to taste

If you see thought on the road, kill it*

* a re-writing of a Zen Master’s warning “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Right, this was meant to be a 1000 words… Less blog, more (long-winded) notes – as un-Buddhist a blog entry as possible. I still haven’t really engaged with the film in depth. Apologies. First, much background, theological and philosophical, and some – dear god – interpretation. Then on to some theory towards the end.

A proposition: Buddhism is a philosophical aesthetic ethics: the creation of concepts and images so as to deconstruct concepts and images (through percepts and affects) so as to achieve the virtual; a form of living to extinguish living.

A guiding principle: Terry Eagleton writes, ‘Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.’

 

Korean Cinema

Lee Hyangjin in Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, Politics (2000), notes the appearance of numerous South Korean films exploring Buddhism: Kwont’aek’s Mandala (1981); Pae Yonggyun’s Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left for the East? (1989); Chang Sonu’s Passage to Buddha (1994). He writes that they may be read as manifestations of the ‘search for a moral vision of society,’ one particularly pertinent in the context of Korea’s increasing materialism, economic success, and Korea’s opening up to the world – cinematically and otherwise. These films might be construed as a reactionary politics, locating authenticity in a static past and inert Buddhism. Such a view, I think, would be massively reductive.

There are problems of conflating any cinema with a particular instance, and this reductivism is doubly complicated in this case: Spring… was not terribly popular in Korea, and many have argued – both in and outside Korea – that it is not a typical Korean film (whatever that might be). Though I don’t know nearly enough about Korean culture to propose any answers to this, I do try and tease out some possibilities. One possible reason, I find, is the formal aspects of the film – a form which is testament both to the increased exchange of culture within Korea with the West, and evidence perhaps of both the disinterest in Korea, and the contrary huge interest in Ki-Duk in the West. I won’t assess whether Ki-duk’s socio-aesthetic engagement with contemporary phenomena and global circulations is a productive or ethically sound one – it’s difficult to say such a thing (for who, is it so?), though perhaps the global reception of Ki-Duk provides some answer to that. Of course all this makes for an interesting instance of World Cinema.

A complication: Kim Ki-duk is a Christian, not a Buddhist. He says:

The reason why I use Buddhism in this film is because it is something very relevant to Asian culture. The history of Buddhism is much older than the history of Christianity in Asia, it is very inherent part of our culture. It shouldn’t be viewed as a Buddhist film, because I happened to choose that, but it relates to an Asian audience in a much more effective way. Buddhism in Asia isn’t seen as a religion but as part of Asian life, that’s why I chose to use that. I believe that religion, whatever it is, should be part of our lives, not something outside of our lives, which we worship. I am really opposed to that kind of practice. In the contemporary world, religion has become a tool for power, for people like George Bush, it’s not really religion, it’s a vehicle for power. [ref]

Similar to Ki-duk I don’t mean to make monolithic Buddhism, nor Korea, but use both “Buddhism” and “Korea” as reified signifiers; amorphous aesthetic-conceptual tools to think about this film. Actually, more honestly, I wholeheartedly admit that my reading here is horribly westcentric and that I too often conflate specific Asian cultures into some horrible Oriental mass.

One other warning: There are serious splits in Buddhism on the nature of emptiness. From what I’ve read, what I say regarding emptiness applies to Zen Buddhism; Zen Buddhism being highly influential and present in Seon (Korean Buddhism).

A Short History of Korean Film

And at wiki

 

(Post-)modernity, Tradition, Orientalisms

Cang Xin, Identity Exchange Series, Peking Opera (2004) performance photograph

Wikipedia describes Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy (2003):

The story traces the life of a man who is put into solitary confinement by someone he does not know. He lives there for many years until he is released to find out the bizarre reason for his cruel entrapment. Dark and gloomy, Oldboy experiments with the themes of psychological madness and sexual distortions that exist in Korean modernity. The title is itself an oxymoron that speaks of the boyish innocence with which old Korean culture seeks to grapple with the psychosis of modern life.

