The Mountain Kyôsaku

"Although we say mountains belong to the country, actually, they belong to those that love them."

Dōgen

Good Movie: Legend of Dajian Huineng

This is a fun movie, not least because it annoys the crap out of a lot of over-taught and under-practiced Zenners. Why, I'll get to in a minute.

Legend of Dajian Huineng (embedded in full above) is not so much the legend of Huineng – the hermit monk who's the last common ancestor of all surviving Chàn-descended lineages – as a legend of Huineng. The basics are all here: young peasant yearns to study the Dharma; family obligation keeps him illiterate and labouring; finally gets through monastery gate; clear-seeing impresses abbot; ends up usurping succession from equally legendary Shenxiu; becomes 6th and last patriarch of united Chàn.

Few of us have problems with that. It's the next act that raises Cain.

See, there's a single paragraph in the Platform Sutra – whence cometh Huineng's formal biography – that tells us he lived with a mountain tribe for 15 years after receiving transmission. According to the scribe, Huineng maintained a Buddhist lifestyle among the hunters, though his evangelism was limited to freeing trapped animals when possible and offering his hosts vegetarian alternatives.

Well, not to put too fine a point upon it… director Gui Zhenjie goes to town (or rather, the wilderness) on this footnote. He drops all the pithy poems, robed monks, and ancient temples, and picks up…

well…

• martial arts scenes. (Make that Billy Quan-school flying-fighter scenes.)
• a Captain Kirk-style cliff-top rescue.
• a several-week coma.
• a love triangle.
• not one, but two, pirate attacks.
• an overt feminist subplot.
• a complete Dances With Wolves narrative.
• a gothic torture scene.
• and a partridge in a pear tree.

(That the tribals eat.)

At last, in the final 3 minutes, the plot returns to record, as a stronger, wiser, dustier Huineng shows up at the monastery he'd set out for all those years ago and blows everybody away with his perfect insight. While still in the dooryard.

So the posers aren't wrong to say this is not a "good" film. To begin with, it can't decide whether it's a Zen-style bio-pic or a Saturday matinee. (And contrary to expectation, it does a much better job at the first than the second.) But I was engaged to the end, if only to satisfy my curiosity about what the director would pull out next.

The subtitles are, as is traditional, surreal; indeed, significantly more so than your garden-variety bargain-basement kung fu grinder. Supplied by a suspect intelligence – artificial or human – they render some passages downright impenetrable. Oft-repeated gaffes eventually cede to concentrated analysis, such as the "hunter team" that enforces "team" taboos and "team" honour, which the viewer's mind eventually resolves into "tribe". Or the master's "inner creed", which Huineng brilliantly pierces, to the consternation of the presumed "real" monks at the monastery. That one is, literally and figuratively, a koan.

But perhaps most bizarre (and then entertaining) is the tendency of 7th century Chinese people to call each other "bro".

Less endearing are sutra passages that drone on over the sole translation, "BUDDHIST SCRIPTURE", and esoteric ancestral verses transposed into random gibberish. Competent English translations of both are freely available online, and could simply have been copy-pasted into the .srt file.

Then there are a few clanging visual anachronisms (i.e., the use of chicken wire by Tang Dynasty hunter-gatherers), and a disturbing absence of ethnographic specifics on the exotic hill folk, who seem remarkably assimilated to Han culture (having, for example, zealously embraced the word "bro"), without, however, ever hearing of Buddhism. But humbugs of this sort, in a movie like this, serve in their whimsical way to enhance the experience.

As I've noted before, Zen luminaries are a tough subject for cinema, because the more impressive they get, the less they do. That said, Huineng's a worthy challenge, given the uniqueness of his story and its importance to Buddhist history. Sadly, though this effort has its moments – and would doubtless have more if someone cleaned up the subtitles – it's never going to do the man full justice. One fears others won't even try now, since a film purporting to do so is already in the can. (That's apparently what happened to Radio Caroline, another potentially great film, that unfortunately became a bad one before better scripts could prevail.)

But while we're waiting, we can enjoy Legend of Dajian Huineng on its own merits, both intended and unintended. The upload is a little wonky, dropping the subtitles briefly here and there, as well, in two short periods, as the entire soundtrack. Fortunately, both of them remain subtitled, so viewers can continue following. (As well as ever, any road.)

In the end, Legend has a scene for just about everybody, even if they aren't always people who've heard of Huineng. And that's got to be worth something, right?

How Sudden Are You?

So another visit to the annals of early Buddhism has yielded a further bit of provocative trivia: subitism is very old. Possibly as old as the religion itself.

