Pedestrian Dharma: Slowness and Seeing in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker
Religions June 26, 2018 Teng-Kuan Ng 5 citations
A short film by Tsai Ming-Liang uses Zen walking meditation to counter the excesses of modern urban life. Through detailed analysis of the film and premodern Buddhist sources, the paper argues that the film's slowness and simplicity offer a prophetic critique of the contemporary metropolis and present contemplative attentiveness as a therapeutic resource. The film cultivates shifts in viewer perspective, transforming places of distraction or mundanity into sites of beauty, wonder, and liberation.