This meeting of (post-)modernity and traditional cultures is of course a highly problematic conception but one critics have brought to bear on Spring… Whilst this reflects some of the important aspects of the film, it’s also reductive. It implies external and internal colonising forces struggling against a static traditional culture rather than a history of emergent exchanges within and without Korean culture. Some have argued that Ki-duk engages in “reverse Orientalism,” a self-exoticisation, essentialising national identity in a utopian pre-modern, pre-colonial imaginary as if such a space were retrievable, and uninflected by recent history (Faure). Likewise, one could designate these critics as re-orientalising, reducing through bifurcated Western categories (and as if the West isn’t far more complicated and always colonised/ing itself). Yet, it is exactly this multi-layered terrain upon which these categories converge and jostle that Ki-duk explores. Questions of orientalism, or reverse-orientalism also seem to ignore the very tangible, valued, and ubiquitous place of tradition in Korean culture; a tradition which isn’t static, but is both a ghost and a body within the present.

 

Crash Course in Buddhist thought

Put on your helmet, and assume I read maps badly:

Korean Buddhism (Seon) can be loosely placed within the Mahayana tradition (as per most East Asian countries), a tradition more communally oriented, ritualistic and universally oriented than the older, relatively orthodox Theravadan tradition (Vajrayana, the third, much smaller, main school practiced in Tibet). Korean Buddhism also draws somewhat upon Ch’an (Zen) sources which fall under the Mahayana tradition also. What I say here though applies – to my knowledge – to all the above. For the sake of convenience I’ll stick with the original pali terms for the most part.

The three marks of existence – noself, impermanence, dukkha

The Four Noble Truths

1. There is dhukka

2. dhukka arises (there is a ‘cause’ of dhukka)

3. dhukka can be extinguished (by eliminating its ‘causes’)

4. The way leading to the cessation of dhukka (The Middle Way (path))

All four are interrelated and equivalent. The total awareness of one simultaneously means the total awareness of all. Buddhists concepts and conceptions are highly interrelated, often paradoxically.

1. dhukka = suffering, conflict, unsatisfactoriness, unsubstationality, emptiness, and (most inclusive of all) anything that is impermanent (so happiness too)

The impermanence and flux of all things is like Heraclitus’ Phanta Rhei “There is no static being, no unchanging substratum…Change movement, is Lord of the Universe. Everything is in a state of becoming, of continual flux… You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” But for Buddhists, this includes the person (closer to Deleuze and Guattari): “The same man cannot step twice into the same river; for the so-called man who is only conflux of mind and body, never remains the same for two consecutive moments.’ (Piyadassi Thera p. 99)

2. dhukka arises because of desire/thirst and kamma (compare D & G); this includes desire of self, the idea of self, and the desire for permanence and existence – these are in large part the primary causes of suffering. dhukka then is the result of acting upon ignorance (ignorance of noself, impermanence, dhukka). As the monk’s master counsels, “Lust awakens the desire to possess, which ends in the intent to murder.” Kamma (Karma) is, in a sense, the historical organisation of the being; the being, a product of his/her past (compare D & G’s notion of becoming), whose desires are a consequence of his organisation, as such. Kamma continues after death, thus the cycle of existence, that which the Buddhist aims to cease (because it is suffering). Kamma is, in a sense, being (action) and can be either good or bad as desire can also be in the sense that they may lead to cessation of dhukka (it’s a process), thus “if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” Thus the seeds of the arising of dhukka is in dhukka itself, and so therefore the cessation of dhukka is also within dhukka, or “‘whatever is of the nature of arising, all that is of the nature of cessation.” Both forces of ‘internal’ agency and ‘external’ conditions lead to dukkha’s arising, and thus both too can help lead to dukkha’s cessation. No dualism here.

Confused yet? Good. I haven’t even got onto the Five Aggregates yet.

3. The cessation of dhukka is Nirodha. When dukkha ceases, and kamma no longer ‘causes’ dukkha, the cycle of existence, continuity and becoming, that is Samsara, may be ceased. This ceasing leads to Nibbana (Nirvana). Nibbana is also, then, Ultimate Truth/Reality and the total “blowing out.” However Nibbana becomes only after the final death of the Buddhist (though if I remember correctly a few extremely rare individuals may reach Nibbana in life – such as the historical Buddha, one amongst a few who’ve achieved such. How this makes sense in the scheme of things I’ve no fucking idea.)