This contentious point of Buddhist teaching, whose name draws on the French « subite » – "sudden" – asserts that enlightenment is a discrete event that occurs all at once in a blinding flash that explodes in your brain, changing both it and you forever. (The Christian adjective for this notion is "catastrophic", as in catastrophic conversion, the Evangelical ideal.)

The opposite view is gradualism, in which enlightenment slowly accrues over time through diligent practice, and only in turning back does one realise it has, at some point, been attained. (And Western Buddhism often implies that it may remain occult even to death.)

This is the main doctrinal difference between Rinzai and Soto, the two extant schools of Japanese Zen. (Seon, Korea's Chàn-descended tradition, also embraces sudden insight, but interestingly, has divided into parties over whether further practice afterward is required to "ripen" it, versus insistence that the bang itself is comprehensive; you're done.)

Rinzai students meditate to precipitate the long-awaited thunderbolt that strikes off the shackles of delusion – weakened beforehand by the crowbar of koanic logic – leaving a mind gleaming in perfect clarity.

Soto types sit for insight – a post-cognitive grasp of the koanic nature of existence, which, over a period of years or lives, eventually calibrates our minds to the universal frequency – though we may not apprehend for some time that our minds have inexplicably taken to gleaming in perfect clarity.

I'd always assumed subitism developed within Zen itself, and was surprised to learn that it actually came from the Southern School of Chàn, having been planted there by none other than 8th century founder and Huineng successor, Shenhui. Further study reveals that the two perspectives were already current in Bodhidharma's India, and may have touched off the first great theoretical debate in Buddhism

The topic isn't pedantic; it strikes at the very nature of enlightenment, and therefore Buddhism. Are we a religion, as subitism suggests, leading faithful practitioners to concrete, certifiable metaphysical transformation; or a philosophy, as gradualism would have it, shifting the adherent's perception by subtle and cumulative means?

History tends rather to support the first, though test cases are often ambiguous. Exhibit A would be the Buddha himself, said to attain enlightenment at an exact moment – upon seeing the morning star after eight days of intensive practice. The softness in that argument comes from his description of the phenomenon, devoid of fireworks, euphoria, or choirs of angels. He just… woke up. (The title we know him by translates as "The One Who Awakened".)

The legend of Bodhidharma also implies a sudden change – we're told he sat before a wall for nine years and "became enlightened", though we have even fewer particulars about the mechanism of that. To the best of my knowledge he never described it, or specified a time, date, or even season. Did he "become enlightened" in a flash, or did he just notice that it had happened, and get up?

And somewhat strangely, Dogen – founder of Soto – by his own detailed admission also received catastrophic illumination. According to the man himself, he was meditating up a storm when the jikijitsu suddenly whacked his dozing seatmate with the kyôsaku. At the crack of the cane, Dogen awakened as well.

Yet this is also the guy who told us enlightenment is gradual.

So clearly the distinction isn't simple. There are many Soto stories of enlightenment events like Dogen's – moments where the dam broke to the fall of a final raindrop, and nothing was the same again. What's common to both teachings is that getting to that point, whether it arrives with chirping birds or marching bands, is intricate, esoteric practice, demanding much zazen and maintenance of one's perceptual instrument.

And that makes the query a bit beside the point, though it does remain intellectually stimulating.

Rather a koan in its own right, really.


(Photo courtesy of Felix Mittermeier and Wikimedia Commons.)/span>

Just Sleep

Among many incisive observations in Adam Savage's maker manifesto Every Tool is a Hammer, I found this boldest:

"There is no skill in the world at which you get better the less sleep you have."

Reading it, I declared aloud, "AMEN."

The belief that sleep deprivation is useful to enlightenment practice figures highly on the list of counter-productive teachings inflicted on Zen by the organised sangha. Our monasteries – largely indistinguishable from boot camps – glory in it: rousting monks afoot at freezing 0-dark-30, and then chastising those who fall asleep on the cushion. (Dōgen actually attained enlightenment to the sound of his neighour being beaten for this.)

It's worth mentioning that such machismo isn't limited to Buddhist houses, either. Most monastic establishments, of any kind, think stumbling about in a numb stupor is God's plan for humanity.

But it's not.

The fact is, any state that compromises your brain's ability to focus – being drunk or high, cold, hot, hungry, under stress, in pain – reduces the quality of zazen. And sleep is possibly the most important of all. I've found the more seriously I take it – valuing sleep as highly as sitting – the better I practice.

