Practicing Buddhism through Film (2018)

Prof. Dr. Francisca Cho : "This issue will consider the ways in which film can function in the manner of traditional Buddhist ritual practices. [..] the aim of this issue is to examine how cinema itself functions as Buddhist religious practice. Such investigation can focus on the process of filmmaking, the experience of watching films, and/or the phenomenology of cinema in its liminal status between reality and illusion. [..]

The aim of this issue is to pay more attention to the cinematic aspects of selected films in parallel to Buddhist ritual experiences and Buddhist understandings of the imaginary nature of lived experience."

Practicing Buddhism through Film (2018)

In this issue :

• Crafting Cinema in the Buddhist Contemplative Gaze (by Edward A. Burger) PDF

In this essay, I discuss the evolution of my approach to creating Buddhist contemplative cinema. [..] I continue with a discussion of Buddhist art and the distinctive multidimensional quality of the cinema-viewing experience that makes it suitable for celebrating, sharing, and exploring the Buddhist contemplative experience. [..]

I look for inspiration from cinema masters like Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda, and David Lynch, who I think are working with cinema with similar intention. These filmmakers are interested in memory and dreams and ecstatic vision. [..]

The contemplative life is about living life as we live in meditation. Showing up, and staying put. Grounded, not distracted. Inquiring, not averse. Illuminating, not reactive. So, I see contemplative Buddhist art, and cinema included, as a profound kind of protest against our own confusion. And by extension, against the status quo of suffering and abuse in our world born of that collective confusion. It is a radical thing to turn one’s gaze within. [..]

• Blindness, Blinking and Boredom: Seeing and Being in Buddhism and Film (by Lina Verchery) PDF

"[..] Must we enjoy a film for it to have a transformational impact on us? What about films that are bad or boring? What actually happens when we watch a boring film? A phenomenology of boredom, I suggest, begins with a feeling of disengagement; a sudden, growing awareness of the distance between ourselves and the film. Indeed, boredom actually requires a high degree of self-awareness; the feeling of boredom, I suggest, consists in large part of the awareness of the fact that one is bored. [..]"

• Pedestrian Dharma: Slowness and Seeing in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker (by Teng-Kuan Ng) PDF

"[..] By instantiating and cultivating critical shifts in viewerly perspective in the manner of Buddhist ritual practice, Walker invites us to envision how a place of frenetic distraction or pedestrian mundaneness might be transfigured into a site of beauty, wonder, and liberation.[..]"