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buddhism
September 2009 
Mind Mirror :: Buddha at the Movies [2]
Posted on Dec 7th, 2007
by 
gary
gary
Cinema provides another metaphor: for reality's Eternal Now. I remember once sitting behind a five-year-old and an adult at a matinee, and every ten minutes or so the kid would ask the adult, "What's happening now?" and the adult would answer, "Now they're getting to know each other." Or "Now they're going to get married." Or "Now they're on their honeymoon." If you think about it, every moment in a movie is (like life) always about "now." Continuous present tense. (Even flashbacks.) And this Film Now can be elastic, instead of like clock time: 10 minutes compressed into 3, or 3 stretched out into 10 (very reminiscent of quite a few sitting meditations I've had). Indeed, the more familiar we become with the eternal nowness of time, the more we sense its elasticity.
Our minds are elastic in the same way. A good analogy is space. As with time, movies are always breaking the ancient Aristotelian Unity of Time and Place (everything unfolding in linear "real time," 1-2-3). A film opens space out like a jigsaw puzzle, constantly changing locations and points of views. So, as audiences, when we're film's space-without-particular-locality, we're also experiencing the limitless possibility of emptiness, and of our own mind. Felt everywhere but nowhere to be seen.
Fiction films are usually a neatly patterned karma tale. For an interesting meditation sometime, buy a ticket to a movie you otherwise don't care about and walk in on the middle (at a multiplex this is easy to do). Then stay for the beginning up until you walked in. You'll see how everything that happened in the second half was a result of the characters' actions in the first half. (You can also try this at home, fast-forwarding into the middle, starting from there, then returning to the beginning.) See karma, study dharma.
note: please see comment, for sidebar on cinema & magic ...
and to add comments of your own (hear! here!)
Our minds are elastic in the same way. A good analogy is space. As with time, movies are always breaking the ancient Aristotelian Unity of Time and Place (everything unfolding in linear "real time," 1-2-3). A film opens space out like a jigsaw puzzle, constantly changing locations and points of views. So, as audiences, when we're film's space-without-particular-locality, we're also experiencing the limitless possibility of emptiness, and of our own mind. Felt everywhere but nowhere to be seen.
Fiction films are usually a neatly patterned karma tale. For an interesting meditation sometime, buy a ticket to a movie you otherwise don't care about and walk in on the middle (at a multiplex this is easy to do). Then stay for the beginning up until you walked in. You'll see how everything that happened in the second half was a result of the characters' actions in the first half. (You can also try this at home, fast-forwarding into the middle, starting from there, then returning to the beginning.) See karma, study dharma.
note: please see comment, for sidebar on cinema & magic ...
and to add comments of your own (hear! here!)
-= / to be continued
-=| excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to
Understanding Buddhism (second edition) by Gary Gach
(Alpha Books, 2004) used with permission of the publisher |=-
-=| excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to
Understanding Buddhism (second edition) by Gary Gach
(Alpha Books, 2004) used with permission of the publisher |=-
Access: Public
When I attended UCLA, film was defined as having two roots: fiction and documentary. But a filmstudent there, named Jim Morrison, — (who headed the house rock band called The Doors at the Whiskey A-GoGo)— pointed to a third stream, which could be called magical cinema. Such popular art forms as tarot cards, spells, woodblocks, and magic lantern slide shows inspired the invention of movies. This third-stream, pre-cinematic element is also present in Taoism, Tibetan devotional art (tangka), and the Zen sequence of ten images known as the ox-herding pictures representing stages of practice (like a film storyboard), the Vedic and Brahmanic traditions, ritual paganism, etc.
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[In the West, the issue of icons became crucial in the evolution of the Church, leading to a schism from Orthodox Christianity; in Judaism, images were shunned, associated with fetishism, taking Ultimate Reality to be imageless as well as nameless.]