hour. The drama centers on Deckard, a
Blade Runner, or special cop who “retires” illegal androids made for labor
and entertainment in off‑world colonies in outer space. These “replicants”
look like humans and have emotions, but their superhuman strength
makes them a threat and they are banned from Earth. Deckard is forced
out of retirement to hunt down and kill four replicants who have escaped
to Earth in order to find their creator—the founder of the Tyrell Cor‑
poration—and demand an extension of their four‑year lifespan. Deckard
eventually succeeds in his mission of retiring all four, although his life is
spared during the confrontation with the last remaining android—Roy,
the leader of the outlaw posse. Deckard is no match for Roy’s superior
strength, but the latter spares him moments before he expires from his
own exhausted lifespan. Deckard narrates:

I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last

moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not
 The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi 105

just his life—anybody’s life; my life. All he’d wanted were the
same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from?
Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was
sit there and watch him die.

The ambivalence expressed in these sentences matches the moral

ambiguity of Deckard’s assignment. The replicants’ desire to live makes
them difficult to distinguish from humans, and killing them seems like
plain murder. This is particularly the case with the replicant Zhora, who
hides by working as a dancer in a nightclub. Deckard flushes her out and
guns her down in the streets, where she comes to a dramatic end by crash‑
ing through the layers of store plate glass windows. Her death is poignant
and the regret on Deckard’s face is plain to see. Deckard’s compromised
sentiment is abetted by the fact that he is falling in love with another
female replicant named Rachel, who works as Tyrell’s personal assistant.
Rachel is special because as the latest and most advanced of androids, she
has been implanted with childhood memories and initially does not even
know she is a replicant. When she kills another replicant who is about
to take Deckard’s life, their relationship is sealed. At the end of the film,
Deckard tells his handler Gaff that he will no longer work as a Blade
Runner. Gaff responds, “It’s too bad she won’t live; but then again, who
does?” referring to Rachel. In the conclusion of the theatrical release, we
see Deckard and Rachel driving off into the mountains and Deckard’s
voiceover stating that Tyrell informed him that Rachel has no automatic
termination date. This upbeat and hopeful ending was undoubtedly a
concession to mainstream audiences, but the Director’s Cut does not
contain this coda, ending instead with Gaff’s final line: “It’s too bad
she won’t live; but then again, who does?” This might strike a fatalistic
tone for some, but its honest observation of the human condition also
reveals what makes life valuable. Deckard understands that this is the
reason why Roy spared him, the very man who killed his compatriots
and sought to eliminate him as well.
Film noir may very well demonstrate, then, the global span of the
yūgen aesthetic. This raises the question of how to adequately describe it
beyond the language of national cinemas. In addressing the accessibility
of Japanese cinema, critics use the terminology of “modern” and “existen‑
tial,” but the applicability of these terms is questionable. These concepts
emerge from Western cultural history and have meanings foreign to the
Japanese and East Asian context. To be sure, the structures of modernity
are fully integrated into Asian societies when it comes to economic,
106 Seeing Like the Buddha

demographic, and social organizations. Hence, the idea of modernity does

have traction on the global scale. But the notion of modernity also con‑
notes a kind of secularism understood as an explicit alienation from the
traditional religious episteme—particularly with the advent of scientific
rationality. The philosophical movement of “existentialism” follows suit as
a response to the loss of traditional faith and the ensuing quandary over
the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence. Like modernity,
existentialism implies an epistemic break with the past, and the resulting
predicaments of that rupture.
This “before and after” structure does not compute in Japanese
society, as William LaFleur notes, where the “religious” realm of Bud‑
dhism and the “secular” realm of aesthetics were merged long before
modernity. Modern Western art frequently purveys itself as an alternative
to traditional religion, but this has been a traditional idea and practice
in the East Asian Buddhist world. For that reason, the term Buddhist
better captures the global resonance of Maborosi. The origins of Bud‑
dhism may be Asian, but Buddhism itself negates the idea that it must
be embodied in any particular historical and cultural form. This is the
only way of seeing the emptiness inherent in all forms. The French film
Amour (2012), by writer and director Michael Haneke, quietly follows
an octogenarian couple and the space in which the husband nurses his
wife through a stroke, gradual decline, and death. The cinematography is
replete with views of empty rooms and feature many moments of nonac‑
tion and nonnarrativity. It could very well be described as Ozu‑esque.
But one can concur with Russell and Marran and deny that this invokes
“Japaneseness”—the film is French, after all. On the other hand, “mod‑
ern” and “existential” are much too bland and inadequate as descriptors.
“Buddhist” is better, paradoxically, because the label means that we are
supposed to let go of visions of the Buddha. A Buddhist reading of Mabo‑
rosi, far from “Japanifying” it, helps us to transition away from Japanese
and Asian films altogether.
 chapter 6

The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick

A merican filmmaker Terrence Malick (b. 1943) can be described as a

classic “auteur” in that his body of works conveys a consistent and
distinctive vision.1 Malick’s first film as writer and director, Badlands, was
released in 1973. In the forty subsequent years to date he has produced
five more under his complete artistic control: Days of Heaven (1978), The
Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011),
and To the Wonder (2012).2 Each film sports a lineup of A‑list Holly‑
wood actors such as Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and Sean
Penn. Malick pairs highly recognizable faces with a beautiful visual style,
philosophical voiceovers, and a barely‑there narrativity that sacrifices the
usual conventions of storytelling. Twenty minutes into The Tree of Life,
for example, the film shifts abruptly from its 1950s suburban Texas set‑
ting to a visual narration of the creation of life on both cosmological
and microscopic levels, including the formation of galaxies and planets,
and the evolution of dinosaurs and human life. Then we return to Texas.
The narrative structure of Malick’s films becomes increasingly diffuse
over the progression of his work until even dialogue is purely incidental
in To the Wonder. In his New Yorker review, David Denby complains:
“A Malick sequence has now become a collection of semi‑disconnected
shots, individually ravishing but bound together by what feels like the
trivial narcissism of Caribbean‑travel ads on TV” (2013).
To be sure, images are everything in a Malick film, but not all
of them are pretty—each film features shots of environmental degrada‑
tion, pestilence, as well as animal and human suffering. More impor‑
tantly, the visuality of Malick’s cinema never functions as mere aesthetic

107
108 Seeing Like the Buddha

e­mbellishment but rather says things that language cannot articulate. In

a rare and early interview after the release of Badlands, Malick recounts
his one‑year stint teaching philosophy at M.I.T. Malick was a Rhodes
Scholar who started but never finished a thesis on Martin Heidegger at
Oxford University, and he reports that he was also a bad teacher (Walker
1975). So he decided to turn to filmmaking. It seems that Malick finds
the visual language of film more capable of expressing what he was unable
to say through academic discourses.
The centrality of images in Malick’s films also sacrifices many norms
of cinematic storytelling, which predictably leads to viewer dissatisfaction.
David Denby thinks the scenes in To the Wonder are as “insubstantial as
the wind” and add up to nothing (Denby 2013). Other critics, however,
are more appreciative of what can be gained by the minimal style. Roger
Ebert reports, “As the film opened, I wondered if I was missing some‑
thing. As it continued, I realized many films could miss a great deal”
(Ebert 2013). More than a decade earlier Ebert’s assessment of The Thin
Red Line had a similar conclusion: “But the audience has to finish the
work: Malick isn’t sure where he’s going or what he’s saying. That may
be a good thing” (Ebert 1999). Emmanuel Lubezki, Malick’s cinematog‑
rapher for The New World, Tree of Life, and To the Wonder confirms that
this open‑endedness is deliberate. He says of To the Wonder:

The movie has very little plot; it’s more of a contemplation,

and we’re always looking for the moments that editors normally
throw out. In many cases they’re the moments before and after
the dramatic scenes that make up most movies. I don’t want
to say that those moments feel more real, but they affect me
and I relate to them as an audience member. By leaving out
the conventional scenes that explain things, the film invites
the audience to create some of the story themselves, and I
like that. (Hemphill 2013)3

These references to incompleteness and insubstantiality render

Malick’s corpus of films an ideal analogue to the empty stūpa at the
center of Borobudur. The underdetermined quality of Malick’s cinema
invites the viewer to complete the process of narration for himself, just
as the absence of a Buddha image at the apex of the monument turns
away from seeing the Buddha to put the focus on the nature of our own
perceptions. Malick depicts both the misery and glory of existence in a
 The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 109

totality that poses the question of what each of us is capable of seeing

in the world. For these reasons, Malick’s artistic vision is about vision
itself. The following analysis will focus primarily on The Thin Red Line
as representative of Malick’s oeuvre, with briefer references to The Tree
of Life and To the Wonder as more recent works.

The Nonnarrative Language of the Visual

Malick’s films have overt spiritual and philosophical concerns that review‑
ers often discuss by bringing up the Christian symbolism and themes in
his work. One film critic formulates this as the tendency “to urgently
question, yet also accept, the presence of God in a fallen world” (Chang
2011). This observation refers to The Tree of Life specifically, but it is
characteristic of Malick as an auteur and embodied in the man or woman
of grace that seems to appear in every movie. This figure—Private Witt
in Thin Red Line, Mrs. O’Brien in Tree of Life, Father Quintana in To
the Wonder—embodies and articulates the possibility of another world
even in the presence of human pain.
This general framework is assisted by direct Christian textual and
literary sources. Tree of Life begins with a Biblical passage from The
Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the
earth? . . . When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of
God shouted for joy?” The conclusion of Tree of Life features a resur‑
rection scene in a naturalistic heaven—a beach—where the child and
adult versions of the main character are reunited with the members of
his family, including his brother who died at the age of nineteen. To the
Wonder’s Father Quintana is a Catholic priest who struggles to see God
in his abject parishioners and the suffering that he works to alleviate.
“Teach us where to seek you,” his voiceover says, followed by passages
from the prayer of St. Patrick: “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ
behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ
on my right, Christ on my left, Christ in the heart.” Hubert Cohen
carefully documents the Biblical references in Days of Heaven, the title
itself being taken from Deuteronomy (11:21) where it states that God’s
people will live in the land of milk and honey and their lives will be “as
days of heaven upon the earth” (Cohen 2003).
Given the explicit Biblical and Christian language, some under‑
standably see the visuality of Malick’s work as representing the “­omniscient
110 Seeing Like the Buddha

presence” of God (Cohen 2003, 59) and “the slippery viewpoint of God”
(Feeney 1999). Many recognize Malick’s cinema to be religious and medi‑
tative in that it “put[s] us in touch with eternal rhythms and spiritual
questions underneath [the] melodramas of survival” (Lopate 1999). But
Malick’s meditations can be described equally well in the language of
Buddhism without, at the same time, displacing or contesting that of
the Bible. To the degree that Malick “puts us in touch with eternal
rhythms,” he is also capable of accommodating a plethora of historical
and imaginative filters to parse such experience. Wendy Doniger’s notion
of the “mythical method” in which traditional myths, novels, and films
can move us from the personal to the cosmically abstract is helpful here.
All stories must speak in a particular vernacular about particular people
and events but it is in the nature of mythical narratives to say, “This
could happen to anyone” (Doniger 1998, 7). If that is the case, then
the language, place, and time can be changed without losing the force
of the story.
By happenstance, Doniger elucidates this via the passage from the
Book of Job with which Tree of Life begins—“Where were you when
I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Doniger focuses on
how this response from God to Job’s complaints is an example of the
Bible’s own practice of the mythical method because God’s response
“whips the microscope of self‑pity out of [Job’s] hand and gives him, in
its place, a theological telescope” by invoking the overpowering riddle of
creation (Doniger 1998, 12). When a story reaches in this way beyond
the personal to the abstract, “myth is cross‑culturally translatable, which
is to say comparable, commensurable” (Doniger 1998, 9). This com‑
mensurability exists in the fact that different cultures address the same
questions, and these questions are not bound to any single system of
articulation. One movie critic expresses this understanding in observing
Malick’s own Christian references: “Malick does not mean to be clever
or literary: he is simply trading on the texts and traditions we have
long relied on to formulate our understanding of the nature of things”
(Cohen 2003, 47). For that reason, it is possible to read Malick through
Buddhist (and other religious) lenses—to the degree that they too access
eternal rhythms and raise spiritual questions.
If we apply a Buddhist filter, the force of Malick’s filmmaking
is to go beyond the desire for a clear and final pronouncement about
what things mean. Its preference for images over storytelling deliberately
 The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 111

sacrifices the normal tropes of cinematic meaning and strives for a dif‑
ferent kind of language. This sometimes includes novel uses of ordinary
language. Malick’s trademark voiceover technique, for example, is to have
many narrators in order to multiply perspectives rather than creating the
clarity this technique normally affords. This is particularly evident in The
Thin Red Line because of its large ensemble cast. Rather than privileging
one character’s experience, competing and multiple voices are heard as
if the point is multiplicity itself. It is difficult to identify who is speak‑
ing at any given moment, and individual characterization is secondary
to this panoply of perspectives. Voiceover is even used to splinter what
an individual character feels. When Lieutenant Doll shoots a Japanese
soldier during battle he yells triumphantly “I got ‘em! I got ‘em” but
his internal voice layers the scene and bemoans: “I killed a man! Worse
thing you can do. Worse than rape. I killed a man and nobody can
touch me for it.” There is no perspicacity evident in human actions, let
alone in the totality of existence. It is no coincidence that most of the
voiceovers are in the form of questions rather than pronouncements, as
we shall soon see.
It is the language of images that stars in Malick’s oeuvres, however,
and it speaks in a very particular way. Lubezki states, “Photography is
not used to illustrate dialogue or a performance . . . we’re using it to
capture emotion so that the movie is very experiential. It’s meant to
trigger tons of memories, like a scent or a perfume” (Zeitchik 2011).
Malick typically shoots hours upon hours of footage in order to capture
spontaneous and accidental moments. Lubezki reports, “The key is to
react quickly to an unrehearsed moment in the acting or in the weather.
We’re all looking for those ephemeral moments, and they’re what end
up in the film” (Hemphill 2013). Malick then crafts his movies in the
editing room, paring raw footage into a final product that often takes
years to finish. The priority given to the unrehearsed and nonnarrative
moments often cuts actors entirely out of the final product. The final
cut of The Thin Red Line pared down one hundred hours of film and
left every scene with Gary Oldman, Mickey Rourke, and Martin Sheen
on the editing room floor. Likewise, the scenes with Jessica Chastain and
Rachel Weisz were cut entirely from To the Wonder.
The way actors are treated in a Malick film is also a result of its
visual emphasis. Roger Ebert suggests that Malick uses his actors like
“models” in spite of their marquee status (Ebert 2013). Cast members
of To the Wonder report that Malick would push them to move around,
112 Seeing Like the Buddha

“telling them to ignore their lines and simply move where the spirit took
them” (Zeitchik 2012). Human actors function as prompts for what
one might see and capture in the moment rather than as the center of
a story. Olga Kurylenko notes that they shot scenes with dialogue but
most ended up on the cutting‑room floor: “They might have simply been
intended as a way for the actors to feel out their characters, rather than
sequences audiences were meant to see” (Zeitchik 2012). Ben Affleck also
describes the disconcerting experience of being displaced in the middle
of a shoot: “I’d see the camera start out on me and then move up the
branches and think ‘Maybe I should climb up the tree?’ ” (ibid.). Janet
Maslin complains that in spite of the lineup of stars in The Thin Red
Line “no one here has a role with much continuity, since the film’s edit‑
ing shows off the performers to such poor advantage” (Maslin 1998).
The normal movie viewing process, in fact, puts the Malick film at
a disadvantage because it does not reward the usual expectations of star
performances and compelling storytelling. To fully appreciate a Malick
film it is best to discard the expectation of linear movement, which only
suffers constant interruptions from “nature photography as exquisite as
it is redundant” (Maslin 1998). The more rewarding approach is to
rewatch individual segments repeatedly, in no particular order, and to take
in the visual language of this cinema that can sustain the viewer’s gaze
in the manner of a masterful painting. Being cinema, however, Malick’s
creations also include the enriching elements of movement, music, and
words. Although the stillness of painting is useful for describing the
contemplative mood of Malick’s films, the dynamism that cinema allows
is fully exploited. The movement of the camera features in particular
nature and the broader landscape that are the only nonnegotiable stars
of Malick’s moviemaking.

