Waiting for Godharma

Naturally, after our epic struggle to obtain a watchable copy of 달마가 동쪽으로 간 까닭은? (Why has Bodhidharma left for the east?), neither monshu nor I could be arsed to watch it. He finally broke the impasse today by announcing that, come what may, we were watching the damn thing. To that end, he planned a simple supper that only needed to be shoved in the oven, turned on the space heater in the den, and spread out the afghan.

My expectations were pretty much on target: Beautifully filmed, with long meditative passages, an elliptical storyline, and lots of Zen aphorisms on Letting Go. I only really missed the mark on the music, which was terrible with the exception of a Buddhist composition played during a "big festival" ("큰 절") that looked suspiciously like a shamanistic ritual (굿). It sounded like thirty seconds of mood music snatched from an early 80s slasher film repeated ad infinitum, sometimes with added spooky-voice chorus. Really inappropriate.

There's a running allusion to the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures woven through it compliments of an unattended cow that wanders up to the monastery grounds at whim and an irritatingly karmic bird that haunts the youngest monk, an even more unattended orphan boy who almost drowns himself to be rid of it. (Apparently, once you're pledged to a monastery in Korea, social services loses all interest in you.) We managed to find satisfying explanations for all but a couple of the scenes, but it's still not clear what the whole thing adds up to.

Much of the dialogue is so esoteric (there are extended passages in pure Sino-Korean) that I suspect I would've had trouble understanding it even if I did have any Korean left. All I can really tell any more is what speech level people are using. [Formal polite with humble pronouns to the eldest monk, who uses plain style with his juniors. Except the kid seems to use informal polite with everyone.] I did replay a couple scenes with Korean subtitles in order to catch a few words like "mundane world" (사바세계) and "koan" (화두).

The Old Man recognised a good deal of the scriptural passages, but we were both stumped by a mantra which occurs at one point. The subtitles gloss it was "Om karajya svaha", which finds only references to the movie itself. Searching the Korean version (옴 가라지야 사바하) leads to what appears to be the full mantra, but I haven't been able to find a Sanskrit or Pali source. Oh well--hopefully I won't need to release anyone from Hell in meantime.