4. Enlightenment is about discovering the truth; the Four Noble Truths. These truths can’t be taught, as such, but must be seen/known (thus all those Zen Koans for example). As Buddha said: ’One is one’s own refuge, who else could be the refuge?’ (Mahāparinibbāna-sutta) The Buddha is merely a guide, a mentor (such a relation is obviously demonstrated between the young Monk and his master in Spring…) The Middle Path seeks the middle in all things, refusing the extremes of polarities. Thus vs. being/non-being, life/death and so on.

Noself – this does not mean ‘I have no self’ as such, nor ‘I have a self.’ Similarly nibbana is not non-being. Rather concepts such as self and being/non-being are categories of thought that lead to dhukka.

Samsara – the cycle of existence

Birth, death, rebirth, redeath… Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring…

Ignorance and desire arise – so death arises. Thus when the ‘causes,’ ignorance, dukkha, are removed, so too is death. This is the doctrine of “co-dependent origination” (Pali: paticcasamuppada), a core formula in Buddhism (a re-formulation of the Noble Truths).

As one Buddhist puts it simply, “Are we moving from life to death? No! At any moment of our life we are living and at the same time we are dying…without dying there is no living, and without living there is no dying.”

In Buddhism life and death are inseparable. The aim is not to overcome death, but to be liberated from the life-death cycle, samsara. Clinging to life or clinging to death only perpetuates the circle. It is necessary to go beyond the interdependent and inseparable opposition. Desire too then is not opposed to death, but interdependent.

Samsara applies to all things – it is a profoundly non-anthropocentric view. All nature, all things suffer the problem of eternal generation and extinction. [quaint: as I write Modest Mouse's 3rd Planet is playing: " The universe is shaped exactly like the earth if you go/straight long enough you’ll end up where you were."]

Deleuze writes (and this will make sense later) “As the Chinese (or Japanese) philosopher would say, the world is the Circle, the pure “reserve” of events that are actualized in every self and realised in things one by one….” (The Fold, 2006 p120)

 

Some interpretation

I was unable to locate any information on this, but in Spring… I imagine the symbolism of the ‘seals’ with ideograms placed over the eyes and mouths, ‘shut,’ refers to the achievement of the cessation of dukkha; the cessation of samsara, the final passing. It is a shutting out as a dispersal of the self (the Body without Organs?). When the master does this, as a ritual prior to his suicide, it is structured to appear positive. When the initiate monk does this it is made to appear premature, infantile – suicide as an escape; an escape into non-being which would only perpetuate samsara whilst prefiguring the next life to be loaded up with the negative fruit of kamma.

The film is cyclically structured, ending where it began. Whilst Ki-duk seems to promote Buddhist thought and the view of samsara, he complicates things too. In the final scenes the new initiate is seen tormenting a turtle; a reflection of his master who when young tormented the snake, fish and frog. This torment prefigured his attachment to dukkha in the sexual relationship he has with his to-be wife, who he ends up murdering. “Lust awakens the desire to possess, which ends in the intent to murder.” Kim-duk seems to suggest that the logic of samsara is a hopeless one; that any positive movement (Nibbana) means nothing in a recurring universe in which murder and violence are eternal. Any positive movement, even the final passing away of a Buddhist, is but a pre-figuration of the violence of samsara, a cycle which remains in the balance or at least definitely not improving. The closed life of the Buddhist monk may be a perfect existence, but he still requires the violence of that which is outside.

Whilst not anti-Buddhist, it seems a pessimistic film. If there is an anti-modernity in Spring… it is entwined with a complex interweaving of tradition, religion, contemporaneity and even postmodernism. Ki-duk does not only paint an ideal pastoral image invaded by contemporaneity, but questions that pastoral image also as a possible triumphal illusion. The resolution to the film is continuation of a cycle of violence in which neither tradition nor modernity can be disentangled and figured as the cause.

Despite all that the film’s a pleasure. It provoked in me a serene optimism despite it all. Buddhist then? Samsara; such is life, let us be equanimous about it?