The Seeing of Nature

As suggested through the film Maborosi, seeing like the Buddha entails
putting human experience into perspective by decentering it. A visual
way to accomplish this is to integrate characters into the natural world
so that human actions are simply part and parcel of natural events.
Regardless of the setting—the war‑torn hills of Guadalcanal, the ancient
abbey of Mont St.-Michel, or the large and barren housing subdivisions
of Oklahoma—each location is bathed in glowing light and caressed by
 The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 113

the camera into an ethereal beauty. As Janet Maslin notes of The Thin
Red Line, “The way light filters through the canopy of the rain forest
means at least as much here as the specifics of battle” (Maslin 1998).
Like Kore’eda, Malick shoots in natural light and is inclined to cap‑
ture wide‑open spaces and integrate the human actions therein. Human
dramas are not disregarded but neither are they front and center. The
vagaries of what people do are offset by the grandeur of nature, which
is vaster than passing human events. But nature is not romanticized in
Edenic fashion either—we see predation in the opening shot of an alli‑
gator slowly submerging into water in The Thin Red Line and wildlife is
just as prone to suffer as human beings. The lack of narrative clarity in
human dramas extends to the larger environment and nature too presents
a canvas for the relentless question that drives Malick’s filmmaking—the
question of what it is that we can see.
The Thin Red Line is set during the Battle of Guadalcanal in the
Solomon Islands (1942–43) during World War II. The campaign centers
on wresting control of the island and its landing strip from the Japanese
in order to safeguard American supply and communication routes in the
Pacific. The film’s focus is on the men of C Company of the 25th Infantry,
whose initial action entails storming a hill while taking heavy fire from
the Japanese‑held bunker above. They eventually take the bunker and the
Japanese stronghold in a Pyrrhic victory entailing heavy casualties. The
company is given a week’s leave, but then is confronted by advancing
Japanese artillery fire. Three soldiers are sent up a river to scout for the
Japanese position. Two are killed during this mission but one makes it
back to warn his company of the advancing force. As the film ends, we
see a new Captain arrive on Guadalcanal to replace the one that has been
sent home, and some of the soldiers of C Company are shipped out.
The Thin Red Line was released in the same year (1998) as Stephen
Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, another World War II film that features
a beach landing and a ruinous assault on a hill commanded by enemy
bunkers—this time, in the Battle of Normandy against Nazi German
forces. Spielberg’s film is about heroic men in the midst of a punishing
campaign and it earned him an Oscar for best director. The camera trains
steadily on the soldiers, who are cut down with unrelenting frenzy in the
extensive battle sequence at the beginning of the film. From the start,
the story focuses on the character of Captain Miller and then on Private
Ryan. Miller is the fatherly and capable leader who earns the devotion
of his men, and Ryan is the committed soldier who opts to stay in the
114 Seeing Like the Buddha

battle despite being given the chance to go home. Thin Red Line also
features a paternal and humane commander in the figure of Captain
Staros, but he is only one character in a large ensemble of many voices
that take turns narrating their thoughts and experiences. It is hard to
discern the identities of the voiceovers and the army uniforms visually
blend the men together so that it is difficult to distinguish between them.
Spielberg’s focus on key heroic figures, on the other hand, separates the
stars from the supporting cast.
The soldiers in Thin Red Line are like fish in a barrel during their
upward assault, where the lush and waving grass of the hills feature as
largely as the human beings. In some places the grass is taller than the
soldiers, engulfing them; in others, their heads and torsos emerge from
the greenery as if they are outgrowths of the vegetation. When men
fall from gunfire, they disappear instantly into the undulating flora as
if being swallowed back into the earth. Sometimes the camera’s point
of view slithers low through the grass, much as the men do, and at
other times it offers a wide vista on this landscape, turning the lines of
soldiers into marching ants. The way humans are welded to the land is
poignantly articulated by Sgt. McCron, who loses all twelve of his men
during the battle for the bunker. At nightfall, the sergeant inveighs against
the hills—or perhaps God—asking, “Who decides who’s going to die?”
Tearing at the grass, he observes, “That’s us. We’re just dirt.”
That may be so, but the dirt and what it breeds is shown over
and over again in glorious splendor. Malick takes the time to look at

Figure 6.1. The men of C Company are outgrowths of the foliage and return
to the landscape in death.
 The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 115

these things—panning up the sides of trees and walls to see the sky, and
moving away from the main action to train upon the birds, reptiles, and
butterflies that coexist with human preoccupations. The film takes time
during battle scenes to examine the strange and beautiful behavior of
leaves that shrink upon physical contact or repel water droplets like oil
gliding off Teflon. After the first two soldiers are mowed down by gunfire
at the start of battle, a wide‑angle shot of the shadowed hills captures
the rippling sunlight that crosses the land and reveals it like an epiphany.
With this breaking of light, the fighting erupts in a fury.
A Christian filter naturally evokes Eden or the Promised Land, with
its attendant notion of sin and eviction from paradise. Private Witt is an
AWOL soldier at the beginning of the film who lives and plays with the
Solomon Islander children in a pristine and heavenly land. When Witt
returns to the same village after the battle for the bunker, he sees signs of
disease, strife, and death. In the eyes of one viewer, “Clearly, Malick wants
us to acknowledge that war inherently has the power to make us see the
world as it really is—not as our self‑imposed innocence has made it seem to
be” (Cohen 2003, 47). Witt’s certainly sees another side of the Melanesian
community, perhaps as a result of his own recent experience. But a linear
before‑and‑after fall from innocence is not so evident. For one thing, the
camera’s digressions to the flora, fauna, and sky occur in the midst of the
battle scenes, juxtaposing death and beauty rather than segregating them.
Private Witt himself is not irreversibly disillusioned by his darker percep‑
tion of the Melanesians but goes back to his characteristic state of grace,
particularly at the moment of his own death near the end of the film.
The world seen through the lenses of The Thin Red Line might be
described as indifferently gorgeous in the face of human carnage. The
film contemplates beauty in a manner quite absent in Saving Private
Ryan, which focuses on the grit and chaos of battle in a highly realized
rendition of the “war is hell” genre. But to consider such beauty callous
to human pain demonstrates a myopia that Malick’s landscapes actually
defy. The point is not that human suffering is trivial in the grand scheme
of things: it may very well be that beauty and pain are inextricably and
paradoxically the same. The first voiceover in the film has Witt talking
about his mother’s death, ostensibly to his fellow deserter during their
idyll among the Melanesian natives:

I couldn’t find nothin’ beautiful or uplifting about her goin’

back to God. I heard of people talk about immortality, but I
116 Seeing Like the Buddha

ain’t seen it. I wondered how it’d be like when I died, what
it’d be like to know this breath now was the last one you was
ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it the same way she
did, with the same calm. ‘Cause that’s where it’s hidden—the
immortality I hadn’t seen.

Witt echoes a perspective on death that William LaFleur finds in

Maborosi: “as possibly providing an absolutely unparalleled experience
of being connected to the panoply of things” (2002, 162). Witt’s own
death is depicted as realizing the hope he expresses here. He is the soldier
who diverts the Japanese troops so that his comrade can backtrack and
warn their company about the enemy advance. As he is encircled by
the Japanese troops, he looks around and settles into a state of stillness
and acceptance, unfazed by the enemy demands for his surrender. He
is clearly aware that he is drawing his last breath. He raises his gun in
order to draw fire and is shot dead. The next scene immediately cuts to
an underwater sequence of Witt swimming in play with the Melanesian
children, which replicates an opening scene of the film. His “immortality”
has him reintegrated into this world in its blissful version. There are no
separate worlds but rather different perspectives on the same single world.
This dynamic is embodied in the interplay between Witt and Ser‑
geant Welsh, his squad leader. Welsh proclaims, “In this world, a man
himself is nothing, and there ain’t no world but this one,” to which Witt
replies, “I’ve seen another world.” But most significantly, Witt seems

Figure 6.2. Private Witt is surrounded by Japanese soldiers in the moment

before his death.
 The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 117

to be in this other world precisely at the moments of suffering and

degradation. Witt’s ability to be with pain is repeatedly displayed—as
a stretcher‑bearer attending to the wounded, in attending to the dying
moments of his comrades, even in his presence with the half‑starved,
terrified, and deranged Japanese soldiers after their capture. In a later
exchange, Welsh taunts Witt: “You still believin’ in the beautiful light,
are you? How do you do that? You’re a magician to me.” Witt replies,
“I still see a spark in you.” This conversation is followed by a voiceover
that reiterates this duality of perspective. The voice of Private Train, who
also provides the opening and closing narrations, observes: “One man
looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain,
that death’s got the final word. It’s laughing at him. Another man sees
that same bird, feels the glory, feels something smiling through it.”
These opposing perceptions and experiences are further expressed as
the views of different characters. Colonel Tall states: “Look at this jungle.
Look at those vines, the way they twine around, swallowing everything.
Nature’s cruel.” This sentiment reflects Tall’s own embittered experience
of the army, which has passed him over for promotion. Tall uses the
Guadalcanal campaign as a personal battle for political advancement,
disregarding the cost in his soldiers’ lives. Tall appeals to nature’s cruelty
as justification when he relieves Captain Staros of his command for being
“too soft” and unwilling to sacrifice his men. Nature is the canvas Tall
uses to paint Staros as weak, but the competing perspectives of Tall and
Staros, as of Welsh and Witt, suggest the nonintrinsic essence of the
world, which always awaits interpretation. As Staros ships out, we hear
his voice defining his experience of command for himself. He addresses
his men in his mind, saying: “You are my sons, my dear sons. You live
inside me now. I’ll carry you wherever I go.”
Malick’s tendency to juxtapose alternative perspectives on the world
is pointedly embodied in the figures of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien in The
Tree of Life. The opening voiceover by Mrs. O’Brien lays out the options
quite plainly:

The nuns taught us there were two ways through life—the

way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose
which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself.
Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults
and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others
to please it too. Likes to lord it over them, to have its own
118 Seeing Like the Buddha

way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is

shining around it and love is smiling through all things. They
taught us that no one who loves the way of grace comes to
a bad end. I will be true to you, whatever comes.

Mrs. O’Brien is the indisputable figure of grace, raising three boys

in Waco, Texas, in the 1950s. Mr. O’Brien, on the other hand, embodies
the way of nature with a bullying love that wants to toughen his sons
to survive in the world. Malick proffers suburban domesticity as more
than equal to the drama of world war: a non‑diegetic interlude twenty
minutes into the film depicts cosmic gas and dust forming galaxies and
microorganismic processes forming human life. The cradle of the family
is made the pinnacle in the drama of creation itself because that is the
place where our habits of perception are formed. This is made explicit
in the oldest son Jack, whom we see ricocheting between his parents as
a child and whose influences he struggles to reconcile as an adult.
What the O’Brien family faces is no less momentous than the
question of life and death endemic to war. There is the death of Jack’s
friend at the local swimming pool, but the central event is the death
of Jack’s younger brother R. L. even though it is not depicted in the
film. We merely witness Mrs. O’Brien receiving the news via a telegram.
Again, narrative is sacrificed in favor of the primacy of experience. In
the final resurrection sequence, the family is reunited on a shoreline
crowded with people ambling to a majestic operatic soundtrack. Here
Mrs. O’Brien and the rest of the family encounter R. L. as the child
we have seen in the bulk of the film. Mrs. O’Brien takes him in with
wonder and adoration, but in the end raises her hands to the sky and
whispers, “I give him to you. I give you my son.” In the next scene, the
adult Jack wakes up from his dream. The resurrection, it is implied, was
his reverie and his own realization of the way of grace and acceptance
modeled by his mother.
Cinematic images of children at play feature heavily in Tree of
Life, which again pairs the idyllic and the menacing, such as the scene
of ecstatic boys running through the billowing spray of the insecticide
DDT that was widely and indiscriminately used before its toxicity was
documented. The specter of the present play in tandem with the future
harm it presents makes for a rather ambiguous vista. The vignettes of
Jack’s own sport begins with the enchantments of childhood play, under
the guidance of his mother, but matures into adolescent episodes of
 The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 119

vandalism, cruelty, and sexual aggression in the company of like‑minded

boys. The influence of Mr. O’Brien’s way of nature and the way Jack is
also beholden to it is suggested here. But the progression from innocent
play to unintended malevolence is also a seamless transition. Life flows
from one thing to the next until it becomes difficult to separate things
in any stable way. This sense of movement is repeatedly visualized in
Malick’s filmmaking, which creates a visual analogue to the ultimate
nonduality of the ways of grace and nature.

Movement and Flow

The Thin Red Line is a meditation on good and evil that goes beyond
jingoistic distinctions between good guys and bad guys, and even beyond
the ideals of heroism and sacrifice that seem to be the only virtuous
possibilities when faced with the senselessness of mutual human destruc‑
tion. Ethical questions about the origins of good and evil are trumped
by meditations that dissolve the boundaries between them. When the
battle climaxes with the American takeover of the Japanese position, the
din of gunfire and screams fade in volume while the following questions
layer over the scenes of rampage and death:

This great evil. Where does it come from? How’d it steal into
the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s
doing this? Who’s killing us? Robbing us of life and light.
Mocking us with the sight of what we might’ve known. Does
our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the
sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed
through this night?

This climactic sequence offers our first glimpse of Japanese faces

and bodies, in contrast to their previous incarnation as the barrage of
gunfire that cuts down the American soldiers during their assault on the
hill. The enemy that is finally subdued is a ragtag band of half‑starved,
delirious, and broken humanity that robs the viewer of any sense of vic‑
tory. The question, “Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us?” is asked over
the slaughter of Japanese soldiers, raising the “us” to a mutually inclusive
if not universal category, just as the questions “Is this darkness in you,
too? Have you passed through this night?” seem to address us all equally.
120 Seeing Like the Buddha

“Us” and “them” do not have stable referents as the identities of killer
and victim continually exchange and evolve.
The protean dynamics of love is an equal focus of meditation in
The Thin Red Line. Private Bell’s reveries of his wife intersperse the film,
shot as his memories of the dance of their lovemaking and intertwining
bodies. The voiceover wonders in amazement at its source, and they pose
parallel inquiries to the film’s questions about evil: “Love. Where does it
come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it.
I was a prisoner. You set me free.” Bell is sustained by the anticipation
of returning to his wife even though three years have passed. His voice
intones, “My dear wife, you get something twisted out of your insides
by all this blood, filth, and noise. I want to stay changeless for you. I
want to come back to you the man I was before.” Bell’s desire for stasis
is contradicted by the imperative of movement, however. During the lull
between battles, Private Bell receives a letter from his wife informing him
that she has fallen in love with another man and wishes to divorce. “I
just got too lonely,” she explains. The impersonal nature of her explana‑
tion tells us both everything and nothing at all. The mystery of love’s
beginnings is equaled by the mystery of its disappearance.
Of course, there is no serious attempt to offer answers to these
questions about the source of love and strife. Instead, Malick turns to
movement such as images of flowing water to suggest that these events
are the rhythms and patterns of human experience. In the final voiceover,
we see Private Train standing in the back of the transport ship leaving
the island. Over the image of flowing water, we hear his voice say:

Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I

lived with? The brother. The friend. Darkness, light. Strife
and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features
of the same face? Oh, my soul. Let me be in you now. Look
out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All
things shining.

This is not the first time we hear the suggestion of a fundamental

oneness. In an early scene when Private Witt attends to a wounded sol‑
dier during his duties as a stretcher bearer, we hear him say, “Maybe all
men got one big soul everybody’s a part of, all faces are the same man.
One big self.” We see flowing water here as well, in the stream where
Witt pours cleansing water over the head of a wounded man in an act
 The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 121

Figure 6.3. The image of flowing water sustains Private Train’s reflection: “Dark‑
ness, light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features
of the same face?”

that reads equally well as Christian baptism and Bodhisattva compassion.

