People throw around the phrase “zen” while knowing zero about “Zen,” so while I feel people in the US and Europe could learn more about Buddhism, the documentary “Kūkai” directed Yue Ye is not the vehicle where enlightenment will be found.
In Los Angeles, it is worth knowing about Kūkai, the founder of Shingon (True Word) Buddhism. In 816, he built a monastery on Mount Kōya. In Little Tokyo, a district in Downtown Los Angeles, there is the Koyasan Buddhist Temple that was founded in 1912 and is one of the oldest existing Buddhist temples in North America.
According to Britannica, Shingon “emphasizes spells, magic formulas, ceremonials, and masses for the dead.” It also writes that “The sect believes that this wisdom may be developed and realized through special ritual means employing body, speech, and mind, such as the use of symbolic gestures (mudras), mystical syllables (Dhahran), and mental concentration (yoga). The whole is intended to around a sense of the pervading spiritual presence of the Buddha that lies inherent in all living things.” That description seems a bit biased and another reason why people should learn more about Buddhism.
In any case, Britannica further notes Kūkai (空海) was born in 774 to an aristocratic family. He traveled to the T’ang Dynasty capital, Chang-an, in 804. There he met Hui-kuo (746-805), a master of esoteric Buddhism, and studied under him. Returning to Japan in 806, Kūkai began to promulgate his teachings and in 1816, he build the monastery on Mount Kōya. Kūkai died 22 April 835.
The film has supposedly won eight international awards, including Best Documentary at the London Independent Film Awards, but I have to wonder about the competition. The documentary primarily consists of enough lovely footage of mountains, sunrises, sunlight filtering through a variety of natural formations and vast greenery that stacks and stacks of Hallmark cards could be made for the next decade. The director found multiple ways for using solar flare to suggest enlightenment, from soft diffused flares, to starbursts, to veiling flare to ghosting.
In the documentary, writer Yaoming Long tells us rather than showing us and for the most part, the film is narrated in voice over and we never get an idea of who Kūkai was on an intimate level.
Just when you think things are over with the death of Kūkai, the script circles back. It makes no sense at all. Neither do some of the visuals which give us art from hundreds of years after Kūkai. I love the impressive and dramatic gate guardians at Kōyasan, but those two wooden Niō (15.7 feet tall) were sculpted during the Edo period (1603-1868) by artists Koi and Uncho. Kūkai died in 835.
If you are unfamiliar with Buddhism, you might be confused by the different names. The man who was born as Saeki no Mao (佐伯 眞魚), became Kūkai which literally means “air” and “sea,” and was then posthumously known as Kōbō Daishi ((弘法 大師). Yet there are other reasons to study Kūkai because he was also a poet, artist and calligrapher. One wishes his poetry might have been explored a bit more in the documentary. While he is considered a leading figure of Japanese Buddhism, some of the things claimed in the film aren’t true or are based on legend.
The documentary asserts that Kūkai didn’t die and that he is in a state of eternal meditation inside his mausoleum on Mount Kōya. Unlike most Japanese, Kūkai wasn’t cremated. The documentary also asserts less spiritual legends are true, such as that he created the phonetic kana script. Kana was not created by a single person and began with the Nara period Man’yōgana. Experts say that katakana was developed by Buddhist monks and hiragana was developed by court women and scribes during the early Heian period.
In the film, Kūkai is represented by AI that gives a creepy rather than a holy presence. Although Kūkai is supposed to age and most East Asians age gracefully, the AI representation of Kūkai remains oddly young in some aspects and has the added feature of Miami Vice stubble. The AI adds to the general feeling that there was too much exaltation and not enough critical examination in the making of this film. This is only for the faithful who verge on fanatical. In Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles.