Pedestrian Dharma: Slowness and Seeing in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker
Religions June 26, 2018 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.3390/rel9070200 via DOAJ
Summary
This paper analyzes how Tsai Ming-Liang's short film "Walker" uses Zen walking meditation to address the relationship between Buddhism and modernity. Through detailed film analysis and premodern Buddhist sources, it argues that the film presents slowness and simplicity as counterpoints to urban excess, and offers contemplative attentiveness as a therapeutic resource. The film shifts viewer perspective like Buddhist ritual, transforming frenetic or mundane spaces into sites of beauty and liberation.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | The film uses Zen walking meditation to present slowness as a counterpoint to modernity and to offer contemplative attentiveness as a therapeutic resource. |
Abstract
This paper studies the ways that Walker, a short film by the Malaysian-Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang, visualizes the relationship between Buddhism and modernity. Via detailed film analysis as well as attention to sources in premodern Buddhist traditions, this paper argues that its filmic performance of Zen walking meditation serves two functions: To present slowness and simplicity as prophetic counterpoints against the dizzying excesses of the contemporary metropolis; and to offer contemplative attentiveness as a therapeutic resource for life in the modern world. 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.