Water is also metaphorically invoked to speak of a fundamental unity.
Private Bell reflects on his wife and intones, “We. We together. One
being. Flow together like water. Till I can’t tell you from me. I drink
you. Now. Now.”
The malleability of water reveals its intrinsically empty nature mar‑
velously—it conforms to any vessel it occupies because it has no necessary
form or meaning. The idea of flow is not limited to the convergence of
parts that are inherently good or evil, or the necessity of taking the bad
along with the good. It implies instead the interpenetration of good and
evil, in that each contains the other in itself. Good and evil seem to be
equal possibilities in the flow of experience, like ripples and waves that
form momentary configurations in ever‑moving bodies of water. In the
context of the inhumanity of war, then, the opportunities for humaneness
are always present. A sergeant states, “I look at that boy dying, I don’t
feel nothin’. I don’t care about nothin’ anymore,” and Welsh responds,
“Sounds like bliss.” Welsh’s cynicism suggests that the only kind of tran‑
scendence possible is simply numbness to pain. In action, however, he
demonstrates an ability to change brutality into compassion. Welsh is
the one who saves Witt from a court martial for being AWOL by rein‑
tegrating him into his unit. During the initial assault on the Japanese
bunker, Welsh is the one who relieves a terrified soldier from duty. In
the midst of that battle, Welsh is also the one who dodges a rain of fire
122 Seeing Like the Buddha

to bring morphine to a dying soldier screaming in pain. Much as we

saw in Rashomon, debates about good and evil are irresolvable, perhaps
because words and concepts demand dichotomies that remain forever in
opposition to each other. Only action and movement can pass beyond
the “either/or” distinction that words create. Witt has concrete evidence
when he tells Welsh: “I still see a spark in you.”
To the Wonder is particularly evocative of movement—in the cho‑
reography of the actors, in the camerawork, and in the story itself. In
terms of plot, the film is a story of romantic love between the American
Neil and the single mother Marina whom he meets in Paris. Neil brings
Marina and her ten‑year‑old daughter Tatiana to his native Oklahoma,
where he takes a job as an environmental inspector. At first, life is happy,
but their love unravels and Marina returns to Paris. Neil gets involved
with an old childhood friend named Jane but this relationship too falls
apart. Marina returns to Oklahoma, where she and Neil reunite and
marry, only to flounder once more when Marina has a tryst with a
local carpenter. As one might expect, there are no dialogues or character
portrayals that explain why these relationships take these turns. Instead,
Malick shows us an ongoing pattern of togetherness seguing into sepa‑
ration and merging back into union. Love is also the flow of opposites
and this movement itself stands in for the story that is bigger than the
particulars of any two individuals. In a voiceover, Marina asks, “What
is this love that loves us? That comes from nowhere? From all around.
The sky. You, cloud. You love me too.” The images during this narration
are of flowing water in a stream.
The focus on movement is accentuated by how much Marina
dances her way through the landscape. This includes not only the plains
of Oklahoma, which Malick favors in the glow of sunset gold, but the
interior of Neil’s large suburban house and even the supermarket where
Marina whirls with sundry dry goods. The New York Times review refers
rather derisively to Marina’s “serious commitment to twirling” (Scott
2013), which is replicated to a lesser degree by Jane. As Olga Kurylenko
(Marina) reports, “Every actor has to move in a Terrence Malick film—
that’s the requirement. If you stop, he’ll tell you, ‘No, no, keep moving.’
You can’t be static. It’s a choreography.” Jessica Chastain (Mrs. O’Brien)
confirms that working with Malick is like being part of “a ballet dance
company without a soloist. We’re all moving together, and that includes
the cinematographer, the focus puller, the camera operator, Terry and
the actor. It’s all five of us contributing to the shot, to seeing what
 The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 123

the moment is” (Hynes 2013). Chastain’s choreography in Tree of Life

includes partnering with a butterfly and even floating in midair. To the
Wonder is notably dynamic in its camerawork. Malick has persistently
favored the mobility of the handheld camera, but the cinematography
of To the Wonder is in constant motion, as if its point of view is that of
flowing water itself. The camera—and the audience along with it—is the
constantly moving stream that courses in and out of the lives of Marina,
Neil, and Jane. We eavesdrop on a snatch of conversation and glimpse
a moment before flowing on to another vista in the human landscape.
The minimal role of dialogue in all of Malick films reaches its height in
To the Wonder, which favors movement both in the viewer and what is
viewed above all else.
As with Jack’s dream of resurrection and reconciliation at the end
of Tree of Life, To the Wonder also concludes with a dreamlike vision of
hope. The final scene depicts Neil in a different house with two young
children. The view then cuts to Marina lying in a dew‑drenched field,
through which she ambles until her face is caught in the orange‑yellow
glow of sunlight. She turns and the final shot is of Mont St. Michel.
The voiceover in this final sequence has Marina saying: “Love that loves
us. Thank you.” The presence of the young children suggests that some
years have passed since the previous scene in which Marina and Neil
appear to have divorced and Marina boards a plane back to France. Prior
to this departure, however, Neil makes peace with Marina’s infidelity by
kneeling before her and taking her hands in his, as if seeking forgive‑
ness himself. The montage of images suggests a period of reflection as
Neil accompanies Father Quintana during his ministry with the ill and
the wretched, during which we can hear the voice of Father Quintana
reciting the Prayer of St. Patrick. He ends with the lines: “Flood our
souls with your spirit and life, so completely that our lives may only be
a reflection of yours. Shine through us.”
The origins of love and hate cannot be fathomed, and so the more
fundamental question becomes what ultimately moves us to one or the
other. The voice of Private Train asks, “How did we lose the good that
was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered. Careless. What’s keeping us
from reaching out, touching the glory?” Innate to this question is the
presumption that it is always possible to reach out and touch the glory.
Darkness and light are features of the same face, and therefore both are
possible at all times. With the right movement of vision and action, it
is possible to render “all things shining.”
124 Seeing Like the Buddha

Conclusion

Malick’s invitation to create the story through open‑ended filmmaking

recapitulates the Buddhist visions offered by the films examined in this
book. Like the Bodhisattva Guanyin who looks down and hears the cries
of all beings in Kim Kiduk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring,
Malick’s camera takes in the rhythms of human action, reflecting its sor‑
rows but also suggesting another reality behind it. Similar to the way the
Korean film collapses the distance between samsara and nirvana, Malick
juxtaposes wretchedness and grace and wonders if they are really separate
things. And like the varying discernments of the ghost‑wife in Nonzee
Nimibutr’s Nang Nak and of the rape in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon,
Malick uses his characters to demonstrate that how and what an indi‑
vidual sees determines the qualities of their actions and the worlds they
occupy. Finally, like the non‑diegetic filmmaking of Hirokazu Kore’eda’s
Maborosi, which favors landscapes and incidental moments over narrative
omniscience, Malick fills his frames with the breathtaking visions that are
possible once dualistic ways of constructing meaning are transcended in
favor of a synchronous and nondualistic insight. What results is filmmak‑
ing that showcases the distinct virtuosities of film as a visual medium.
By the time we reach the works of Terrence Malick, all signs of the
Buddha’s presence have been erased. But this is in accord with Mahāyāna
conceptions of the dharmakāya, which is the ultimate body of the Bud‑
dha and the source of its many manifestations. The dharmakāya in itself
is beyond form because it is fundamentally empty. By the same token,
when a vision of the Buddha is obtained, it is incumbent upon the seer
to deconstruct it:

Having thought: “Did these Tathāgatas come from somewhere?

Did I go anywhere?” he understands that those Tathāgatas
did not come from anywhere. Having comprehended that
his body did not go anywhere either, he thinks: “These Triple
Worlds are nothing but thought.” (PraS 3L)

In early Buddhist understandings of the Buddha, he is absent

because he has attained nirvana and thus disappeared from the wheel of
samsaric existence. With the rise of Mahāyāna traditions, the ultimate and
empty dharmakāya is ever‑present in the world but invisible because it
cannot be reduced to any particular form. And because the dharmakāya is
 The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick 125

invisible, “To see the Buddha in his dharmakāya, one must know what a
Buddha knows—one must be a Buddha” (Gifford 2011, 160). But as the
layout of Borobudur demonstrates, to be a Buddha also means descend‑
ing back into the world of forms as the place where one can see in the
manner of the Buddha himself. It is this final portion of Borobudur with
which we will conclude our consideration of the contemporary medium
of film and its Buddhist possibilities.
 chapter 7

Descent into the World

Buddhist Visionary Practices

T he practice of seeing the Buddha, as attested in classical Buddhist

scriptures, is called buddhānusmr.ti (Pāli: anusatti), which means a
meditative contemplation that “recollects” the Buddha and “calls him
to mind.” In the Pāli texts, this practice entails a short recitation of
the qualities of the Buddha, such as the description that he is “per-
fected in knowledge” and “the teacher of gods and humans.”1 Focusing
on the spiritually wholesome qualities of the Buddha is thought to be
beneficial by displacing afflicted thoughts, thereby producing an altera-
tion in consciousness. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, the practice of buddhā-
nusmr.ti evolved to include explicit visualization of the Buddha’s body.
Hence, the physical qualities of the Buddha become objects of focus,
and one is instructed to concentrate on how the Buddha is “with all the
finest aspects, handsome, beautiful, lovely to behold, and endowed with
bodily perfection” (PraS 8A). The recitation of iconic features, such as the
thirty‑two marks of the Great Man enumerated in both Pāli and Sanskrit
sources, clearly point to the use of images as an aid in buddhānusmr.ti
practice (Zurcher 2013, 500).
Visionary experiences are central in Mahāyāna Buddhism, as
attested in the Pure Land and Perfection of Wisdom texts,2 and the
Gan.d.avyūha, which “self‑consciously embraces imaginative and projective
vision as an integral part of Buddhist practice” (McMahan 2002, 112).
References to visualizing Buddhas and Buddha‑lands are made across
Mahāyāna sources, and although the names and even the techniques
of the practices vary, “in essence [they are] the same developed form of

127
128 Seeing Like the Buddha

buddhānusmr.ti” (Harrison 1992, 224). The Chinese nienfo (Japanese:

nembutsu) of Pure Land Buddhism is one version of buddhānusmr.ti,
in which chanting the name of the Buddha Amitābha accompanies the
practice of visualization. So is the deity yoga of Tibetan tantra, in which
Buddhas and bodhisattvas in the image of benevolent and wrathful deities
serve as objects of meditative contemplation.3
An important and common feature of these visualization prac-
tices—which is emblematic of their shared heritage—are repeated
reminders that the Buddhas both seen and visualized are ultimately
empty. The early Mahāyāna visualization text called Pratyutpanna‑buddha‑
sam. mukhāvasthita‑samadhi (“the samadhi of direct encounter with the
buddhas of the present”) states that “when in this way one obtains the
samādhi of emptiness by concentrating on the Tathāgatha without objec-
tification, that is known as the calling to mind of the Buddha” (PraS
3F). To call the Buddha to mind without seizing upon that experience
as the apprehension of an independent and objectively existing reality
is to discern in the proper way. Hence, recollecting the Buddha is for
the purpose of seeing properly, as the Buddha himself did, and what is
actually recollected simply provides an opportune occasion:

Attention is shifted away from the professed religious value or

significance of the ritual acts themselves and directed instead
toward a critique of the fundamental processes by which they
(together with all other phenomena) are conceived. (Stevenson
1986, 65)

In the logic of this meditation, then, calling the Buddha to mind

is only one way of attaining the discernment of emptiness. While the
figure of the Buddha is an overt reminder of the qualities that he attained
and the wisdom he achieved, “any type of activity or circumstance—reli-
gious as well as mundane—can serve as an equally effective ground for
meditative discernment” (Stevenson 1986, 77).4 In fact, if the point of
meditation is the discernment of emptiness and emptiness is the mark
of all things, this seems to mandate a movement away from the Buddha
to the wider world itself as the field of practice.
The temple Borobudur appears to visually and ritually embody
this sentiment. In her detailed study of the temple, Julie Gifford argues
that the stairs that allow ascent and descent through the monument
functioned as the locus of a significant ritual. This ritual would be the
 Descent into the World 129

Figure 7.1. The perspective from the bottom of the stairs of Borobudur provides
a clear view of the niche Buddhas, who appear to accompany beings descending
the temple. (Photograph by Alexander Ipfelkofer)

final act in the experience of Borobudur, comprising the descent and exit
from the temple after having climbed all the way to the empty stūpa at
its center. The descent and departure is just as important as the experi-
ence of Borobudur itself:

Having performatively constituted himself as an advanced

bodhisattva on the terraces, the celebrant returned from the
purified fields to the world, bringing the soteriological power
130 Seeing Like the Buddha

of the cosmic Buddhas with him. This is entirely in keeping

with the Mahāyāna virtue of compassion, which the bod-
hisattva demonstrates by remaining in sam. sāra, returning to
the world again and again for the sake of saving all sentient
beings. (Gifford 2011, 165)

Gifford’s argument for this reading of the descent from Borobu-

dur is based on traditional legend, ritual, and images. After the Buddha
taught the Dharma to his mother in the Trāyatrim . śa heaven where she
had been reborn (and where the first image of the Buddha was fash-
ioned from sandalwood), Śākyamuni descended back to earth by way of
a jeweled ladder formed by the god Śakra.5 This famous episode from
the Buddha’s life is represented in Indian, Southeast Asian, and Tibetan
Buddhist art and ritually reenacted in contemporary Theravādin societ-
ies when monks descend their hilltop monasteries after the rainy season
retreat. Laypeople line the bottom of the hill to make offerings of food
and supplies, and this auspicious opportunity to make merit is called
Devorohana, or “coming down from the deva world” (Gifford 2011, 167).
With this ritual enactment, monks function as stand‑ins for the Buddha
and embody the bodhisattva principle of being physically present in the
world for the sake of devotees.
The logic of emptiness says that the historical Buddha was only
one manifestation of an ultimately formless emptiness, which is why
Buddhas proliferate in the course of Buddhist tradition—particularly as
bodhisattvas whose raison d’être is to be present in the world. The ritual
progression of Borobudur suggests that anyone who ascends and then
descends from this microcosm of the dharmakāya world can also fulfill
the role of a bodhisattva. The “visual rhetoric” of Borobudur strongly
intimates this by displaying multiple images of the Buddha that are
visible from the bottom of the stairs. Looking up the steps provides
the best vantage point on the 432 niche Buddhas carved into the top
of the gallery walls. These Buddhas are separate from the seventy‑two
stūpa Buddhas on the open‑air terraces. The niche Buddhas adorn the
galleries that form the lower part of the temple, and every level of these
niche Buddhas is visible from the bottom of the stairs. This creates an
interesting visual effect:

The niches draw the eye from one Buddha figure to another,
and because the stairs introduce a vertical element, the eye is
 Descent into the World 131

Figure 7.2. A close‑up of some of the 432 niche Buddhas on top of the gallery
walls. (Photograph by Robert DeCaroli)

naturally drawn up and down. When one scans the monument

is this way, it creates a visual illusion of movement. This illu-
sion of movement helps the images in the niches function as
a representation of the Buddha’s descent. (Gifford 2011, 167)

The suggestion of this descent accompanies the view of the person

coming down the stairs, as if he or she is in the company of the Buddha.
More than this, the kinship and even equivalence between the Buddha
and descending person are implied. It is in the nature of Buddhas to
descend into the world and by that token, those in the world fulfill the
function of being Buddhas. Buddhas and bodhisattvas, after all, never
walk the earth in their cosmic forms but rather take on earthly mani-
festations such as Śākyamuni or the Dalai Lama. In the circulatory logic
of the bodhisattva ideal, what goes up must come down and what is in
the world is ultimately equivalent to what is supposedly above it in the
formless realm of the dharmakāya.
132 Seeing Like the Buddha

This logic has been tapped in this book to argue that film instanti-
ates a seamless continuity with the ritual, visual, and meditative practices
of traditional Buddhism. This means considering film as more than a
way to inform audiences by depicting the life of Buddhist figures or
by “drafting” mainstream movies to showcase Buddhist teachings. The
movement away from overt Buddhist signs draws our attention to film
itself as a ritual practice, above and beyond its obvious capacities as an
educational tool. One does not learn any discursive Buddhist content
from the films of Terrence Malick but rather undergoes experiences, and
what makes them Buddhist are the qualities of disciplined and attentive
participation that they enable.