 

Postmodernism and Buddhism

A number of theorists have (problematically) discussed Buddhism’s relation to Postmodernism. Both Derrida and Barthes focused on a number of aspects of Japanese culture, which find resonances (and some origins) in Buddhism. They argued that Japan, particularly Zen Buddhism, was already largely decentred, non-logocentric. The idea of an ‘oriental’ nothingness slipped in wonderfully with postmodernist notions of the absence of self-presence, signified etc; open-endedness, empty spaces; the non-essential, non teleological nature of Buddhist thought (non-teleological in the sense that there is no ultimate truth, but the truth of nothingness). These were compared to Western epistemologies and ontologies of Being; a history of numerous centres (essence, Man, subject, consciousness, being). Unlike some critics (including Japanese critics) Derrida disagrees that Japan is nearly as deconstructed as some would like, arguing many centred structures remain (he wryly cites the great interest in Japan in deconstruction as evidence – a number of books on the subject became bestsellers).

Deconstruction and the logic of différance:
Any category of presence, being, or identity can be deconstructed into a “play of differences.” Each term is infected by the trace of its difference. Each term is non-identical, rather eternally deferred into a chain of (negative) differences, never reaching a final signified – the illusory transcendental signified (e.g. God). Signifieds are only a play of floating signifiers; any sign empties out into a network of differential relations.

Decentring
Centres are merely signs/categories/identities that have become absolutised as having self-identity (~ Nietzsche on metaphoricity of language).
Any sign with centre/self-identity, through deconstruction, can be fractured into différance, a chain of differences/deferrals.
Through deconstruction, all centres appear as trace, the interplay of presence and absence, identity and difference). These differential traces (metaphysical centres) including the individual self are placed under erasure (written with an X) signifying presence which is simultaneously absent; an absence which is simultaneously present; aporia – subverting its grounds, dispersing meanings into indeterminacy – chain of signifiers. Vs. being/non-being.

Zen is a kind of ‘culmination,’ if you will, of the deconstructionist thought of Buddhism, parting from those Buddhisms that state the Buddha-nature as absolute centre, though these too are highly decentred and deconstructionist. The practice of Zen Buddhism, some have argued, is a process of deconstruction; a process in which the Buddhist learns to use structures only to deconstruct them, slowly finding his/her way to a pure unmediated state devoid of structures. You could call it an aesthetic-ethical form of living, or becoming.

For Buddhist theorist/theologist Magliola, the Buddhist logic of śūnyatā (Chinese: kung, Japanese: kū – the truth of the void) is a differential logic structurally isomorphic with the logic of différance. Śūnyatā is absolute nothingness. This isn’t a nihilism (again being/non-being make no sense in Buddhist thought), rather an infinite openness devoid of centres, including the anthropocentric. Buddhist theorist/theologistNishitani writes, “The field of śūnyatā is a field whose centre is everywhere.” Via the logic of śūnyatā, then, is achieved a deconstruction of metaphysical centres,

“a multicentring of the reality continuum wherein each and every event is now affirmed in its positive suchness as a unique centre. That is to say, since the infinite openness of śūnyatā or emptiness is devoid of all absolute centers… now all phenomena are affirmed as individual centers in the locus of absolute nothingness” [deconstructionist negative difference, or Deleuzian positive difference?]

Another Buddhist theorist/theologist, Nagarjuna, writes

“Śūnyatā is fundamentally non-Śūnyatā with a cross mark…[Śūnyatā – Derrida’s erasure]…That is the true and ultimate Śūnyatā. This means that true Śūnyatā empties not only everything else, but also empties itself [BwO?]. Through its self-emptying it makes everything to exist as it is and to work as it does. Śūnyatā should not be understood in its noun form but in its verbal form because it is a pure and dynamic function of all-emptying”

This would achieve Nirohda, the appearance of Ultimate reality, the cessation of the cycle. Similar to the Tao which D & G mention: “’Tao, a field of immanence in which desire lacks nothing” (ATP p.157)

 

Some Theory: aesthetics, silence, the irreducible, the body

Some thievery, forgery, vandalism, littering ensues:

The virtual/void

For D & G the void/virtual is not nothingness or disorder, but like Buddhists, immanence, the field of all possible particles without fixity. Nature (the universe) is emptiness, immediate, virtual, mysterious: “a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless” (Kawabata – Buddhist novelist).

