The Transnational Buddhism of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

Abstract

Kim Kiduk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring is a Buddhist film from Korea that reflects both traditional Asian and modern western-influenced impulses. A close reading of the film reveals how it replicates long-standing ritual practices such as seeing and being seen by the Buddha, and literary themes such as the cycle of karma. It also exhibits fidelity to canonical accounts of contemplative practices, reflecting a mainstream interest of western Buddhism that has found its way back to Korean society. Kiduk's film demonstrates that Buddhism is a complex and dynamic entity that evolves through a process of feedback and response in a global context that should not be atomized into “Asian” versus “western,” and “traditional” versus “contemporary” fragments.

Notes

^1. See Daniel Boucher's translation of Sutra on the Merit of Bathing the Buddha (1995) for an example of a canonical text that sanctions image/relic worship. Kinnard (1999, 70–74) also discusses the Ekottaragama and the Visuddhimagga of Buddhaghosa in relation to images.

^2. 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).

^3. 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 honour 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 immolated 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 Buddhahood. For an in-depth study of this history, see Benn (2007).

^4. Donald Lopez reports that Har Dayal has calculated these three aeons to be equivalent to 384 X 10 [58] years (1992, 147). The source for this information is not cited.

^5. See Buswell and Gimello, Paths to Liberation (1992) for an overview of evolutions in Buddhist conceptions of the path (marga), which range from highly structured and enumerated charts of religious progress—such as the 10 stages of the bodhisattva path—to anti-marga 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 progress, 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’ (Buswell and Gimello 1992, 22). See the essays by Paul Groner (1992), ‘Shortening the Path: Early Tendai Interpretations of the Realization of Buddhahood with This Very Body (Shokushin Jobutsu)’ and Carl Bielefeldt (1992), ‘No-Mind and Sudden Awakening: Thoughts on the Soteriology of a Kamakura Zen Text’ for discussions of East Asian Buddhist notions of innate Buddhahood that radicalize notions of the Buddhist path, particularly in Japan.

^6. This view of modern Buddhism as an ‘invention’ driven by political interests which hides or effaces ‘real’ Buddhist forms is now a cottage industry, and is evident in works such as Donald Lopez's Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (2008) and Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (1998); John McRae's Seeing Through Zen (2003); and Bernard Faure's Unmasking Buddhism (2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francisca Cho

Francisca Cho received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School and works on East Asian Buddhism from the perspective of aesthetic media. Her first book, Embracing Illusion: Truth and Fiction in the Dream of the Nine Clouds (1996) focused on classic fiction, and her second, Embracing Illusion: Manhae's Poems of Love and Longing (2005) focused on poetry. She is currently working on a monograph on Buddhism and film, from which the current article is excerpted.Address: Theology Department, Georgetown University, Box 571135, Washington DC 20057-1135. Email: [email protected]