Film as Visionary Practice

This is perhaps more evident in non‑feature films that are relatively free
of the requirements of normal storytelling. I will consider two instances
that form bookend examples, and demonstrate how they replicate and
extend Buddhist forms of ritual practice. The first work is Anthony
Cerniello’s video Danielle (2013), whose eponymous subject ages from a
young girl to an elderly woman in the space of less than five minutes.
This work utilizes the capacity of film to collapse time to the extreme—
or at least considerably more than Kim Kiduk’s Spring, Summer, Fall,
Winter . . . and Spring. The second example is Andy Warhol’s art film
Empire (1964), which deliberately slows down its image capture of the
Empire State Building to produce a film that is more than eight hours
long. This film considerably extends Kore’eda’s and Malick’s long takes
on the nonnarrative moment. Both Danielle and Empire take advantage
of the technological capabilities of their medium to create distinctive
viewing experiences. Commentators therefore pay a lot of attention to the
mechanics of their technical manipulations. My interest here, in contrast,
is in the ritualized practices of seeing that they instantiate and elicit.
Anthony Cerniello’s Danielle opens on a frontal headshot of a
young Asian girl against a completely white background, accompanied
by the low hum of a synthesizer. For the full duration of the video the
girl looks directly at the viewer and does not move except for some
occasional blinking and subtle eye movements. The primary thing she
does is to age, marked only by the intermittent pulsing of the synthe-
sizer from its otherwise steady hum. The remarkable thing about this
act of aging is how imperceptibly the girl’s face alters right in front of
 Descent into the World 133

Figure 7.3. Danielle as she appears 8 seconds into the video.

the viewer’s eyes—for the first full minute, the growth of the subject is
virtually undetectable until one realizes that she has matured into an
adolescent by about a minute and a half into the video. At two minutes
she is a woman, and a minute after that the lines around her eyes and
the loosening of the skin on her chin and neck has put her well into
middle age. The video concludes at four minutes and twenty seconds,

Figure 7.4. Danielle as she appears 4 minutes and 17 seconds into the video.
134 Seeing Like the Buddha

when Danielle appears to be in her sixties. Her hair is not yet completely
white, and her lightly spotted skin is still unmarked by the full cascade
of wrinkles that marks truly advanced age.
Cerniello’s video is available on Vimeo with the following tag: “I
attempted to create a person in order to emulate the aging process. The
idea was that something is happening but you can’t see it but you can feel
it, like aging itself.” Cerniello’s artistic and technological feat was created
through a combination of photography and animation, using footage of
his friend Danielle and her youngest cousins to her oldest female rela-
tives. Cerniello, who is a professional film editor, scanned and edited
the montage of photos, and afterward his collaborators Nathan Meier,
Edmund Earle, and George Cuddy brought the images to life through
animation. The result replicates the experience of watching one’s own
children grow, particularly the potent combination of the daily contact
that blunts awareness of change, on the one hand, and then the sudden
shock and awakening to how much the person has altered, on the other.
The process happens in front of one’s eyes but it is imperceptible and
can only be experienced as a startling aftereffect.
Time‑lapse photography has been widely utilized to document
long‑term change and processes, of course. Danielle calls to mind the
photographer Noah Kalina, who took a daily self‑portrait for twelve and
a half years, from January 11, 2000, to June 30, 2012, and posted them
all to his website with the title Everyday. The resulting video of 4,514
photographs has a run time of 7:41 at ten frames per second. Unlike
Danielle, Everyday is documentary art that evinces the actual life of one
person, starting at the age of nineteen, who is caught in the vagaries of
the everyday as his changing environment, dress, and hair length flash
at lightning speed across the screen. Compared to the subject of Dani‑
elle, however, Kalina ages only twelve years in almost twice the amount
of time, and the jumpiness of the rapid‑fire succession of photos with
its distracting variations do not create the focused mood of Cerniello’s
work. Raw footage of “real life,” in other words, sometimes displays less
than what artifice can, such as the digitally manipulated images of the
multiple people comprising Danielle.
Buddhist visualization practices are also a form of artifice that cre-
ates visions for the sake of seeing more clearly. Discerning the truth of
old age, illness, and death is a standard trope of Buddhist practice, and
one that has required artistic technologies in order to underscore what is
usually too invisible to be taken in. The well‑known tale of Kisāgotamī
 Descent into the World 135

tells of the young mother who sought out the Buddha to cure her dead
child and who is told instead to collect a mustard seed from a household
that has not known death. She fails, of course, and the fruitless task awak-
ens her to the truth of life and she becomes a follower of the Buddha.6
The conceit of Kisāgotamī’s naivete—that she really needed to personally
knock on doors to confirm that death comes to all families—is a liter-
ary contrivance that encourages one to inhabit a truth that is normally
and perhaps purposefully forgotten. This narrative stratagem—and its
brevity—is necessary to awaken a kind of vision that runs much deeper
than simple intellectual knowledge of human mortality.
The fact of constant change and the simultaneous births and deaths
that construct all events—most particularly the putative self or person—is
one of Buddhism’s most central visions. And it is one of the most dif-
ficult to discern (most of all within oneself ) because we can only look
at ourselves within the same time scale in which change actually occurs,
and to exist within that process makes it difficult to see as an explicit
object. The Satipat.t.hāna Sutta (M 10), which is one of the foundational
texts on mindfulness meditation, prescribes a practice that again reflects
on the process only after the fact. This is the famous charnel ground
meditations in which the practitioner is instructed to contemplate corpses
in nine distinct stages of decay, from only a few days dead, when it is
bloated, livid and oozing matter, to its last stages when it turns into a
heap of bleached bones and then dust. The progression of decomposition
is rather finely parsed, distinguishing between stage three, for example,
when there is a skeleton with some flesh and blood held together by
tendons, and stage four, when there is a blood-smeared skeleton with no
flesh but still held together by tendons. If Danielle were to move past
old age into death and beyond, the charnel ground meditations could
function very well as a script for those successive states.
The Satipat.t.hāna Sutta’s meditational instructions comprise one
early artistic method of producing Buddhist visions, made necessary by
the limits of ordinary experience. One can wonder to what degree actual
charnel grounds cooperated in offering up neatly arranged corpses and
skeletons arrayed according to the nine stages of decay. Clearly it is the
text of the Satipat.t.hāna Sutta itself and its clinically ordered distinctions
that produce the desired effect of mentally enlivening Buddhist under-
standings of the nature of human existence. The text says, in fact, that the
practitioner contemplates “as though he were to see a corpse thrown aside
in a charnel ground” (M I.58; emphasis added) rather than instructing
136 Seeing Like the Buddha

monks to actually go to the charnel grounds. To be sure, the premise

of the meditations suggests that visual prompts—that is to say, actual
bodies—were readily embraced as aids to mental visualization. In the
Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa instructs monks to go and meditate upon
actual corpses—but only after taking careful precautions. After warning
against the possibility of encountering robbers on the road and wild
beasts on the charnel grounds, Buddhaghosa also instructs the meditator
to remain at some distance from the corpse—lest he gag at the smell or
become frightened by the sight, and also to avoid corpses of the opposite
sex in order to avoid “the wrong kind of excitement” (Vm VI, 12–42).
Unstructured experience can have a way of derailing meditative practice
and its aim of generating the appropriate internal vision—in this case,
insight into the truth of impermanence and the inevitable decay of the
body. The point of contemplative practice is to produce and maintain
such insight at will, unencumbered by the distractions of normal life
situations. The Satipat.t.hāna Sutta is not only more readily available than
actual corpses, it is less encumbered by potential hindrances. Hence, art
is necessary.
The art of Danielle shares the Satipat.t.hāna Sutta’s strategy of focus-
ing our attention on the passage of time and is better at supplying the
visual experience that texts can only evoke through description. The fact
that Danielle is actually a montage of many people and the fact that the
aging process is simulated is a fine actualization of the Buddhist view
that the illusion of art is necessary to awaken to the illusory nature of
life itself, resulting from its ephemerality. The power of art to focus
the attention and sustain awareness is superior to the dulling effects of
“real life,” and Buddhist contemplative practices are themselves a kind of
internal cinema of the mind that aims to vivify what the tradition takes
to be ultimately real. The ability to do this takes disciplined effort, and
works like Danielle are in lock‑step with the practice of scaffolding the
kind of vision that in time is supposed to become independently and
internally sustained.
The technology of film works in more than one way and can go in
the opposite direction of slowing down our experiences. If the fast‑for-
warding effect of Danielle works in tandem with Buddhist meditations
on the ephemerality of life and its inescapable endings, a film such as
Empire resonates with Buddhist ritual practices that cultivate the capacity
to see things in the proper way by holding one’s gaze. Empire was filmed
from the forty‑first floor of the Time‑Life Building. Andy Warhol and
 Descent into the World 137

his crew shot six hours and thirty-eight minutes of footage but the film
is projected at a slower speed to create a movie of over eight hours in
length. The Museum of Modern Art in New York possesses the original
film and provides this description of the work:

Empire consists of a single stationary shot of the Empire State

Building filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m., July 25–26,
1964. The eight‑hour, five‑minute film, which is typically
shown in a theater, lacks a traditional narrative or characters.
The passage from daylight to darkness becomes the film’s nar-
rative, while the protagonist is the iconic building that was
(and is again) the tallest in New York City. Warhol lengthened
Empire’s running time by projecting the film at a speed of
sixteen frames per second, slower than its shooting speed of
twenty‑four frames per second, thus making the progression to
darkness almost imperceptible. Non‑events such as a blinking
light at the top of a neighboring building mark the passage of
time. According to Warhol, the point of this film—perhaps
his most famous and influential cinematic work—is to “see
time go by.” (http://www.moma.org/collection/works/89507)

Warhol’s aspiration to exhibit time going by is analogous to Cerni-

ello’s desire to see the aging process, and despite its opposing strategy
of slowing time down rather than speeding it up, the theme of imper-
ceptibility marks both. Empire visualizes time through changes in the
environment rather than in the edifice itself, which is relatively immobile.
What moves instead are the changes in natural light as well as the onset
of artificial lighting such as the floodlights that come on at night, and
the blinking light on the top of an adjacent tower. Some entities are
made to defy perishability, at least compared to human lives, and so its
own invisible timeline of change and eventual decay must be marked by
external events that move at a faster pace.
The fact that Warhol chose to slow down these visible markers of
time—such as the coming of night—is noteworthy. Empire was shot in
the middle of the summer when the sun traces its longest arc over the
sky and creates the lengthiest and most gradual of sunsets. By slowing
that process even further, the progression to darkness is extended and
made almost imperceptible. If the purpose of the film is to see time go
by then it handicaps the effort by slowing the pace to near stillness,
138 Seeing Like the Buddha

rendering the experience akin to staring at a painting. The actress Mary

Woronov in fact stumbled upon this insight during a 2008 Warhol ret-
rospective at the Gershwin Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where Empire
was projected on the lobby wall:

I realized that Andy never meant to do a film. He was doing

a painting. Pop art put the image back in painting and Andy
took it even further and put the image on film instead of
canvas. He wasn’t directing, he was painting. It’s only taken
me 40 years to realize that these films were never meant to
screen in a theater, where I thought they were boring. They
were meant to hang on a wall. They are Andy’s greatest paint-
ings. (http://www.warholstars.org/empire.html)

If we imagine Empire as a painting on a wall that one can come

back to at different times to see the subject under different conditions,
then we might be reminded of Claude Monet’s depictions of Rouen
Cathedral, which he captured at different times of day and in different
seasons through over thirty paintings in the years 1892 and 1893. His
purpose was to call attention to the effects of lighting, and this exten-
sive exercise in aesthetic observation also has deep philosophical implica-
tions. If the appearance of the cathedral changes in different atmospheric
conditions, is each instance of appearance that of the same cathedral
or of different entities? Does the identity of the cathedral lie in some
extrasensory plane beyond its changing appearances or is it constituted
in the very act of observation—which can only take place under the
varying conditions of light that make visual perception possible at all?
The apparent solidity of monuments such as the Rouen Cathedral and
the Empire State Building become questionable in the wake of art that
poses the question of what exactly it is that one sees from one moment
to the next. Monet’s Cathedral series raises doubts about the inherent
stability of the object it portrays, and so does Empire. The latter in a
sense folds Monet’s multiple depictions of the same building into one
continuous work by slowing film almost to the point of stasis, on the
one hand, while simultaneously encompassing the changes wrought by
the movement of time, on the other.
What Empire features that paintings cannot, however, is the sugges-
tion that the viewer should remain focused on it for its full eight‑hour
duration. A film is supposed to be watched from beginning to end even
 Descent into the World 139

when it embodies only the barest whisper of a story, thereby commanding

one’s time to a degree that static portraits do not. The film’s equivalence in
length to the standard workday suggests the labor of the undertaking and
pushes the viewing experience to the level of a contemplative discipline.
If one were to seriously undertake a full screening of Empire, without
drifting off into daydreams and other mental distractions, a primary way
of concentrating on this barely‑moving image might be to scrutinize its
constituent elements until the whole entity is committed to memory.
While the gradual evolutions in Warhol’s portrait of the Empire State
Building raises questions about its ultimate stability (in the manner of
Monet’s cathedrals), its long temporal duration invites an intense visual
encounter with the form and provides the opportunity to instantiate and
fix it within one’s own mind.
Staring fixedly at an object for hours on end is common in Bud-
dhist meditation practice, particularly in the kind of visualization rituals
already discussed in this and previous chapters. Consider the depictions
of Maitreya’s abode in the third gallery of Borobudur, specifically panels
III‑20 to III‑39, each of which features one aspect of the palace inte-
rior by turns—such as the bells, the banners, the lotus blossoms, and
other objects that festoon the scene. Julie Gifford argues that this series
of compositions both depicts what the pilgrim Sudhana sees and what
the pilgrim to Borobudur is also encouraged to see, which is a medita-
tive visualization of a purified Buddha‑field: “Not only do they depict
the visual elements found in a purified field, the . . . sequences also
recapitulate the meditative procedure by which the practitioner builds
up a complex mental picture of a purified field from a series of vividly
imaged parts” (2011, 82). Panels III‑20 to III‑39 break down a single
scene into multiple images in order to guide the observer in focusing on
discrete features piece‑by‑piece so that one may finally assemble a mental
picture of the whole.
Empire does not isolate the elements of its subject one at a time,
of course, but rather invites a sustained scrutiny of an empirical object
whose physical reality—in contrast to Maitreya’s palace—appears to be
indisputably real. But the questions raised above about its actual stability
can be engaged further by considering the Amitāyurdhyāna Sūtra (“sūtra
on the meditation on Amitāyus”),7 which focuses on otherworldly visions
and provides a different perspective on what it means to experience some-
thing as existing. As one of the three central Pure Land texts in Chinese
and Japanese Buddhism, the Amitāyurdhyāna Sūtra gives instructions on
140 Seeing Like the Buddha

how to obtain a vision of the Buddha Amitābha (Chinese: O‑mi‑to fo;

Japanese: Amida) and his Western Pure Land by meditating on thirteen
successive objects. The first six visualizations focus on the Pure Land
and begin with contemplating the setting sun in the West until one is
“able to visualize it clearly, whether your eyes are open or closed” (AdS
342a). Then one is told to visualize other elements such as the water, the
ground, and the trees of the Pure Land, providing descriptions that guide
the imagination. Because the Pure Land is by definition somewhere other
than in the present world, the point of these exercises is to actively create
the Pure Land in one’s own mind—as if this is akin to actually going
there. Seeing an entity in the world, on the one hand, and imagining it
in the mind, on the other, elide together as equal acts of consciousness.8
As a result, the act of vividly bringing objects to life in the mind
is repeatedly exhorted. For example, the text instructs one to: “Envision
the western direction as entirely flooded by water. Then picture the water
as clear and pure, and let this vision be distinctly perceived” (AdS 342a).
Sometimes the guided visualizations are lengthy and detailed, such as in
the contemplation of the trees of the Pure Land:

Visualize each one and then form an image of seven rows of

trees, each being eight thousand yojanas high and adorned
with seven‑jeweled blossoms and leaves. Each blossom and
leaf has the colors of various jewels. From the beryl‑colored
blossoms and leaves issues forth a golden light. From the
crystal‑colored [blossoms and leaves] issues forth a crimson
light. . . . Coral, amber, and all the other jewels serve as illu-
minating ornaments. Splendid nets of pearls cover the trees.
Between these seven rows of nets covering each tree there are
five hundred kot.is of palaces adorned with exquisite flowers,
like the palace of the Brahmā king, where celestial children
naturally dwell. (AdS 342b)