A Chinese Zen master of T’ang dynasty: “When I did not yet practice Zen Buddhism, to me a mountain was a mountain, and water was water; after I got insight into the truth of Zen, I thought that a mountain was not a mountain and water was not water; but now that I have really attained to the abode of final rest, to me a mountain is really a mountain and water is really water”

Śūnyatā is saying ‘yes to all things’ (echoes of Nietzsche’s positive nihilism). All things are affirmed as they are in their positivity on the field of immanence/nothingness. Irreducibility becomes through “no-thingness.” A Buddhist saying: ““differentiation as it is is equality; equality as it is is differentiation.” The irreducible singularities and particularities are not merely that, they are not merely nonessential but rather prototypes of the universal. Frampton describes film-thought as uniting the many, as a non reductive pluralistic unity.

There is no exhaustion of things and individual things make the universal possible. Deleuze writes “As the Chinese (or Japanese) philosopher would say, the world is the Circle, the pure “reserve” of events that are actualized in every self and realised in things one by one.” (The Fold, 2006 p120) And again: “Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities. Every multiplicity involves both actual and virtual elements. There is no purely actual object. Every actual is surrounded by a haze of virtual images…”

Aesthetics, the virtual, creation and concepts

Rancière:

If the reader is reader is fond of an analogy, aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.’

Concepts and images give stability to the virtual. My proposition again: Buddhism is a philosophical aesthetic ethics: the creation of concepts and images so as to deconstruct concepts and images (through percepts and affects) so as to achieve the virtual; a form of living to extinguish living.

For Nietzsche representation and reality are collapsed. “Thus concepts work like metaphors, and change our experience of the world” (Frampton) Frampton’s Filmosophy following Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze. Film-thought and Buddhist reality:

“Meditative thinking becomes a poeticising of thought, an attempt to move thinking beyond language, towards a ‘primordial poetry’ – as all poeticizing begins with thinking”

So film-thought, for Frampton, can open us up to the plane of immanence. Instead of reference, aesthetic forms which open up to infinity, the virtual, no-thingness. Śūnyatā aims to free experience from identity and causality, from confining forms opening up experience to the unheard and unseen of the virtual. Frampton:

“Filming is a free and open way of apprehending something; a shining-through of non-essential being…a letting go; a kind of thinking beyond simple representation; a disjunctive kind of judgement”

The body

Kim Ki-duk has said:

“The reason that in my movies there are people who do not talk is because something deeply wounded them…Because of these disappointments they lost their faith and trust and stopped talking altogether. The violence that they turn to, I prefer to call a kind of body language. I would like to think of it as more of a physical expression rather than just negative violence. The scars and wounds which mark my figures are the signs of experiences which young people go through, in an age when they can not really respond to outside traumas.”

And speaking of his film Breath: “I wanted to highlight the difficulty of social and human relations — so much so that you find it hard to breathe.” Evidently Ki-duk thinks about the body and affect, including the body of the viewer.

Terry Eagleton writes: ‘Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.’

For the Buddhist actualisations are necessarily impermanent, dukkha. The Buddhist aims to overcome all actualisations; dispersing him/herself into the virtual. In Buddhism, particularities, singularities including those of sensation and perception are aestheticised into a deconstructive, deconstitutive system; a provisional, self-destructive mediating system in which conceptual and somatic experience move from recognition to the unmediated virtual. A utopian system of judgement aimed at jettisoning judgement. Śūnyatā Śūnyatā

This differs to Deleuze’s becoming. Frampton writes “The image of thought…guides the creation of concepts: “as it unfolds, branches out and mutates, [it] inspires a need to keep on creating new concepts, not through any external determinism but through a becoming that carries the problems themselves along with it.” Not Arborescent, nor Rhizomatic, Buddhism aims for lesser particles.

When the master monk closes his eyes to the world his subjection to the disciplines of Buddhist life disperse; he becomes both self-empty and emptied of everything else; both self-identical and nothing – the world is seen as it is. The closing of his eyes is symbolic (the final seeing; seeing). He has achieved the cessation of samsara. He ‘enters’ Nibbana, the virtual.