This lesson landed with an audible thud in the early days of my 100 Days on the Mountain. I hadn't planned for an adequate bed, and the lack of rest complicated my practice for every one of those 100 days.

In the end, it's your right and responsibility to decide whether to sleep or sit in any given moment. I eventually learned to do both simultaneously, out there on ango, a technique I still fall back on sometimes here in the Red Dust World.

In any case, it's always well to keep self-hatred – such as "I wouldn't be sleepy if I were a better monk" – in view. It's so easy to confuse that with practice.

(Photo of a sleeping monk ...seal, courtesy of Jared Wong and Wikimedia Commons.)

Responsibility Kyôsaku

"Do not emulate others' wrongdoing. See to your own virtue."

Dōgen

(Photo courtesy of Jay Castor and Unsplash.com.)

Source Buddhism

I've been rereading The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, the succinct little Thich Nhat Hanh book that amounts, so far as I'm concerned, to our Bible.

Non-Buddhists may be astonished to learn we lack one of those. Instead, we maintain a libraryful of sutras – pamphlet-sized documents that more or less quote the Buddha – along with three or four additional libraries of epistolary commentary. And we Zenners tend to bust even that down to the Heart Sutra (a short summary of the Buddha's insights), four koan anthologies, and, in Soto, Dogen's Shobogenzo. (Other schools swap that last out for their own founders' teachings.)

But for my money, Heart satisfies the hunger for a source of record, something to tell us in no uncertain terms what we're supposed to be doing here. Heart was the book that made me a monk, and the one I return to in moments of despair and confusion. And it never lets me down, though each time I find I've never read it before.

Among insights gained this time is TNH's reference to "Source Buddhism", one of three streams he sorts modern Buddhism into, by way of understanding the differing perspectives. The other two are Many-Schools Buddhism, notable for its didactic nature, and the Mahayana, which emphasises the responsibility of practitioners to their species and world (the famous "bodhisattva principle").

And though my own tradition – Zen – sits squarely in that last camp, I find I'm a bit of a Sourcer.

Quite a Sourcer, really.

Source Buddhists insist on the primacy of the Buddha's teaching over all other authorities. What he said, is Buddhism. Anything else… might not be.

I think this is an important fixation, because humans compulsively pile everything they like under the rubrics they've already adopted. If they're pacifists, they define even their most bellicose conduct as perfect pacifism. If they're conservatives, each innovation they make becomes the soul of conservatism. If they're feminists, their every impulse reflects pure disgust for sexism – highest of all, their purely sexist ones.

Nowhere is this fatal flaw more evident than in religion.

And in no religion is it more evident than in Zen.

So it's comforting to know that in my instinctive sourcery, I'm paddling an Original Stream – perhaps the original stream – of Buddhism.

Because the path of the Buddha isn't always the smoothest, but I do believe it's the most effectual.

And in case you're wondering: yes. My own meandering improvisations thereupon do constitute "original Buddhic teaching".

Seriously; have you ever met a human?


(Photo of the 6th century Teaching Buddha in Ajanta Cave 16 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Zen At War... With Itself

'Way back in March of 2012 CE (how strange to have such a deep vault) I reviewed Zen at War, Brian Daizen Victoria's exposé of Japanese Buddhism during the Second World War.

And now, these many years gone, while looking up the book's Amazon link for a friend, I happen to glance at the reader reviews.

Some of them are disheartening.

While most commenters shared thoughtful, supportive responses, I rate it worthwhile to meet two others, not by way of defending Daizen's work – it's self-defending – but to survey some dangerous internal trends in our incipient Western religion. Especially here, where our grasp of Buddhist history (and our own) is tenuous.

First to catch my eye was a one-star rating entitled "Very disappointing":

This guy [Daizen] must have a terrible background, probably tried to escape all that trauma by moving to far east and becoming Buddhist etc., the classic story. It's ok as long as one does not try and contaminate beautiful Zen with a messed up mind. Avoid this book especially if you're a new Zen learner as it will ruin the whole experience for you.

There's something simultaneously amusing and infuriating about a self-professed Zenner who has no idea what a human being is. While I assume First Honoured Sangha is a sojourner, I've also met so-called "masters" who lack any greater insight.

So to protect any fragile new Zen learners who may stumble upon such spluttering, Ima lay down some tough-dharma. (Ten thousand apologies, pro forma trigger warning, how's your father.)

1. First Honoured Sangha has no calling to judge others or analyse their lives, or to declare their fate foregone. (Gotama; Dogen; Jesus.)