The description of the trees goes on for some time in this manner
with the aim of helping the practitioner construct a detailed and precise
image. One is repeatedly told to visualize the objects until they appear
to be actually present. The text instructs, “See all of these as clearly and
distinctly as if you were looking at your own image in a mirror” or “as
if you were seeing an object in the palm of your hand” (AdS 343a).
Generating a vivid internal image (nimitta) is the objective and object
 Descent into the World 141

of such concentration practice. Having faith in Amitābha and his Pure

Land means instantiating them through such visionary experiences rather
than just making doctrinal proclamations of belief.
The actual existence of the Empire State Building is not the object
of much debate, to be sure, but exercising contemplation of it can cul-
tivate the same mental powers as visualizing the Pure Land. Despite the
instant recognizability of this iconic building, even those in everyday
proximity probably do not look at it closely or long enough to mentally
reproduce it in detailed or lifelike form. Even if one were to make such
an attempt, real‑life situations do not readily provide a good vantage
point on the subject—such as access to the higher floors of the Time‑Life
Building—nor the freedom to sit and stare at it in the midst of daily
activities. This is not to suggest that there is some inherent virtue to
contemplating and committing a view of the Empire State Building to
memory. Rather, the objective is to cultivate the capacity to purposefully
stay with a phenomenon in an undistracted manner and thereby develop
the ability to actively determine what worlds and realities one occupies.
This capacity can be cultivated by taking mundane objects as focal points,
which offer easier points of departure for visualization practice.
For this reason, even Buddhist contemplation practices focus on
simple and ordinary objects, such as the kasin.a meditations described in
the Pāli canon and systematized by Buddhaghosa in the Visuddhimagga.
Perhaps the simplest kasin.a is the earth kasin.a, which is a clay disk that can
be the size of a bushel or a saucer that is to be manually constructed if there
is no access to a natural plot of earth such as a ploughed area or a thresh-
ing floor (Vm IV, 22–23). In the water kasin.a and the fire kasin.a medita-
tions, one can again choose to concentrate on natural formations such as
a lake or lamp flame, or manufacture an appropriate object expressly for
the purpose of meditation, such as a bowl of water or a special fire. The
use of ordinary objects and events is notable: the air kasin.a meditation
includes noting the tops of plants and trees moving to and fro in the wind
and feeling the touch of the breeze upon one’s body (Vm V, 9), and the
light kasin.a meditation can be practiced by concentrating on the circle of
light cast on the floor by the sun or moonlight passing through a hole
in the wall (Vm V, 21). But one can alternatively create such phenomena
artificially, suggesting the interchangeability of nature and artifice when it
comes to the single goal of cultivating the mental ability to concentrate.9
Medieval Chinese and Japanese Pure Land masters report having
had intense visions as the result of their visualization practices, aided by
142 Seeing Like the Buddha

other ritual tools such as sleep deprivation and countless mantra repeti-
tions. This led them to render their experiences in painting and sculpture
that in turn functioned as prompts for their followers’ visualization prac-
tices, further extending the synergy between art and experience.10 This
co‑dependency seems to be invoked by the Amitāyurdhyāna Sūtra in a
brief passage that Julian Pas (1974, 112) reads as a later philosophical
interpolation to the text. It appears in the section describing the eighth
meditation practice, which is a visualization of the Buddha:

[B]uddha tathāgatas have cosmic bodies [dharmadhātu‑kāya],

and so enter into the meditating mind of each sentient being.
For this reason, when you contemplate a buddha, your mind
itself takes the form of his thirty‑two physical characteristics
and eighty secondary marks. Your mind produces the Buddha’s
image and is itself the Buddha. (AdS 343a)

The meaning of this last sentence has been given somewhat varying
interpretations by different masters, but they converge on the idea that
the visions of the meditating mind are no different from the objective
reality of the Buddha and Buddhahood.11 The dharmakāya is invoked
here and it again enables a transition from the Buddhas seen to a focus
on the mind that does the seeing. The passage goes on to say, “The
ocean of perfectly and universally enlightened buddhas thus arises in
the meditating mind” (AdS 343a). It is the act of seeing the Buddha
that makes him real, and therefore the Buddha is no different from, and
exists within, the artistic imagination that actively chooses and constructs
what to see. This is not to say that Buddhas are merely a figment of the
imagination. This short philosophical interlude does not undermine the
countless Pure Land devotees who have believed in the empirical existence
of Amitābha’s paradise in the West. But affirming the empirical reality of
something does not entail ontological materialism either, particularly in
a tradition such as Buddhism that is chiefly concerned with how human
perceptions color what is seen in the world. For this reason, “Pure Land
Buddhists would say that the Pure Land is immediately given through
phenomenal experience, and in this sense is empirically verifiable” (Becker
1984, 147; emphasis added).
The ability to have such a phenomenological experience must be
cultivated, however, and it is not simply given to the devotee. This is not
a matter of constructing a wishful fantasy in order to mask the painful
 Descent into the World 143

reality of the mundane world but rather of counteracting the weight

of default human illusions with more felicitous ones. Filmic art such
as Warhol’s Empire can actively contribute to such an effort, and the
perspective provided by Buddhist practice neutralizes the accusations of
facetiousness or cynicism that are often directed to modernist art of
this kind. Warhol’s deceptively simple challenge to “watch time go by”
underplays the phenomenological questions Empire provokes: Wherein
does the reality of an object exist but within our evolving and unstable
experiences? Empire provides a canvas on which to paint and possibly
increase each viewer’s ability to choose and sustain a vision of things,
and given the history of Buddhist practice, such cultivation is difficult
to separate from religious actions.

Conclusion

Erik Zurcher notes that the Mahāyāna emphasis on the universal unreal-
ity of emptiness automatically commits it to iconoclasm:

Since the true Buddha‑nature is beyond all imagination, no

image can ever do justice to it. Icons are, in the last analysis,
as useless as anything else as a means to reach the Absolute,
for ultimate truth can only be approached by rejecting all
images, both mental and material. (2013, 485)

Zurcher goes on to note, however, that this iconoclastic stance is bal-

anced by “the equally important Mahāyāna concept of ‘expedience’ or
‘adaptation.’ . . . Since the ultimate Truth as such is inaccessible, we
need concepts, words and images to approximate it” (2013, 502). This
is certainly correct, but more needs to be said.
As so many observers of Buddhist tradition have noted, the Western
conception of “religion” and its emphasis on doctrinal systems can skew
our understanding of Buddhist practice. Specifically, we are too ready to
apply the familiar concepts of credo and orthodoxy to Buddhist teach-
ings, as if what Buddhists call the Dharma is above all a set of empirical
and metaphysical propositions to which all followers must assent. But the
Buddha’s teachings are in fact “a set of practical and experiential tech-
niques rather than a body of discursive knowledge” (Samuel 2008, 139).
Thus, even the teaching of emptiness is an invitation to an experience
144 Seeing Like the Buddha

that is enabled by words, analogies, parables—and ultimately, images.

Words and images are not mere approximations of a reality beyond this
one but rather what activates our imaginations, and their resulting experi-
ences. Seeing the Buddha and the qualities he embodies—regardless of
the medium or material—is thought to engage our minds in the wholly
auspicious manner required to become a Buddha oneself. This medita-
tion is its own end rather than the means to a destination beyond the
present world. The way art allows one to perceive the world—in contrast
to the distracted operations of the everyday mind—brings Buddhas to
life everywhere. And this manner of seeing the Buddha is in fact to see
what the Buddha himself saw.
 Notes

Chapter 1. Seeing Like the Buddha

 1. The thirty‑two marks are not exclusive properties of the historical

Buddha but thought to be characteristics of the Great Man, which can also
include cakravartins (“wheel turning monarchs”) who rule according to Buddhist
teachings. The thirty‑two marks are listed in the Lakkhana Sutta (“discourse on
the marks”) of the Digha Nikāya (D 30) and the Brahmāyu Sutta of the Majjhima
Nikāya (M 91). Some of these attributes include golden skin, blue eyes, a long
tongue, and a penis concealed in a sheath.
 2. And to be clear, not all individuals who accepted the idea of
Buddha‑nature thought the concept extended to inanimate objects. The Bud‑
dha‑nature of the insentient (wuqing foxing 無情佛性) was the subject of great
controversy in early Chinese Buddhism, but it was supported by Huiyuan
(334–416) of the Pure Land tradition, Jizang (549–623) of the Chinese Mad‑
hyamaka school, and Zhanran (711–782) of the Tiantai lineage. See Koseki
(1980) for a discussion of Jizang, and Sharf (2002, 246–49) for a discussion
of an eighth‑century Chan text, the Treasure Store Treatise, which affirms the
Buddha‑nature of grass and trees.
  3. Tathāgathagarbha doctrine is not the property of a single Mahāyāna
school, but an idea that is found in various texts. Important early sources include
the Tathāgatagārbha Sūtra, the Śrīmālādevīsim . hanāda Sūtra, the Anūnatvā­-
pūrn.atvanirdeśa Sūtra, and the Mahāparinirvān.a Sūtra, all of which were com‑
posed in India between 200 and 350 CE. This early tathāgathagarbha tradi‑
tion is summarized in the Ratnagotravibhāga (also known in Tibetan as the
Uttaratantraśāstra), an early‑fifth‑century Sanskrit text now preserved through
Tibetan and Chinese translations.
  4.  The idea of “Buddhist aniconism” refers to the fact that images of the
Buddha are notably absent until the first century CE. Scholars have debated why
this is the case, and whether or not Buddhists deliberately avoided representing
the Buddha in the early centuries (Huntington 1990). Explicit iconoclasm is
voiced in East Asian Chan/Zen Buddhism, as a part of its antinomian attitude

145
146 Notes to Chapter 1

toward all religious forms, including rituals and scriptures in addition to images.
The Zen emphasis on emptiness doctrine leads to denunciations of all religious
forms as unnecessary. See Sharf (2002, 44–46, 252–53) on the Ox Head lin‑
eage, and Adamek (2007, 218–26) on the Bao Tang, both southern schools of
Chinese Zen.
 5. See Pamela Winfield’s (2013) comparison of Kūkai (774–835), the
image‑loving founder of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, and Dōgen, the iconoclas‑
tic founder of Japanese Sōtō Zen. Even Dōgen, however, tacks back and forth
between rejecting and utilizing images.
  6.  Reverend Jump’s essay was originally published for private distribution
to his New Britian, Connecticut, congregation in 1910. It is reprinted in Film
History 14, no.2 (2002).
  7.  See Freedberg (1989), ch. 8, “Invisibilia per Visibilia: Meditation and
the Uses of Theory,” for an account of medieval theological justifications of reli‑
gious images as moving texts for the illiterate. The justifications are consistent
with Reverend Jump’s recommendations of motion pictures. See also Reinhartz
(2004) for a consideration of the Jesus film genre, including Gibson’s film, as a
continuation of traditional Christian art.
  8.  Fredriksen’s essay “History, Hollywood, and the Bible: Some Thoughts
on Gibson’s Passion” first appeared in the Society of Biblical Literature’s SBL
Forum (March 2004) and was reprinted in The Journal of Religion and Film (Feb.
2004, vol. 8:1). This volume of the journal is entirely dedicated to Gibson’s film.
  9. Vairocana Buddha is thought to have made his first literary appear‑
ance in the Brahmajāla (Brahma Net) Sūtra, a purportedly Mahāyāna Sanskrit
text translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva in 406 but actually composed in
China in the mid‑fifth‑century. Vairocana, which means “he who comes from
the sun,” is described as the Primordial Buddha from whom all other Buddhas
emanate, and as the embodiment of emptiness. Vairocana is a significant fig‑
ure in Chinese Huayan and Tiantai Buddhism, Japanese Shingon, and Tibetan
tantric Buddhism.
10.  Unsurprisingly, dharmakāya is another synonym for tathāgathagarbha.
See the Śrīmālādevīsim . hanāda Sūtra, which states, “This Dharmakāya of the
Tathāgatha when not free from the store of defilement is referred to as the
Tathāgathagarbha” (Wayman and Wayman 1976, 98). The dharmakāya and
tathāgathagarbha are the same things distinguished by undefiled and defiled
states.
11. This story appears in the Ekottarāgama, the Sanskrit version of the
.
Anguttara Nikāya that was translated into Chinese in the late fourth century.
See Zurcher (2013, 485–86) for an account of the tale. It is also recounted by
the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang (602–664) in his famous account of
his travels to India called Xiyouji (“journey to the West”). See Beal 1980 for the
translation. The story appears in vol. 2, 254–56.
 Notes to Chapter 1 147

12. This is a slightly modified version of Beal’s translation. The Guanfo

sanmei haijing 觀佛三昧海經 (“the scripture of the sea of samādhi of visualizing
the Buddha”), which was translated into Chinese by Buddhabhadra in Chang’an
sometime between 408 and 429 CE, also contains a version of the sandalwood
image story in which the image walks and talks to the Buddha.
13.  Naturally, there are numerous Chinese legends about how the Uday‑
ana image was brought to that country. See Sharf (1996) for accounts of three
of them.
14.  See Cameron Warner (2011) on the controversy regarding the Jowo
Buddha, whose appearance was altered when the founder of the Geluk school
Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) added a crown. The controversy that ensued focused
nominally on the Buddha’s appearance—did Śākyamuni ever actually wear a
crown?—but the underlying concern was that the crown, which covered the
Buddha’s cranial protuberance and its protective rays of light, could potentially
diminish the image’s ritual power.
15. See Schopen (1988–89), Schober (1997), and Swearer (2004) for
discussions of the cult of images in India, Burma, and Thailand, respectively.
16. Mahāyāna Buddhists articulated a three‑body (trikāya) theory that
redefined the rūpakāya as the nirmān.akāya, or “manifestation/emanation body”
that can take many historical forms other than the Buddha. It also postulated
the sam . bhogakāya (“enjoyment body”) as a third body that contains the Buddha’s
immeasurable merit and the supernatural abilities associated with it. This body is
the reward for incalculable periods of bodhisattva practice. See Griffiths (1994)
for discussion of the trikāya theory as articulated in third- to ninth‑century
Indian Mahāyāna śāstra literature, which Griffiths defines as “doctrinal digests”
that attempt to “give systematic and authoritative expression to Buddhist doc‑
trine” (1994, 30). See also Xing (2005) for discussion of the Mahāyāna sūtra
literature that gave rise to the trikāya theory.
17.  We can see a similar kind of classification system in Theravāda Bud‑
dhism with its distinction between three different kinds of relics: corporeal rel‑
ics, relics of use (the Bodhi tree), and relics of commemoration (images). These
categories are not the same as the Tibetan classification of emanation bodies
but they display a similar impulse to recognize the many and different ways
in which the Buddha is present in the world. See Trainor (1997, 89) on the
Theravāda classifications.
18.  This idea of the dharmakāya as the qualities of the Buddha was first
developed by the Sarvāstivāda school in the second century, which listed eighteen
attributes of the Buddha culled from early sutras. They are the ten powers, the
four kinds of intrepidity, the three foundations of mindfulness, and the great
compassion. These qualities are sometimes structured into the three divisions of
śīla (morality), samādhi (concentration), and prajñā (wisdom). In the third and
fourth centuries, the Mahāyāna came up with its own entirely different list of
148 Notes to Chapter 1

eighteen attributes that can be found in the Perfection of Wisdom literature. See
Xing (2005) for discussions of Sarvāstivāda and Mahāyāna dharmakāya theories.
19. The Mahāpadāna Sutta of the Digha Nikāya (D 14) recounts how
the Buddha revealed to his followers his knowledge of the lineage of cosmic
Buddhas, of which he is the seventh. The Buddha has this knowledge by virtue
of the divine eye that also gives him knowledge of his many previous lives. See
Reynolds (1997) and Woodward (1997) for discussions of how this tradition of
enumerating past and future Buddhas evolved into ever‑longer lineages.
20. The Daśabhūmika Sūtra originated as an individual early Mahāyāna
text but was incorporated as the twenty‑sixth chapter of the Avatam . saka Sūtra
(which is an amalgamation of independent scriptures) in the late third to fourth
centuries in Central Asia.
21. This metaphor appears in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa I.16. The
image of molten gold that can be shaped into many forms is used in the early
Chan text Treasure Store Treatise to talk about images of the Buddha (Sharf
2002, 253).
22. Gomez (1977) describes how this idea developed within the myth‑
ico‑magical framework of ancient India, where people believed ascetics developed
magical powers (r.ddhi), including vikurvana—the ability to transform or mul‑
tiply one’s own body. This common folk belief was appropriated by Buddhists
to thread a middle course between nihilism and ontological fundamentalism by
rendering illusions into signs of emptiness that are powerful in awakening beings
to their reality. Griffiths (1994) details the development of these Buddha bod‑
ies in their technical distinctions as “manifestation” (nirmān.a) and “communal
enjoyment” (sambhoga) bodies.
23.  The cremation and veneration of bodily relics is a practice indigenous
to the northeastern region of Magadha where Buddhism originated, which is
geographically distinct from the brahmanical stronghold in the northwestern
Indus River valley. Another explanation of the Buddha’s cremation, along with
the other rites performed during his funeral, may be that he was treated like a
king according to Hellenistic and Near Eastern practice (Strong 2007). There
is evidence that the remains of Alexander the Great and King Menander were
preserved and worshipped as greatly auspicious. The ambivalent nature of relic
worship is also an issue in contemporary Thailand, which has experienced
brahmanical influence. The display and veneration of mummified corpses is
extremely popular even though dead bodies are generally considered to be inaus‑
picious. These corpses include not only that of Buddhist monks but infants and
fetuses, the veneration of which seems to go back to native practices (McDaniel
2011, 173).
24.  Campany (1991) examines Chinese Buddhist miracle tales about the
Lotus Sutra, which was revered as a holy object and believed to have the ability
to move and act, much like King Udayana’s sandalwood image. This cultural
 Notes to Chapter 1 149

