"Why Has Boddhidharma Left For The East?" (1989)

(a corean film by Bae Yong-Kyun... his first of only two films)

[The elements even for an alchemist are abstract:
Fire burns.
Water runs.
The wind blows.
The earth stays;
It waits
&
shudders.
Of the energies of man,
& the rites of women -
who knows why
the devout
leave
for where
the sun rises?]

A young man named Yong-Nan leaves his family to become a monk for no apparent reason. Only when face to face with the Master Hye-Gok he tells the sage: "I wanted at any cost to reach enlightenment. My body ached for it." It was as simple as that. The Master looks upon the acolyte and suggests that he stay with him until he cracks the nut of a single insignificant koan:

'When the moon in your mind waxes beneath the water, where does the master of your being go?'

The acolyte stays with the Master Hye-Gok, whom the brethren referred to as a single beacon shining atop the dark mountain air. Solitude's best for those who burn hotly.

With the Master too stays a young school age boy, hardly 10 years old, an orphan whom he's adopted for inexplicable reasons. Perhaps it was the mere thought of seeing a celibate old monk carrying around a baby boy on his back that caught his fancy. Anyhow the boy is left to roam through the forest at day and do as he pleases. Rather than books, the boy's rudiments are the stones he flings, the mountain stream through which he wades, the soil on which his bare feet leave imprints.

One day the boy, for inexplicable reasons, flings a stone at a cuckoo and brings it down. It is not dead, but its mate searches for it as the boy takes it hostage and brings it with him to his room. He stores it in a secret compartment and he feeds it by candlelight as he lists. All the while the mate watches him from afar; it follows him everywhere he goes and watches him as he contemplates the sudden death of the cuckoo, which dies abruptly for inexplicable reasons. The boy comes to face the fact that he has killed the cuckoo: that is his first thought. He has killed something through selfishness. He decides to bury it under a rock. The mate perches on a branch and watches the boy as he buries the cuckoo under a hollow rock...

Days later the boy returns to the burial place and uncovers the rock. He shudders. He sees what he has never seen before: maggots swarming the corrupted body of a bird. The mate watches him from afar, but no thoughts are in its head.

The boy reflects by the fire that the twig of wood burns when he holds it to the crackling stove. He observes the twig as it's eaten by flames. He asks Yong-Nan, the acolyte, a question.

'Why do we come from this world in which birds are eaten by maggots and twigs consumed by flames?'

'The world is mundane.'

'Why is the world mundane?'

'No one has peace in it. So they sap it of its meaning.'

...