2. First Honoured Sangha knows nothing about Daizen's "classic story". We all have classic stories. Even First Honoured Sangha. (Gotama; Claude Anshin Thomas.)

3. First Honoured Sangha has no authority to give permission, or withhold it. (Gotama; Jesus.)

4. First Honoured Sangha has not been asked to guard the supposed "honour" of Zen. Zen is clean by its nature. Others soil it. (Bodhidharma.)

5. If First Honoured Sangha can't put down the burden of piety, then First Honoured Sangha can haul his or her prodigal backside back to the Church. If we must speak of contaminating Zen, piety is certainly the ultimate pollution. Mindless fear and shame are what authentic Zenners strive to overcome.

In an oddly similar vein, consider this (ostensibly favourable, five-star) review:

The shock value is not so great, as I've been aware of the basic contents for sometime. Japan is an island and the Japanese are an insular people. The emphasis in their culture is group conformity. Zen is not the transformer of personality as it was once marketed, and it should not surprise us to learn that Zen leaders in Japan followed the lead of the Japanese government and Army into widespread war.

The endemic racism and ethnocentrism of Western Zenners never ceases to dumbfound me. It's not just that we dissuade those of African or Hispanic or Arabic origin from joining us; we even freeze out Asians! With the exception of a dwindling handful of deified Asia-born teachers, you see damn few Asian faces in Western Zen centres.

Seriously, brothers and sisters. We have a problem.

One that won't go away until we drive it bodily from the zendo and kill it with ferocious blows from our monk sticks.

Apart from the sort of blanket condemnation First Honoured Sangha called down on another entire vaguely-defined demographic, Second Honoured Sangha neatly excuses Westerners from suffering any angst over Daizen's thesis. The demon, we're assured, isn't the Sangha; it's the Japanese.

With respect, Second Honoured Sangha is mistaken.

The demon is the Sangha. All of us. Then and now. There and here. Present and future.

You and me.

Nor am I alone in my discomfort with the unBuddhic habit of associating practice with submission to dictatorial authority – and then absolving ourselves of the evil we do under it. Thus, Third Honoured Sangha:

What I don't like, is the way it is almost impossible to discuss [enthusiastic Buddhist participation in Japanese fascism] in the Zendo, and I've tried.

Word.

And a final Fourth:

As a Buddhist, it was a reminder that we must be ever looking at our own practice. Do read this book.

Zen is important. We must resist the urge to turn it into a church.


(Photo courtesy of Serg Childed and Wikimedia Commons)

Foreign Invasion

Greetings, honoured sangha. This week I offer Japanese for Zenners, with this basal concept:

マインドフルネス 。

Can't read it? Let me help:

Ma-i-n-do-fu-ru-ne-su.

I think what threw you is that it's written in kana, unlike other elemental Zen concepts, which are usually expressed in kanji.

"But," you say, "that's not hiragana!"

Ah, but I didn't say hiragana, did I?

In a fascinating Tricycle magazine article, writer Karen Jensen reports that Japanese Zen teachers are pinning their hopes on a patently unAsian remedy to their religion's problems.

You see, in contemporary Japan, Zen – like most religions there – has devolved into something more akin to a fraternal lodge than a spiritual practice. Today it's more associated in the public mind with the national obsession with rites of passage, than anything higher. And this shallow, agnostic role naturally obscures the Path in Japan.

Faced with this challenge, some Japanese teachers are resorting to desperate measures. To wit: for the first time since Dogen, they are injecting foreign practice into their teachings.

That's why maindofurunesu (say it aloud with me; feelin' it?) is written in katakana, the syllabary of foreign words.

Because it is a foreign word. For a foreign concept.

To be brutally precise: a Western one.

At this point, some Zenners are probably rushing into the street, looking for a statue of me to push over.

But the joke's on them. Hermits are pre-cancelled.

That's why we're hermits.

Anyway, yeah. "Mindfulness" is not a Zen thing. It's a purely Western one, albeit one that's been kneaded into non-Asian Buddhist practice over the last 50 years.

Which means, among other things, that when you advocate it, you're being Eurocentric.

And thank God for that, because mindfulness is darn good practice.

Not that it's exactly absent from historic Asian models, mind you. At the root of Japanese Zen, for example, is the notion of nen, which refers to spontaneous thought, and by extension, delusion, and by further extension, awareness of same and the necessity of waiting for that second thought, which entire process leads to "clear-seeing". That insight, and its implications, are fundamental to enlightenment practice; some seekers call it the entire path.