evidence confirms that Buddhist texts stood in for the person of the Buddha in
the same manner as his physical relics and images.
25.  The Sutra on the Merit of Bathing the Buddha is the Chinese monk
Yijing’s (635–713) translation of a Sanskrit text that is no longer extant. Daniel
Boucher speculates that it is perhaps an amalgamation of two other texts avail‑
able in eighth‑century translations—one on stūpa worship and one on image
worship (1995, 59). Regardless of the provenance of the text, it demonstrates
how Buddhists harmonized competing practices by looking for their soteriologi‑
cal and philosophical underpinnings.
26. One can add living human beings other than the historical Bud‑
dha to this list. The tulku tradition of Tibetan Buddhism recognizes lineages
of incarnate lamas who are understood to be living Buddhas. This practice
is specifically sanctioned in terms of the idea of the manifestation bodies, or
nirmān.akāyas. See Bogin (2013) for a discussion of Buddha‑body theory in
relation to the tulku tradition.
27. Eckel (1992, 101) traces the various meanings of the Dharma as
(1) the collection of teachings, (2) the path to enlightenment, (3) the goal of
enlightenment, and (4) nondual awareness. The last concept of Dharma collapses
the means‑end linearity of the second and third definitions, in that nondual
awareness is a mental state that comprises both path and goal. Eckel traces this
idea to the Perfection of Wisdom literature, as well as the Yogācāra works of
Vasubandhu and Dignāga.
28.  This is an unpublished translation of Qiu Wei’s poem by Paula Ver‑
sano.
29. The recent publication, Buddhism Goes to the Movies, by Ronald
Green (2013), uses American films such as Fight Club, Waking Life, and I Heart
Huckabees to talk about Buddhist teachings such as the Four Noble Truths and
Dependent Origination, for example. Buddhism and American Cinema, edited
by John Whalen‑Bridge and Gary Storhoff (2014), also utilizes the practice of
looking at American films (such as Lost in Translation and American Beauty)
through Buddhist concepts. The Hollywood Zombie genre has also been the
focus of Buddhist readings (Moreman 2008, 2010; Walker 2012; Herman 2014).
30. The base of Borobudur with the Karmavibhanga images is actually
hidden by an encasement that was added in the middle of the construction
process, around 792. This has created scholarly debate as to whether the reason
was structural or ideological. The argument for the latter is that given the overtly
Mahāyāna worldview of Borobudur, the Karmavibhanga’s images of tortures and
punishments in hells for evil deeds were perhaps deemed incompatible with the
Mahāyāna message of universal salvation. Thus, the images were covered up
by a later architect/priest who took charge of construction. I follow Gifford in
favoring the structural interpretation, thereby rendering the visual program of
Borobudur into a deliberate and integrated process that moves from what are
150 Notes to Chapter 2

considered lesser visions to more enlightened ones. In either case, however, the
idea of multiple visions of Buddhahood remains.
31.  There have been debates as to whether Borobudur is a stūpa, a sto‑
ried palace (prasada) that represents the bodhisattva path to enlightenment,
or a man.d.ala (Gifford 2011, 21–47). None of these suggestions are mutually
exclusive. In any case, the nested circles‑within‑squares configuration echoes the
“palace‑architecture” man.d.ala common to Tibet and Nepal, which features a
principal deity in the center ringed by multileveled square palaces with openings
in the four cardinal directions.
32. Samuel (2008, 225) confirms this basic feature of the man.d.ala as
comprising a center “with non‑central components [that] are treated as emana‑
tions of that centre and reducible to it.” He suggests that the man.d.ala reflects the
political model of “a supreme king at the centre in relation to whom lesser kings
are expected to be local projections rather than independent rulers” (226–27).
This model was appealing to Chinese and Tibetan kings from the sixth century
on, who favored man.d.alas with the figure of Vairocana Buddha at the center
adorned with imperial imagery.

Chapter 2. The Karmic Narrative of

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring

 1. There are 547 jātakas in the Jātakatthavannana of the Pāli canon

(found in the Khuddaka Nikāya). Aryaśura’s Jātakamālā (“garland of birth sto‑
ries”) is a fourth‑century collection of thirty‑four tales in Sanskrit that has been
particularly popular in India and Tibet. For an account of the jātakas and their
variant collections, see Reynolds (1997).
 2. The Apadāna is a collection of some six hundred verse‑biographies of
monks and nuns written during the last two centuries BCE. They elaborate upon
earlier oral poems about Buddhist monks and nuns known as the Theragāthā
and Therīgāthā, respectively. All three works form parts of the Khuddaka Nikāya,
along with the Jātakatthavannana. Indian avadāna tales were written well into
the thirteenth century CE, drawing from the apadānas, jātakas, and folklore. See
Sarkar (1981) for a study of the history and nature of the jātaka and avadāna
genres, as well as their relation to each other.
  3.  Early Western scholars of Buddhism have in fact considered the exten‑
sive biographical narratives that are also the subjects of art and popular piety
as inferior and watered‑down renditions of Buddhist philosophy, as Woodward
recounts (1997, 41).
 4. The Vimānavatthu (“stories of mansions”) and Petavatthu (“stories of
the departed”), also contained in the Khuddaka Nikāya, are perhaps the most
explicit in accounting for the types of deeds that land people in Buddhist heavens
 Notes to Chapter 2 151

or the hellish realms of hungry ghosts, respectively. In contrast, the Apadāna

accounts for those who have attained Buddhist liberation.
  5.  See my article, “Religion, Science, and the Truth about Karma” (Cho
2014) for a discussion of the moral function of karma doctrine in traditional
Buddhist societies in Asia. I explicitly reject the idea that it has functioned as a
form of Buddhist theodicy, and I also reject the relevance of empirical verifica‑
tions of karma doctrine (such as rebirth in heavens and hells), seeing it instead
as a way of actively shaping moral experience.
 6. The practice of self‑cremation is attested in China as early as the
fourth century. It was part of an array of “abandoning the body” practices to
honor the Buddha or enact bodhisattva compassion—such as sacrificing one’s
own body to feed hungry beasts. Self‑cremation seems to be a Chinese innovation
that had no precedents in Indian Buddhism, although the Lotus Sutra’s story of
the Bodhisattva Medicine King who immolates himself serves as the blueprint
for the Chinese practice. Although suicide is technically forbidden in Buddhism,
self‑cremation has been valorized in East Asian Buddhism as a sign of Buddha‑
hood. For an in‑depth study of this history, see Benn (2007).
  7.  For the cult of images in India, see Kinnard (1999), especially chapter
3; for its development in China, see Kieschnick (2003), particularly chapter 1.
Swearer (2004) provides an ethnographic account of image consecration rituals
and practices in Thailand. Miracle tales regarding Buddha images can be found
in the Korean Samguk Yusa (“legends of the three kingdoms”), which is partially
translated in Grayson (2001).
 8. Donald Lopez (1992, 147) reports that Har Dayal has calculated
these three aeons to be equivalent to 384 X 10 [58] years. The source for this
information is not cited.
 9. The three poisons at the center of the Wheel of Life (bhavacakra)
are represented by a bird, snake, and pig. The bird, which is frequently glossed
as a cock in Western Buddhist literature, stands for lust or positive attachment
because of its tendency to mate for life. The snake represents anger, hatred, or
negative attachment generally. The pig is ignorance, which is thought to be the
cause of both lust and aversion.
10.  See Buswell and Gimello (1992) for an overview of evolutions in Bud‑
dhist conceptions of the path (mārga), which range from highly structured and
enumerated charts of religious progress—such as the ten stages of the bodhisat‑
tva path—to anti‑mārga traditions that draw on emptiness doctrine to radically
revise the discourse on nirvana. According to Buswell and Gimello, even the
most antinomian strains of Buddhism never reject the idea of path and prog‑
ress, but they reimagine nirvana as a “non‑abiding” that never settles anywhere
and allows one “to embark on a continuing transformation, to participate in
unfettered change and in unbounded interrelation with all things and beings”
(1992, 22). See Groner (1992) and Bielefeldt (1992) for discussions of East Asian
152 Notes to Chapter 3

Buddhist notions of innate Buddhahood that radicalize notions of the Buddhist

path, particularly in Japan.
11. For example, the Sutra on the Merit of Bathing the Buddha states
that the consequence of bathing the Buddha image “is that you and the great
multitude of men and gods will presently receive wealth, happiness, and long
life without sickness; your every wish will be fulfilled. Your relatives, friends, and
family will all be at ease. You will bid a long farewell to the eight conditions of
trouble and forever escape the fount of suffering. You will never again receive
the body of a woman, and will quickly achieve enlightenment” (Boucher 1995,
67).
12.  See my study of the seventeenth‑century Korean novel Dream of the
Nine Clouds, and the broader consideration of the dream narrative genre with
its Buddhist themes (Cho Bantly 1996).
13. The Chinese title of the film is also different from the translation:
“three times” stands in for the original “zuihao de shiguang” (最好的時光),
which is more accurately translated as “the best of times.”

Chapter 3. The Meditative Discernment of Nang Nak

 1. Chinese zhiguai first flourished during the Six Dynasties (220–589)

and continued through the Tang (618–906). Zhiguai is not an exclusively Bud‑
dhist genre but rather folktales of anomalies that reflect Buddhist, Daoist, and
shamanic influences. Some zhiguai collections, however, were compiled by Bud‑
dhists for didactic purposes, such as the Mingxiangji (“manifesting the dead”),
Huanyuanji (“requiting grievances”), and Yuminglu (“the dead and the living”).
See Campany (2012) for a translation of Mingxiangji and Campany (2015) for
translations from numerous zhiguai sources. Japanese setsuwa collections were
compiled during the Heian (794–1185) and Kamakura (1185–1333) periods,
the first being the 116 tales of the Nihon ryōiki of the early eighth century.
Japanese setsuwa tend to be more explicitly Buddhist because they were col‑
lected by monks as source material for sermons. See Nakamura (1997) for a
critical discussion and translation of the Nihon ryōiki, and Reider (2001, 2002)
for discussions of early modern Japanese setsuwa.
  2.  The Nō drama and otogizoshi both date to the Muromachi (1336–
1573) period, but whereas Nō was an aristocratic art form, the picture perfor‑
mances of otogizoshi tales were directed toward a broader spectrum of audiences
in commercial centers such as Kyoto and Nara. What is particularly interesting
about the picture performances is the active role that Buddhist monks and
nuns reputedly played in producing the picture books and forming the class of
professional storytellers (Ruch 1977; Araki 1981). See also Mair (1989) for a
discussion of the Buddhist origins of the Chinese tradition of picture perfor‑
 Notes to Chapter 3 153

mances based on bianwen, or “transformations texts,” which can be linked to

later vernacular fiction.
  3.  This part of the film is based on the tale “Jasei no in,” or “A Serpent’s
Lust,” in Ueda’s Ugetsu Monogatari.
  4.  This part of the film is based on “Asaji ga yado,” or “The Reed‑Choked
House,” in Ueda’s Ugetsu Monogatari.
 5. Tambiah (1968) and Veidlinger (2006) note the dominance of oral
literature in Thailand even into the early modern era. This is true of the man‑
ner in which Buddhist teachings were transmitted even after the textualization
of the Pāli canon into manuscripts in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. In
this context, it is not surprising that folk tales such as Nang Nak seem to lack
textual origins.
 6. The Nang Tantrai cannot be dated because the surviving manuscripts
date back only to the nineteenth century. But it is clearly related to the south
Indian reworking of the Pancatantra known as the Tantropakhyana, and both
its Sanskrit and Tamil versions are attested before the year 1200. See Ginsberg
(1967) for a full review of existing manuscripts. The Nang Tantrai was reprinted
in 1869 under the direction of Prince Badintharaphaisansophon, during the
reign of King Chulalongkorn, and Buddhist monks were involved as copyists.
 7. The Trai Phum Phra Ruang (Trai Phum) was written around 1345 by
Phya Lithai, heir to the Sukhothai throne in central Thailand. This act of Bud‑
dhist piety, which enhanced Phya Lithai’s political charisma, was undertaken in
close consultation with Buddhist advisors and Pāli Buddhist sources. Therefore,
the content of Trai Phum faithfully echos orthodox Theravāda Buddhism but
also communicates “the profundities of the doctrine to those who possessed only
a minimum of religious sophistication and training” (Reynolds and Reynolds
1982, 7). The focus of the text is a description of the thirty‑one realms of the
three‑world cosmology that is standard in Buddhism. This includes descriptions
of the six realms of rebirth that are a part of the kāmaloka, or the world of
desire. Given the authority of the author, its claim to orthodoxy, and its acces‑
sibility, the Trai Phum has been a significant influence on the Thai Buddhist
imagination up to the modern period. See Reynolds and Reynolds (1982) for
an introductory discussion and translation.
 8. It is useful to keep in mind that the Buddhist doctrine of karma
functions as an explicit challenge to brahmanical conceptions of personhood,
which justified the social hierarchy by asserting absolute, species‑type differ‑
ences between castes (Bronkhorst 2011b, 50). In contrast, the Buddhist view is
that “one’s status in society is not a function of one’s inherent nature, but of
the quality and direction of one’s values, intentions and actions—one’s karma”
(Hershock 2007, 181). Opposition to the brahmanical notion of an inherent
nature leads to the Buddhist emphasis on mind and attributes of consciousness
as the determining factors of existence.
154 Notes to Chapter 4

 9. Hayashi’s (2003) ethnographic study of Thai village Buddhism

describes how the figure of the wandering ascetic monk, in particular, simulta‑
neously promotes meditation and Buddhist discipline as forces for taming native
spirits: “The mechanism for driving out evil spirits . . . is to convert them to
Buddhism, to bring them into the Buddhist world and thereby render the power
of the world beyond impotent” (242).
10. As Pāli text scholars have noted, Buddhist cosmology is described
in terms of both physical places and mental/meditative states (Hamilton 1999;
Gethin 1997). The form and formless worlds of the three‑world schema are
explicitly correlated to levels of meditative states (dhyānas), for example. The
physical and mental readings of cosmology are not treated as mutually exclu‑
sive options. Rather, they correspond to each other. The Trai Phum begins its
discussion of hells by accounting for both the physical and mental factors that
lead to rebirth there.

