Kim Kiduk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring is the latest of a series of films from Korea which, set in a Buddhist temple, portray the world of Zen monastic life. The recent vogue of Buddhist films in Korea began in the early 1980s with the release of Im Kwon Taek’s Mandala. Im’s work played a crucial role in shifting the focus of the Buddhist film genre from epic-scale hagiographies to day-to-day monastic practice.

The growing interest of the Korean film industry in Buddhist temple life takes the movie camera into the inside world of reclusive mountain monasteries, bringing various ethnographic elements of the Korean Zen tradition to the silver screen. While the domestic receptions of this type of fiction films vary, the local Buddhist tradition captured in these works apparently has a global appeal, as is demonstrated by the popularity of Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East? (1989), A Little Monk (2003), and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring (2003) among the international audience.

The international attention, however, has given rise to a new form of Buddhist films, which I would call “Zen ethnography.” Although films of this category are not documentaries, they heavily incorporate time-honored rituals and customs of Korean Zen monasticism as well as various doctrinal elements of Mahayana Buddhism into their texts. While these elements enrich the film narratives and enhance their visual beauty, they also generate interpretive problems.