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

A boy grows up under an old monk on a small temple floating on an isolated lake, and across five seasons we watch him wound a fish, wound a woman, kill a man, return in chains, and finally take up the master's place while a new child arrives to begin the cycle again. The surface reading is a serene Buddhist parable about the cycle of life. What Kim actually made is harder and more exact: a study of how suffering is not interrupted by the sacred setting but runs its full course through it, and how liberation comes not from avoiding the karma but from finally seeing it whole. As a child, the boy ties a stone to a fish, a frog, a snake, and laughs. The master ties a stone to the sleeping boy's back and tells him he must remove it from the animals, and that if any has died, he will carry the stone in his heart forever. One does. He does. The film is the working-out of that sentence across a lifetime.

The Buddhist teaching on karma is not punishment but consequence, the weight of action that follows a mind until the action is fully understood rather than merely regretted. Kim renders karma as an actual stone. The child's cruelty to the animals returns as the man's cruelty to himself and others, the same knot of grasping expressed at each stage of life. When the grown man returns to the temple having murdered his unfaithful wife, the master does not console him. He writes the Heart Sutra on the temple deck in cat's-tail ink and makes the man carve out each character with the knife he used to kill. The act of carving the teaching, letter by letter, into the ground with the murder weapon, is the exact Buddhist mechanism: the poison and the medicine are the same substance, and liberation is metabolizing the deed by facing it in full. In the final season the man, now old, ties a millstone to his own body, carries a Buddha statue up the mountain, and sets it at the peak overlooking the lake. He has chosen his stone. That is the difference between karma as fate and karma as path.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring draws from Buddhism, Alchemy traditions. Kim Ki-duk built a temple that floats on a lake with no walls and doors that open onto nothing, and then he filmed a single soul moving through the wheel of a life on it. The doors have no walls, and everyone respects them anyway. That is the whole teaching.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003) directed by Kim Ki-duk is essential viewing for those interested in Buddhism, Alchemy. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring Is the Same Sin Watched Until It Becomes the Path. It rewards multiple viewings and contemplation.