Chapter 4. Rashomon and the

Indiscernible Emptiness of Being

 1. Kobayashi (1979) and Kelsey (1982) draw on post–World War II

Japanese Konjaku scholarship to refute the long‑standing belief that the collection
was put together by the aristocrat Minamoto Takakuni (1004–77). The current
theory that the compiler was instead a Buddhist monk is ultimately specula‑
tive and the exact identity is unlikely to be determined, short of new evidence
coming to light. Manuscript evidence, however, suggests the likelihood of one
Kakuju (1084–1140), a monk of the Tōdaiji temple in Nara. An alternative
theory poses the possibility of a Tendai monk in residence at Mt. Hiei, the
Tendai headquarters. See Kelsey (1982, 13–16) for discussion of the evidence
of these two possibilities.
  2.  While setsuwa often recount encounters with native spirits and ghosts,
as examined in the last chapter, they also include tales of miracles performed by
the Bodhisattva Guanyin and travels to Buddhist hells. Both Chinese zhiguai and
Japanese setsuwa originate in popular oral narratives and should not be confused
with religious scriptures. Nevertheless, they have indelibly colored the Buddhist
religiosity of these societies: “The genre’s liminal position—betwixt and between
ideological persuasions and religious traditions, dealing with the spirit world but
from the point of view of ordinary life and in texts deemed non‑canonical—is
one of the main reasons for its importance for understanding early medieval
Chinese religious and cultural history” (Campany 1996, 27).
  3.  See Nakamura (1997) for a translation of the Nihon ryōiki, the earliest
of these setsuwa collections that was compiled by the Buddhist monk Kyōkai
 Notes to Chapter 4 155

from 810–823. Appendix E of this book provides a list of all thirty Japanese
setsuwa collections, including dates and authors, if known.
 4. Kelsey (1981) focuses on the “Buddhification” of native Japanese
snake myths in which the thunder deity takes the form of a snake in order
to cause trouble for humans. In the Nihon ryōiki and Konjaku monogatarishū,
these snakes convert to Buddhism and defend it against other native spirits. In
the Buddhist reinterpretation of these menacing snakes, they are beings in an
unfortunate form of rebirth due to attachment to worldly desires: “Now violence
is no longer seen as something impersonal, arising from somewhere outside of
the individual, but rather as something arising from within” (Kelsey 1981, 111).
This is parallel to the Buddhist treatment of ghosts in Nang Nak.
 5. The Konjaku monotagarishū comprises thirty‑one books. The first five
focus on Indian Buddhism, particularly the life of the Buddha, his teachings,
his followers, and tales of karma in the jātaka style. The next five focus on the
spread of Buddhism to China. These first ten volumes import many stories from
collections of Chinese Buddhist tales, such as Fayuan zhulin (“forest of gems
from the Dharma garden”), compiled in 668, Mingbaoji (“record of karmic
retribution”), ca. 659, and Jingliu yixiang (“aspects of Buddhist doctrine”), ca.
516. Books 11–20 are Japanese Buddhist tales, and Books 21–31 contain the
so‑called secular tales, which begin with histories of the imperial, aristocratic,
and warrior families. “Rashōmon” and “In a Grove” appear in Book 29, as the
eighteenth and twenty‑third stories, respectively. For English translations of these
and other Konjaku setsuwa, see Dykstra (1998–2003).
  6.  The Korean text known as Samguk yusa (“legends of the three king‑
doms”), a thirteenth‑century anthology compiled by Iryon, is another example of
literature preserved by a Buddhist monk. It begins with founding legends of the
three ancient kingdoms of Korea and moves on to tales about the transmission
of Buddhism to Korea, as well as miraculous stories about Buddhist images and
monks. This act of preservation has earned Iryon the title of Korea’s first folklorist
(Grayson 2001, 14). See Grayson (2001) for a partial translation of the work.
 7. “Nose” and “Hellscreen” are adaptations of setsuwa from the thir‑
teenth‑century collection Uji shūi monogatari (“collection of tales from Uji”).
See Mills 1970 for a study and translation.
  8.  The Pāli texts of Theravāda Buddhism are not the dominant sources
of East Asian Buddhism, which favor Mahāyāna texts. But the Nikāyas were
translated into Chinese and I draw upon them to illuminate the imagery of
a Japanese film. This does not entail the claim that the compiler of the Kon-
jaku, or Akutagawa, or Kurosawa were schooled in Pāli texts and intended to
invoke them.
.
 9. This metaphor appears in the Dhammasangan.i of the Theravada
Abhidharma corpus. It is also elaborated by Buddhaghosa in his At.t.haśālinī
156 Notes to Chapter 5

(252–53). See Gethin (1997) for a translation. See also Fuller (2005, 79–81)
for a discussion.
10. Fuller (2005) provides a comprehensive survey of the “right‑views”
enumerated in the Nikāyas and concludes that they can be subsumed under two
general categories: the view that actions have consequences, and the teaching of
the insubstantiality of the self. Because Buddhism assumes the close relation‑
ship between thought and action, Buddhist right‑view is something “practiced,
not adopted or believed in” (2005, 126). Wrong views are those that deny that
actions have consequences and make either eternalist or nihilist pronouncements
about the self. Demonstrating the same thought‑action nexus, Buddhist sources
affirm repeatedly that the problem with such wrong‑views is that they are forms
of greed and attachment.

Chapter 5. The Depth of Shadows in Maborosi

 1. The English transliteration of the movie’s title, Maborosi, omits the

“h” in “shi.” When I use the phrase “maboroshi no hikari” I reinsert the “h”
that the proper transliteration of the Japanese word requires.
 2. The practice of Fudaraku tokai, or “passage to Fudaraku,” is similar
to the Pure Land practice of self‑immolation by drowning for the purpose of
reaching the Western Pure Land of Amida Buddha. Fudaraku tokai is attested in
a variety of literary sources from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Eyewit‑
ness accounts by Jesuits in the sixteenth century describe how Buddhist devotees
set sail from the Western coast in small boats and then jumped into the water
after tying themselves down with rocks. Moerman (2007) provides an account
of Fudaraku tokai based on literary and visual sources.
 3. Kamo no Chōmei (d. 1216), author of Hōjōki (“record of the
ten‑foot‑square hut”), writes in his Hossinshū (“tales of religious awakening”),
“Because of a desire for reputation, or out of pride or envy, people may foolishly
think that they can attain birth in the Pure Land by drowning or by making a
lamp of their body. . . . This is absolute delusion” (quoted in Moerman 2007,
274). Chōmei’s admonition attests to devotees who lacked the mental discipline
to self‑immolate in the required state of calm.
 4. The Daodejing (“the classic on the way and virtue”) is attributed to
the ambiguous historical figure Laozi, who tradition has composing this text in
the sixth century BCE. The oldest manuscripts date to the fourth century BCE,
however, and the question of authorship is far from settled. The Zhuangzi has
a firmer author in the philosopher Zhuang Zhou of the fourth century BCE,
and along with the Daodejing form the two fundamental texts of philosophical
Daoism that was influential throughout East Asia.
 5. Yūgen is originally yuxuan in Chinese, and the term was used to
describe the profundity of the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, particularly their concep‑
 Notes to Chapter 5 157

tions of the Dao. Starting from the third century, yuxuan was used to explain
the emptiness doctrine taught by the Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) and
Mādhyamika (Middle Way) schools. Further on, the term was applied to the
Chan/Zen concept of wu 無 (Japanese: mu)—literally, “absence,” which is often
translated as “non‑Being” and derives from the emptiness concept. See Konishi
(1991, 186) for further discussion.
  6.  Fujiwara Shunzei was a poet and critic who is credited with invigo‑
rating the traditional Japanese short poem called waka. Although a low‑ranking
court official, Shunzei hailed from a distinguished literary family that includes his
son Fujiwara Teika and granddaughter Fujiwara Toshinari no Musume. Shunzei
took Buddhist vows at the age of sixty‑three and composed his major critical
work, Korai fūteishō, thereafter, in 1197.
  7.  Tendai Buddhism was originally Tiantai Buddhism in China, founded
by Tiantai Zhiyi (538–597) and brought to Japan by Saichō (also known as
Dengyō Daishi, 767–822), who established the Enryakuji temple on Mt. Hiei
near Kyoto as a center for Tendai study and practice. Tendai Buddhism domi‑
nated Japan during the Heian and Kamakura periods, and exerted strong influ‑
ence on the later school of Zen. Tendai’s emphasis on the Lotus Sutra and the
doctrine of original enlightenment (hongaku), which does not distinguish abso‑
lutely between nirvana and samsara, was utilized by Shunzei and others to justify
the “worldly” realm of poetry and the arts as no different from Buddhist practice.
  8.  Kamo no Chōmei is best known for his literary essay, Hōjōki (“record
of a ten‑foot square hut”), which was written along with the Mumyōshō during
his years as a Buddhist recluse after he retired from the imperial poetry office
around 1204. The Hōjōki centers on the Buddhist theme of impermanence, with
its descriptions of the natural disasters that befell the people of Kyotō. Hōjōki’s
account of the comparatively peaceful life in a simple hut outside of the capitol
has rendered this work a classic in the genre of “recluse literature.”
  9.  Konishi (1991, 520–26) notes that of the roughly two hundred plays
in the current Nō repertoire, only one (“Sanshō”) is humorous, and it is highly
unpopular. The comic spirit of sarugaku has been corralled into the performance
genre known as Kyōgen, which is now staged as an interlude between Nō per‑
formances. The impact of shushi on the development of Nō is visible not only in
the latter’s solemnity but also in plots that involve priests, dreams, and rebirth.
10.  Shunzei utilizes the discussion of shikan (Chinese: zhiguan) offered by
Zhiyi, the founder of Tiantai Buddhism. The shi (止) of shikan is the Sanskrit
term śamatha, which is the meditative practice of calming the mind. The kan
(觀) is vipaśyanā, or insight meditation. See LaFleur (1983, 90) for a translation
of Shunzei’s discussion from the Korai fūteishō.
11.  The Jetavana Monastery, located in Sāvatthi, was built for the Bud‑
dha by the wealthy layman Suddata Anāthapindika. The Buddha is said to have
spent nineteen rainy seasons at Jetavana, and gave many of his teachings there.
Zeami states in his treatise Fūshikaden (“teachings on style and the flower”) that
158 Notes to Chapter 7

during the dedication ceremony the Buddha’s evil cousin Devadatta caused a
disruption by having unbelievers cry and dance wildly. The Buddha thereupon
had three of his chief disciples—Ānanda, Śāriputra, and Pūrna—perform sixty‑six
entertainments to calm the interlopers and allow the Buddha to continue with
the dedication (Zeami 1984, 32).
12.  Bo Zhuyi (772–846) was a Chinese official who passed the prestigious
jinshi exam at the precocious age of twenty‑nine, which entitled him to a series
of high positions in the Tang dynasty court. Along with Du Fu (712–770) and
Li Bai (701–762), Bo Zhuyi is considered one of the greatest poets during the
golden age of Chinese poetry. Bo never entered the Buddhist order, but engaged
in serious study and discussion of Buddhism, particularly beginning in the period
of his political exile in 815. He spent considerable time in the Zen temples of
Mount Lu, and built a small retreat on the mountain to which he returned
between subsequent official appointments.

Chapter 6. The Visual Cinema of Terrence Malick

  1.  “Auteur theory” is a phrase associated with film criticism advanced in

the 1950s by the so‑called French New Wave filmmakers, particularly François
Truffaut, and the periodical Cahiers du Cinéma. The basic idea of auteur
(“author”) theory is that the director is the author and creative force behind a
film, which reflects his or her personal vision.
  2.  At the time of writing, however, Malick has had two films in post‑pro‑
duction: Voyage of Time, a documentary, and Knight of Cups, a feature film.
Both were slated to be released in 2014, but The Hollywood Reporter (February
25, 2014) reports that Malick’s production company, Sycamore Pictures, was in
the process of settling a lawsuit filed by investors in Voyage of Time for Malick’s
failure to have completed the film.
 3. Malick is famously private, refusing most interviews and skipping
the red carpet for his own film premiers. As a result, insights into his artistic
process and ambitions come primarily from his actors and crew, such as his
cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.

Chapter 7. Descent into the World

  1.  In the Pāli Nikāyas, the full recitation of the Buddha’s qualities is: “The
Blessed One is accomplished, fully enlightened, perfect in true knowledge and
conduct, sublime, knower of worlds, incomparable leader of persons to be tamed,
teachers of gods and humans, enlightened, blessed” (M I. 37). In the seventh
chapter of Buddhaghos.a’s Visuddhimagga, the fifth‑century text that systemati‑
 Notes to Chapter 7 159

cally condenses Theravāda teachings, these epithets of the Buddha are grouped
as one of six recollections that form the subject of concentration meditation.
 2. The Pure Land sūtras are the Longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra and the
Shorter Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra, which originated in India, and the Amitāyurdhyāna
Sūtra, which was composed in Central Asia or China. The Perfection of Wisdom
(Prajñāpāramitā) texts include most famously the Heart Sūtra and Diamond
Sūtra, but also include The Perfection of Wisdom in 8000 Lines and The Perfection
of Wisdom in 25,000 Lines.
 3. This deity yoga is visualized in man.d.ala practice, which is one of
the more conspicuous elements of Buddhist Tantra. One of the most elaborate
man.d.alas is the Kālacakra, with 722 deities, but the earliest man.d.ala form (dat‑
ing to the early fifth century) features the four Buddhas of the four directions:
Aks.obhya in the East, Ratnaketu in the South, Amitāyus in the West, and
Dundubhiśvara in the North. Geoffrey Samuel notes that as meditation practices,
“these can be seen as a logical extensions of the meditative procedure involving
the summoning of the presence of the Buddha [buddhānusmr.ti]” (2008, 226).
 4. Stevenson is speaking here of the meditative practice described by
the Tiantai master Zhiyi (538–597) as the samādhi of suiziyi (隨自意), which
Stevenson translates as “cultivating samādhi wherever mind is directed.” The
literal meaning of suiziyi is “following one’s mind.” Suiziyi is one of four types
of meditation techniques that Zhiyi describes in his Mohezhiguan (“treatise on
calming and insight”).
 5. This legend is recounted in the Dhammapada Commentary and is
part of a larger tale about the Buddha performing the Twin Miracle in which
he causes jets of water and fire to simultaneously issue from every pore of his
body. Burlingame (1921, 35–56) provides a translation.
 6. The story of Kisāgotamī originates in the Pāli canon, particularly
the Therigatha, or the verses about Buddhist nuns that are now part of the
.
­Khuddaka Nikāya. Kisāgotamī also appears briefly in the Anguttara Nikāya to
ask the ­Buddha for instruction in the Dharma (A 8.53) and in the Sam . yutta
Nikāya (S 5.3), where she faces down Māra.
  7.  The extant Chinese version of this text was supposedly translated from
the Sanskrit by the Buddhist monk Kālayaśas in the first half of the fifth century.
But scholars believe the text originated either in central Asia or China and was
back translated into the Sanskrit title. The Chinese title is Guanwuliangshoufojing.
 8. The Chinese term that is translated as “to visualize” is xiang (想),
which is made up of the characters for “appearance” (相), and “mind” (心).
Julian Pas glosses this as meaning that “when the outside object [appearance]
is grasped by the mind, one has the subsequent action of either thinking or
imagining” (1974, 100–101). Hence, to visualize means “the act or power of
forming mentally visual images of objects not present to the eye” (1974, 101).
This equalizes the act of memory, or the mental visualization of forms seen in
160 Notes to Chapter 7

the past, and the act of imagining, which is the visualization of forms that exists
only in the mind.
  9.  Buddhaghosa lists ten kasin.a meditations in all: earth, water, fire, air,
blue, yellow, red, white, light, and limited‑space. These meditation practices are
forms of concentration practice that leads to the four levels of dhyāna absorption.
10.  Huiyuan (334–416), the founder of the Donglin Temple on Mount
Lushan, encouraged both meditation on the Pure Land, and the painting of
imagery conducive to such visualization; Shandao (613–681), the Chinese Pure
Land master who exerted strong influence on Hōnen (1133–1212) and Shinran
(1173–1263) of the Japanese Jōdo Shinshū sect, had trance experiences that he
translated into sculpture; Genshin (945–1017), the Tendai monk and devotee
of Amida Buddha, painted both hells and the Pure Land that inspired Amida
worship in Japan (Becker 1984, 140–41).
11. In his translation of this passage from the Amitāyurdhyāna Sūtra,
Inagaki footnotes a number of traditional interpretations, such as “there is no
buddha apart from one’s true nature,” “the Buddha does not exist apart from
one’s mind,” “no buddha exists apart from this meditating mind,” and “since
this mind is the Bodhi‑mind and the cause of buddhahood, it becomes a bud‑
dha” (2003, 100 n.33).
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 Index

Note: Page number in italics indicate figures.

akusala (“unwholesomeness”), 84–85 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott), 104–5

Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke, 71; Bo Zhuyi, 98, 99, 158n12
“Hellscreen,” 71, 155n7; “In a Bogin, Benjamin, 149n26
Grove,” 69, 71, 78; “Nose,” 71, Bordwell, David, 31
155n7; “Rashōmon,” 69, 81 Borobudur Temple, 19–21, 44–45,
American Beauty, 19, 149n29 100, 125, 128–31, 139; cen-
Amitāyurdhyāna Sūtra, 139–40, 142, tral stūpa of, 101–2, 108;
159n2, 160n11 Gandavyūha panels at, 20–22, 72;
Amour (Haneke), 106 as man.d.ala, 25–26; photographs
amulets, 52, 64–65, 81 of, 20, 23, 129, 131; structure of,
animal fables, 30, 52–53, 63; in Kim 149nn30–31
Kiduk’s Spring…, 32, 40–41; in Boucher, Daniel, 15, 149n25
Pancatantra, 53 Brahmanism, 14, 148n23, 153n8;
Anūnatvāpūrn.atvanirdeśa Sūtra, 145n3 exorcism rites in, 58–60
Apadāna literature, 30, 150n2 Brahmāyu Sutta, 145n1
aśuras, 63 Bronkhorst, Johannes, 14, 58
Aśvaghos.a’s Buddhacarita, 44 Buddha-nature, 2, 16, 18, 24, 42,
At. .thakavagga (“chapter of the 45, 143, 145n2; buddhadhatu and,
eights”), 78–80 4; tathāgatagarbha and, 4
avadāna literature, 30 Buddhaghos.a, 136, 141, 155n9,
Avalokiteśvara (bodhisattva), 29, 92 160n9
Buddhānusmr.ti practice, 127–28
Bae Yongkyun, 27 Buddhist cinema, 1, 18–26; film
Barthes, Roland, 101–2 criticism of, 19; Hirokazu Kore’eda
Bashō (poet), 99 and, 102–6, 149n29; Malick and,
Becker, Carl B., 142 110, 124–25
Bentor, Yael, 12, 17 Buddhist visionary practices, 65–66,
Bielefeldt, Carl, 42 127–44

171
172 Index

Buswell, Robert E., 151n10 Dōgen, 146n5

Doninger, Wendy, 110
Campany, Robert, 148n24 Donohue, William, 8
Cao Xueqin, 46 Dream of the Nine Clouds, 152n12
Cerniello, Anthony, 132–37, 133 Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao
Chang Chen, 45 Xueqin), 46
Chastain, Jessica, 111, 118–19, 122 dr..s.ti (“views”), 78–79
Chōmei, Kamo no, 96, 156n3, Du Fu, 158n12
157n8
Christianity, 1, 4, 6–8; cinema’s Earle, Edmund, 134
potential for, 8, 9; confession in, Ebert, Roger, 108, 111
64; ghosts in, 51; icons and, 5; Eckel, Malcolm David, 12–14,
Malick’s films and, 109, 110, 115, 149n27
121, 123 ecological movements, 101
Cloud Atlas (Tykwer), 46–47 Empire (Warhol), 132, 136–39, 141,
Cohen, Hubert, 109, 110, 115 143
Conroy, Melissa, 36 emptiness, being and, 84–85; in
Cox, Renée, 6, 6–8, 7 Daodejing, 94–95; in form, 15–17,
Cuddy, George, 134 97, 107, 130; in Heart Sūtra, 33;
Cuevas, Bryan, 52, 55 in Mahāyāna Buddhism, 41–42,
45, 157n5; Nāgārjuna and, 95;
Dalai Lama, 12, 19, 131 samādhi of, 128; tathāgatagarbha
Danielle (Cerniello), 132–37, 133 and, 4, in Tendai Buddhism,
Daodejing, 94–98, 102, 156nn4–5 96–98; Vairocana Buddha and,
Daoism, 93–95; ecological move- 146n9; visions of, 22–23, 41; in
ments and, 101; ghosts in, 51 Zen, 98–99, 146n4, 157n5
darśan, 34 exorcism, 58–60
Daśabhūmika Sūtra, 148n20
DeCaroli, Robert, 51, 57, 58, 65 Fayuan zhulin (“forest of gems from
Denby, David, 107, 108 the Dharma garden”), 155n5
detachment, practice of, 79 film noir, 103–5
Deuteronomy, 109 folk religion, 49, 65
Devorohana (“coming down from the Fredriksen, Paula, 8–9, 146n8
deva world”), 130 Freedberg, David, 9, 146n7
Dhammapada Commentary, 159n5 Fudaraku (legendary island), 92,
dharmadhātu (“dharma dimension”), 156n2
10, 14 Fuhrmann, Arnika, 50, 52
dharmakāya (“ultimate body of the Fujiwara Shunzei, 95–98, 157n10,
Buddha”), 10–12, 22–24, 124–25, 157nn6–7
130–31, 146n10, 147n18 Fujiwara Teika, 96–97, 157n6
Diamond Sūtra, 159n2 Fuller, Paul, 78, 156n10
Digha Nikāya, 36, 145n1, 148n19 funeral rites, 54, 148n23
 Index 173

Gandavyūha sutra, 20–22, 26, 72, 127 Huiyuan, 145n2, 160n10

Genshin, 145n2
German expressionism, 104 iconoclasm, 5–6, 9, 99, 143–44,
ghosts, 55; in Buddhism, 54–55; 146n5
in Catholicism, 51; exorcism of, Im Kwon-taek, 27
58–60; as folk religion, 65; “hun- Inagaki, 160n11
gry,” 55, 62; karma and, 52–54, Iryon, 155n6
56; in Taoism, 51 Islam, 4
Gibson, Mel, 8–9, 84 Itō Jakuchū, 2, 3, 6
Gifford, Julie, 20, 21, 72, 128–30,
139, 149nn30–31 James, David, 27
Gimello, Robert M., 151n10 jātaka literature, 30, 53, 155n5
Giuliani, Rudolph, 7 Jātakamālā, 21
Gomez, Luis, 148n22 Jetavana Monastery, 157n11
Green, Ronald, 149n29 Jinapañjara mantra, 59
Griffiths, Paul, 13, 147n16, 148n22 Jingliu yixiang (“aspects of Buddhist
Groundhog Day, 19 doctrine”), 155n5
Guanyin (bodhisattva of compassion), Jizang, 145n2
29, 29–30, 33–36, 35, 45, 121, Job, Book of, 109, 110
124, 154n2 Jowo Śākyamuni, 10–11
Judaism, 4, 8–9
Hallisey, Charles, 31 Jump, Herbert, 8, 9, 146n6–7
Hamilton, Sue, 16
Haneke, Michael, 106 Kakuju, 154n1
Hansen, Anne, 31 Kakyō (“a mirror held to the flower”),
Harrison, Paul M., 128 97
Hayashi Yukio, 154n9 Kālacakra man.d.ala, 159n3
Heart Sūtra, 32, 33, 38, 41–42, Kalina, Noah, 134
159n2 Kannami Kiyotsugu, 97
Heidegger, Martin, 108 Kannon (bodhisattva), 92
Hershock, Peter, 57, 66, 84; on karma, 29–33, 44–45, 59, 66, 79;
karma, 45, 153n8 Chinese notion of, 44–45; ghosts
Hirokazu Kore’eda, 132. See also and, 52–54, 56; Hershock on, 45,
Maborosi 153n8; knowledge of, 21; kusala/
Hōjōki (“record of the ten-foot-square akusala of, 84–85; in Nang Nak,
hut”), 156n3, 157n8 50; Wheel of Life and, 39–40
Hōnen, 145n2 Karmavibhanga, 21
Hossinshū (“tales of religious awaken- Kelsey, W. Michael, 70–71, 154n1,
ing”), 156n3 155n4
Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 45–46 Khuddaka Nikāya, 55, 159n6
Huanyuanji (“requiting grievances”), Kim Kiduk, 18, 21–22, 27–47, 124,
152n1 132
174 Index

Kisāgotamī, tale of, 134–35, 159n6 Malick, Terrence, 19, 25, 107–25,
Knee, Adam, 50 132, 132; Badlands, 107, 108;
Kobayashi Hiroko, 154n1 Days of Heaven, 107, 109; New
Konishi Jin’ichi, 95, 97, 157n9 World, 107–9; Thin Red Line, 19,
Konjaku monogatarishū (“tales of 107–9, 111–17, 119–21; Tree of
long ago”), 69–71, 154n1, 155n4, Life, 19, 107–10, 117–19, 123; To
155nn4–5 the Wonder, 19, 107–9, 111–12,
Korai fūteishō (“notes on poetic style 122–23
through the ages”), 96, 98, 157n6, man.d.alas, 2, 25, 150nn31–32, 159n3
157n10 Marran, Christine, 103, 106
Kore’eda. See Hirokazu Kore’eda Maslin, Janet, 112, 113
Kūkai, 146n5 May Adadol Ingawanij, 50
Kundun (Scorsese), 19 McDaniel, Justin, 51
Kurosawa, Akira, 67. See also McMahan, David, 16, 72
Rashomon Meier, Nathan, 134
Kurylenko, Olga, 112, 122 Mills, Mary Beth, 50
kusala (“wholesomeness”), 84–85 Minamoto Takakuni, 154n1
kyōgen kigo (“wild words and embel- Mingbaoji (“record of karmic retribu-
lished phrases”), 98 tion”), 155n5
Mingxiangji (“manifesting the dead”),
LaFleur, William, 88, 91–93, 152n1
98–100, 106, 116 Mizoguchi Kenji, 53
Lakkhana Sutta, 145n1 Moerman, D. Max, 156n2
Lalitavistara, 21 Monet, Claude, 138, 139
Lang, Fritz, 104 mortuary rites, 54, 148n23
Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese), 9
Leonardo da Vinci, 6, 7 Nāgārjuna, 95
Li Bai, 158n12 Nang Nak (Nonzee Nimibutr), 22,
Lopate, Phillip, 110 49–66; karma in, 50; Kurosawa
Lotus Sutra, 13–14, 148n24 and, 76; Malick and, 124; Ueda
Lubezki, Emmanuel, 108, 111 and, 53
Nang Tantrai (Thai story collection),
Maborosi (Hirokazu Kore’eda), 53–54, 153n6
24–25, 87–106, 90; Malick’s films Newman, John, 25
and, 112, 113, 116, 124; shadows nienfo of Pure Land Buddhism, 128
in, 89–93; title of, 88, 93, 156n1 Nihon ryōiki, 152n1, 154n3, 155n4
Madhyamaka (“middle way”), 95, 96, nirvana, 5, 44, 99, 102
145n2 Nō drama, 52, 97–98, 152n2, 157n9
Mahāparinirvāna Sūtra, 145n3, nonnarrative language, 109–12
148n19 Nonzee Nimibutr. See Nang Nak
Maitrībala Jātaka, 62
Majjhima Nikāya, 145n1 Orientalism, 100–101
 Index 175

otogizoshi (“companion tales”), 52, Śākyamuni Buddha, 1, 2, 5, 10–11,

152n2 44, 57, 130, 131
Ozu Yasujiro, 87, 103, 106 Salayatanavagga (“book of the six
sense bases”), 36–37
Pancatantra (animal fables), 53, Salla Sutta, 76
153n6 Samannaphala Sutta (“fruits of the
Pas, Julian, 142, 159n8 homeless life”), 36
Passion of the Christ (Gibson), 8–9, Samguk yusa (“legends of the three
84 kingdoms”), 151n7, 155n6
perception, 16, 33; of no-perception, samsara, 5, 16, 40–43, 99, 102, 124,
77–84; subjectivity of, 71–77 130
Perfection of Wisdom Samuel, Geoffrey, 143, 150n32
(Prajñāpāramitā), 33, 127, 148n18, Samyutta Nikāya, 37–38, 159n6
149n27, 157n5, 159n2 sarugaku (“monkey entertainments”),
Petavatthu (“stories of the departed”), 97, 157n9
55, 150n4 Satipat. .thāna Sutta, 135–36
Phya Lithai, 153n7 Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg),
Piśācapakaranam (“ghost stories”), 53 113–15
prajñāpāramitā (“perfection of wis- Schrader, Paul, 103–4
dom”), 33 Scorsese, Martin, 9, 19
prapañca (“proliferation”), 16, 85 Scott, Ridley, 104–5
Pratyutpanna-buddha- Seiryōji temple, 10–11
 sam . mukhāvasthita-samadhi, 128 self-immolation, 92–93, 151n6,
Preminger, Otto, 104 156nn2–3
pretas (“the departed”), 54–55 setsuwa literature, 52, 69–71, 152n1,
Pure Land Buddhism, 93, 127–28, 154nn2–3
140–42, 145n2, 156nn2–3, 159n2, shadows, 100; in film noir, 103–4; in
160n10 Maborosi, 24–25, 88–93, 89–93,
90; in Roshomon, 77, 77–78, 82;
Qiu Wei, 17 in Thin Red Line, 113
Shandao, 160n10
Rashomon (Kurosawa), 22–23, 67–85, Sharf, Robert H., 145n2, 147n13
68, 77, 83; Maborosi and, 88; Shinran, 145n2
Malick’s films and, 121, 124 Shōtoku, Prince, 98
Rashōmon gate, 67, 68, 69, 82, 83 Shu Qi, 45
Ratnagotravibhāga, 145n3 shushi (temple performances), 97,
Reinhartz, Adele, 9 157n9
relics, 11–12, 14, 148n23 Siodmak, Robert, 104
Reynolds, Frank, 63 Sisyphus, myth of, 41
Richie, Donald, 87 Solaris (Tarkovsky), 66
Russell, Catherine, 103, 106 Somdet To, 51–52, 59–65, 60
Ryōkan (poet), 99 Songtsen Gampo, 10
176 Index

Spielberg, Stephen, 113–15 Udayana, King, 10, 11, 147n13,

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and 148n24
Spring (Kim Kiduk), 18, 21–22, Ugetsu (Mizoguchi Kenji), 53
27–47, 124, 132 Ugetsu Monogatari (Ueda Akinari),
Srīmālādevīsimhanāda Sūtra, 4, 145n3 53, 62–63
Stevenson, Daniel B., 128, 159n4 Uji shūi monogatari (“collection of
Stone, Jacqueline I., 55 tales from Uji”), 155n7
suicide, 32, 75, 91–93, 151n6,
156nn2–3 Vairocana (Universal Buddha), 10,
suiziyi (“following one’s mind”), 146n9, 150n32
159n4 Vajrapāni (bodhisattva), 38
Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra, 159n2 Vale, Eugene, 84
śunyatā, 4–5. See also emptiness Vasubandhu, 14, 148n21, 149n27
Sutra on the Merit of Bathing the Veidlinger, Daniel, 153n5
Buddha, 14, 15, 149n25, 152n11 Vimānavatthu (“stories of mansions”),
Sūtta Nipāta, 76, 78–80, 84 150n4
“symbolic fantasy,” 72 Visuddhimagga, 136, 141, 158n1

Tambiah, Stanley J., 153n5 Warhol, Andy, 132, 136–39, 141,

Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō, 100–101 143
Tantropakhyana, 153n6 Warner, Cameron, 147n14
Tarkovsky, Andrei, 66 Wencheng Gongzhu, 10
tathāgathagarbha (“embryo of enlight- Whalen-Bridge, John, 19
nment”), 4, 145n3, 146n10 Wheel of Life. See samsara
Thin Red Line (Malick), 19, 107–9, Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the
111–17, 119–21 East? (Bae Yongkyun), 27
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), Wilder, Billy, 104
45–46 Winfield, Pamela, 146n5
Tiantai Zhiyi, 157n7 wisdom, 53–54; eye of, 59–65. See
To the Wonder (Malick), 19, 107–9, also Perfection of Wisdom
111–12, 122–23 Woodward, Mark, 44
Trai Phum Phra Ruang (“Three Woronov, Mary, 137
Worlds According to King Wright, Dale, 45
Ruang”), 55, 62, 63, 153n7,
154n10 xiang (“visualize”), 159n8
Trainor, Kevin, 11 Xuanzang, 146n11
Treasure Store Treatise, 145n2, 148n21
Tree of Life (Malick), 19, 107–10, yaks.a (demons), 62–64, 70
117–19, 123 Yijing, 149n25
trikāya theory, 147n16 Yin/Yang, 93–95, 102
Tsongkhapa, 147n14 Yo Mama’s Last Supper (Renée Cox),
Tykwer, Tom, 46–47 6, 7
 Index 177

yūgen (sense of profundity), 89, Zhanran, 145n2

93–97, 100, 104, 105, 157n5 zhiguai (“accounts of the strange”),
Yuminglu (“the dead and the living”), 52, 152n1, 154n2
152n1 Zhiyi, 159n4
Zhuangzi, 156nn4–5
Zeami Motokiyō, 97–98, 157n11 Ziporyn, Brook, 94
Zeitchik, Steven, 111–12 Zurcher, Erik, 143