Deleuze writes: “As the Chinese (or Japanese) philosopher would say, the world is the Circle, the pure “reserve” of events that are actualized in every self and realised in things one by one….” The novitiate’s carving of the ideograms, decidely bodily, is a tracing of the carceral circle; the particularities of the virtual affect a corporeal deconstructive release.

 

Left wanting? The violence of representation

Optimistically one could think of Ki-duk’s film as a kind of Buddhist prayer wheel, an aid to the achievement of enlightenment, a kind of low level form of movement into the Middle Way. Or less optimistically it can be conceived of as a tale. This is where I think the problems of the film arise, and why perhaps it receives both great interest in the West and little in South Korea. Ki-duk’s film is, aesthetically and formally, quite typical of traditional Western film. Representational, and not at all a thinking film in Frampton’s conception. It is far indeed from a koan. Before elaborating, some non-Buddhist examples of Asian deconstructionist aesthetics:

Derrida wrote of on ideograms:
- made up of images; free play of images
- decentring of presence; différance
- Vs. logocentrism and transcendent being
- A non-centred non-centring centre
(I know of a few Chinese artists who’ve played with these aspects of ideograms, often enquiring into the nature of inter-cultural flows etc. e.g Xu Bing)

Barthes wrote on the Japanese aesthetics of yugen as open ‘texts,’ plurality of meanings, unfathomable mysteries, can only see one side, voids and blackness, dislocating reality into multiple perspectives.

The temple itself in Spring… seems to be decentred. Floating, it moves on the lake. Ki-Duk films the temple both to appear moving in relation to a centred world (when he films from the inside the world moves), and centred in relation to a moving world (when he films from the outside the temple moves). The temple follows the logic of différance. Nishitani: “The field of śūnyatā is a field whose center is everywhere.”

This is but one representation amongst numerous in Spring… But does the representation of such not undermine itself, representation being at odds with the Buddhist principles I’ve discussed? Productive of dukkha? Isn’t the film itself, then, to a large degree centred, arborescent? Similarly the film is structured so that we identify with the main character. Rather than the power of film-thought, or the (time-)image, we remain trapped in a sympathetic identification for all the poetic imagery. Cause and effect. Presence and absence. Being and non-being. Samsara. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…

And yet, I still feel something exceeds this; something not bound to the representational violence. A dash of that ‘primordial’ poetry. Perhaps, contingent upon a situated viewer, it is variously instrumental both to the cessation of dukkha and the arising of dukkha. Thus the title. The film is not titled Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring… The ellipses falls in between Winter and a final Spring, the last rebirth. It is then an ellipses within which may reside an eternity; an eternity in which the trajectories of different temporalities and cultural histories collide and an eternity full of the promises of both release and violence.

 

Some links and possibilities

Some critics have criticised the film’s misogyny. I agree. The characters in the film are decentred, or approach decentring but this is achieved through centring women as woman and then annihilating her. This is not deconstruction but destruction. The impossibility of becoming at the cost of oppositional identities.

It’d be interesting to think of the Christian aspects in the film. For example, the disciplining of the body, the Christian ethics of redemption, penance, penitence, and sacrifice. What part do these play in problematising the Buddhist ethic, or do their presence in the film underline the efficacy of Buddhism? Also issues of Christian masochism.

What of love in the film? Particularly that had between the master and novice.

In Spring… Nature serves as a decentred narrator, a narrator caught up in eternal recurrence?

 

I like this quote from Indiewire: “”Time,” the thirteenth film by that most disposable of Asian auteurs, Kim Ki-duk, should finally, definitively, expose the filmmaker’s patented layering of ambiguities as nothing more than the tawdry covering-up of an empty imagination” (my emphasis)

Interview: Korea’s Enfant Terrible Grows Up: Kim Ki-Duk Talks About “Spring, Summer…” at Indiewire [http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_040402kim.html]

Interview with Kim Ki-duk at Senses of Cinema

Interview with Kim Ki-duk at blog harrylimetheme

NY Times Review

The Kim Ki-duk page at Darcy Paquet’s informative koreanfilm.org

References that would have been incredibly helpful but which I couldn’t get:
Mary Bryden, Deleuze and Religion (2001) (the only book on the topic it seems)
Glass, Working Emptiness: Toward a Third Reading of Emptiness in Buddhism and Postmodern Thought (including Deleuzian theory)