Movie 2005.08.21 - Samsara

Samsara is a story about a monk named Tashi, who after three long years of deep meditation ventures out into the world to satisfy his earthly desires. He finds work on a farm, discovers passionate sex in the arms of the farmer's daughter (Pema), and marries her. They have a son, and one time when Pema and her son went to the city, he had a fling with one of the farm hands. Sujata tells him not to worry because Pema told her that she expected this to happen. Tashi decides to become a monk again and leaves his wife and son in the middle of the night. But life is not as simple as he thinks.

The movie's pace is slow, and the plot is simple. The best portion of the movie is the last part when Tashi receives a note from his dying master, "Which is more important: satisfying one thousand desires or conquering just one?" Driven by guilt, he forsakes his family and takes up the cloth again. Pema intercepts him by morning, and gives a stirring monologue. Reading between the lines, I think she's not happy about Tashi's shirking his responsibilities. Like Buddha, he left his wife and child to search for enlightenment. She said, "Could it be that the Buddha eventually attained nirvana because of the kindness his wife showed him?" Perhaps salvation can be found even without being a monk? And that the wife could've done the same thing, but instead she decides to stay in the real world and make equal sacrifices?

Tashi is torn between spiritual peace and earthly. By the time he decides to go back with Pema, she had dropped his traveling box into his lap and vanished. (Which makes one think whether Pema was really there, or was it a vision/his conscience?) Last scene of the movie gives us another philosophical question. Tashi finds a boulder and on it is inscribed this question: "How can you prevent a drop of water from drying up?" He turns the rock over and it says, "By throwing it into the ocean."

Me, I just can't understand how anyone could bear to leave Christy Chung.