Why Did Dharma Travel East?

The camera work of Why Did Dharma Travel East? was apparently shot under my artistic direction. My photo folder is full of shots exactly like the film’s: dark naked trees against luminous evening sky; surface of the water with reflections of sky, autumn leaves upon it, and fish slinking below; glowing tufts of susuki grass dancing in the sunlight and wind. I have seen a lot of excellent, very beautiful photography these three months, but none which resembled my own in topics and camera angles so much.

This is a mystery: while I am capable of appreciating other work – often with a gasp of surprise (for it would have never occurred to me to see that particular shot) – this camera work seems wholly familiar, it covers a ground which I have already covered myself. The director’s mind and mine have followed the same trajectory; they have come down the same path. It’s no use saying the path is informed by North Asian aesthetics (susuki, bamboo, pine, cherry) – because other North Asian directors do not strike me the same way. That we both started in the same place helps me understand it a little – there are only so many paths through the medina which start in the main souk – but it does not explain why we two have taken the same turn all the way down. It is as if we had walked together.

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The motto explains the film’s central idea, I think:

“To the disciple who asked What is truth? silently he (Gautama Buddha) showed a flower”.

The flower is not truth; it only symbolizes all those things in life – in fact, nearly all of them – which make the question of truth totally irrelevant.

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But the film also has a plot: it is the story is of a man “destined” to take care of his blind mother (i.e. he is her oldest son), but who abandons her in order to become a monk; yet, in his hermitage, he is riven by the feelings of guilt. His teacher tells him that love and filial duty are like all other chains of passion: they must be broken in order to attain liberation; it is a noble, courageous and difficult step to take; a necessary step and, for its difficulty, an admirable step.

But the man, struggling in meditation like a tethered cow threshing in a pen (a great photographic sequence) seems unable to free himself of attachment; and attaches himself to his teacher instead. A very long, slow and beautiful scene of cremation follows the teacher’s death: the master had foreseen the ritual as a possible moment of liberation for his student. But will the cremation at last liberate him of his last worldly attachment? Or, on the contrary, will he now find the hermitage unbearably lonely and return to the world defeated? The ending leaves these questions unanswered.

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China (and in its wake Korea and Japan) are quite unique in having evolved a bi-ideological moral system. On the one hand, there is the official ideology (in China it is expressed by Confucianism) which does what ruling religion does everywhere: it supports the family, business, government, contractual obligations and the rule of law against any rebellion by the individual who may find these institutions oppressive. This is, as Joe Campbell might say, the right hand path, the path of the elder sibling.

And then there is the left hand path, the path of the second born: Buddhism, the philosophy of rebellion. It is preached openly, under full protection of law and general respect, if not exactly in full daylight. It is subversive in the extreme: the state and the family are prisons from which a man must break; emotions, including the “moral ones” (like guilt, obligation, duty, love) are evil and to be avoided; the self does not exist and has no business of existing. In fact, we do not exist; there is no one here; what happens to “us” is therefore immaterial. Each of these paths, the right hand path and the left hand path, exist in full light, are legally recognized and held in general respect (if not always in high regard) and most citizens will be familiar with their teaching. For most people, the philosophy of private life falls somewhere in the middle; the mean generally lies closer to the Confucian ideal perhaps, but when the mean becomes unbearable, there is the escape route – the vent – of Buddhist teaching which says outrageous things like: “it is your duty to abandon your mother”; or “when you see Buddha, kill him”.

It was certainly not any sense of tolerance which allowed the Chinese to evolve this system, so unlike the philosophical tradition of Christian Europe where insistence on theological and moral party line was the norm for millenia and still so in living memory. Perhaps the Chinese simply recognized that the safety valve of Buddhism was indispensable for the better functioning of the society.

Does the relatively high profile of Buddhism in China make it easier for individuals to rebel and for those around them to accept the rebellion? Perhaps. If so, the question in the movie's title could be interpreted as a complaint of the West.