But as Brad Warner has pointed out in his excellent essay on the distinction, "mindfulness" is not nen. It's a little less hard-core (no pun intended), a little less "religious", and a lot more accessible. Which, as he says, makes it packageable, and therefore marketable.

Which is why he avoids it.

I'm hip. I too am deeply suspicious of bourgeois Buddhism, with its feel-good bandwagon hustle. But I'm not ready to toss out mindfulness on that basis alone. After all, the local nursery sells concrete garden Buddhas to a decidedly non-monastic clientele, but I still have a Gautama statue on my altar.

But I do insist that mindfulness practice imposes recognition of the fact that Asian Zen is not all Zen. Let's have done with beating others about the head over bowing and chanting, or Dharma transmission, or ascetic practice, or submission to human beings, or other non-Buddhic calculus that accreted over the two millennia we were a uniquely Asian religion.

Because if it's true that Buddhism can't be "just anything" (and it is; this is a defined path, with fundamental teachings), it's also true that the response to those teachings is as varied, and as valid, as anything else in this universe.

And that's a blessing.

(Fortunately. Because ain't crap you can do about it.)


(Photo of a sign on the grounds of the Mid-America Buddhist Association courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Outback Kyôsaku

"Take your inspiration from those who, long ago, went to live in the far-off mountains and practice ascetic discipline in distant woods."

Eihei Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō


(Photo of 11th century painting of the Zhongnan Mountains by 范寬 [Fan Kuan] courtesy of National Palace Museum, The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei DVD-ROM, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Good Book: Eat Sleep Sit

Most books available in the West on life in Japanese monasteries are written by Westerners. Perhaps that's why they tend to take a star-struck, romantically uncritical view of the exotic practices they encounter. Eat Sleep Sit: My Year At Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple doesn't suffer from this quirk. Its author is Japanese, and that makes all the difference.

In the mid-Nineties, thirty-year-old Nonomura Kaoru entered Eihei-ji, the Vatican of Soto Zen. His motives were credibly vague; discussing them with his girlfriend, he gets out little more than "I'm uneasy". (Which is what drives most of us to monasticism – the Buddha called it "world-weariness".)

His friends react with anything but joy. In Japan, taking orders is considered rash and self-destructive, as radical and potentially suicidal as any forest ango. (Surprise!) One of them points out that cœnobites have a lower life expectancy than those outside the walls. But Nonomura persists, and his record of what ensues is both a powerful account of monastic awakening and an important corrective to misconceptions about Asian practice models.

The only honest term for the training Nonomura endures at Eihei-ji is "military":

Then the door […] abruptly opened. Before our eyes there appeared a monk, on his face a scowl so bitter that he might have been shouldering all the discontent in the world. Following the orders he barked at us, we each shouted out our name in turn, summoning all our strength to yell as loud as possible.

"Can't hear you!" he'd snap in reply. "If that's the best you can do, you'll never make it here! Turn around and go home!" [...] Again and again we raised our voices, yelling with such might that it seemed blood would spurt from our throats. [...] Finally I was left standing alone. With every shout my voice grew hoarser, making it harder and harder to yell. How much longer could this go on, I wondered.

It's all here: the hammer-headed machismo, the abuse masquerading as instruction, the barking-mad superiors. For months on end recruits are humiliated and beaten, forbidden to defend themselves or even cringe, and denied sleep, food, leisure, and hygiene.

Some have to be hospitalised; some never return.

But Eat Sleep isn't just, or even primarily, an indictment. Nonomura – an excellent writer, speaking through a talented translator – also relates the moving beauty, the timeless wisdom (especially of Dogen), and the penetration of his own nature and that of the world, that he finds "inside". It's another gift of Nonomura's nationality, inured to gratuitous authoritarianism, and so able to see past it to great treasures. Even the abuse has a certain purifying effect:

Every time I was pummelled, kicked, or otherwise done over, I felt a sense of relief, like an artificial pearl whose false exterior was being scraped away… Now that it was gone […] I knew that whatever remained, exposed for all to see, was nothing less than my true self. The discovery of my own insignificance brought instant, indescribable relief.

Perhaps Nonomura's greatest strength as a writer is his unflagging respect for his readers, eschewing condescending exposition, certain we'll get it on our own. Unlike Western observers, he never endorses or justifies the terrorism. Nor does he credit it with the insights he eventually gains. He simply relates events and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. I found this especially useful, as the contrast between ends and means in this system is dramatic. Eihei-ji is ambiguous and contradictory moral ground, and Nonomura is content (and Zen enough) to leave it so.

I have a fantasy that some day, somewhere, a Zen monastery will be founded on the interlocking principles of anatta and humility. Aspirants in this renewed lineage will be required to study with equal zeal ancestral wisdom and the errors that have been committed in its name. Because if you don't have both, you don't have Zen.

As regular readers will have guessed, I'd like the books I review here to be included on that shelf. And teachers in that future Zen Centre could do worse than assign Eat Sleep Sit to each novice on entry, right alongside mu.

Good Movie: Zen

"This is gonna be a short movie."

That's what I thought when I bought Zen (禅), a biodrama about Eihei Dogen, founder of the Soto Zen sect. Dogen is a seminal figure, but he's famous, even in Soto, for being completely unmovable. Two hours of watching a stone-faced Japanese guy sit perfectly still, broken only to yell at his students when they fail to do likewise. Fun for the whole family.

Fortunately, director Takahashi Banmei had the sense to scrap the legend and seek the soul. Which, one supposes, Dogen must have had. In fact, Takahashi's Dogen is not just sensitive, he's downright soft. He actually cries, for God's sake! Four times!!!

Takahashi sees Dogen as a crusader, first against the comfortable, corrupt Buddhism of medieval Japan, and by extension, the violent tendencies of Japanese culture. His motivation remains under-explained; as in oral tradition, the boy loses his mother, and vows to find a path out of misery for all humanity. Alright. But peoples' mothers die all the time, and they don’t hike across China to end suffering. Why did he?

Takahashi begs the question; he wants to get to The Story ("Dogen vs. The Volcano"), and his unorthodox grasp of storytelling makes what happens next one of the great cinematic epics.

It also makes it hard to review. See, this is a visual movie. Oh, there's plenty of dialogue. Important dialogue. Powerful dialogue. It's just, like, so not the story. That is in the images, scenes so saturated with meaning that every one, whether a sweeping vista or the monastery kitchen, is a sutta. I've seen it a few times now, and no longer even bother to turn on the subtitles. (And let me assure you, 僕の日本語 外人のめちゃくちゃですね 。)

So how do you describe a movie that seems to bypass your brain, like you're receiving it in the marrow of your bones? Well, for starters, my film reviews usually include three screen-caps. You'll note a few more here. You can't review Zen with three screen-caps. And these are just half the ones I collected for it. (Click on them. See them bigger.)

In short, Zen is a truly Zen experience, and a deeply moving one at that.

Another facet of Takahashi's "outsider" genius (he's most known for dirty, edgy grinders) is his gift for iconoclasm. In this case he gave the lead to a kabuki actor. Yeah, that's what you want to play the Stone Buddha: an opera singer. But as much as the cinematography, Nakamura Kantarou is this movie. He manages to be just human enough, without getting cuddly, and also remarkably supple. He's got that Dogen steel, sure, but he's never macho. This is not Dogen as samurai; this is Dogen as priest.

Irish priest, in fact; this is a very religious movie. And that's weird; Zen itself is highly suspicious of the thing Christians call "praise," and our movies generally reflect this preference for practice over preaching. But Takahashi's Dogen can't shut up about the Buddha. And while the film does heavily emphasise sitting (for once, thank God), we also see Dogen preach. That's right: preach. At the drop of a deep-dish monk hat, my dear. Is it because Takahashi isn't a Zen Buddhist? Or is he trying to tell us something? I don't know. But I like it. It's fresh. I dig this Dogen.

There are other gems here: Dogen's love of China (some of the film's nuance will be lost on those who can't detect his frequent shifts from native Japanese to his second language, and back); his obsession with the moon, now a Zen obsession; the view of medieval Kyoto, Japan's holy city, as one big brothel; Dogen's rejection, no less dramatic today than it was in 1220, of social distinctions and bourgeois values. "We don't care about your past here," he tells a prostitute who wants to take orders. 

I could snipe at a few things, but they'd be the same things reviewers always snipe at. ("Too derivative. Too Hollywood. Not enough cowbell.") But from my cushion, the only real problem is the title. This movie is not about Zen. I suspect that's why it remains obscure. (A big-budget studio title, and sold only on Japanese Amazon. At least at the moment.) So people who don't care about Zen won't see it, and those that do, don't either. And that's too bad, because it demands to be seen. So what should Takahashi have called it? Something about the moon, maybe. Nah, that would only net a lot of disappointed middle school girls.

Anyway, here's the bottom line: he's strong, he's sensitive, he's Dogen. See the movie. It's good.