By Donald H. Harrison 

At the suggestion of my friend Chris Micoine, I watched Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, on my home DVD player.  It was a Buddhist tale: a beautifully photographed story of a Korean boy growing up in the middle of a lake in the home of a Buddhist monk.  Once, after rowing ashore, the boy caught and tied to stones a fish, a frog and a snake.  Unknown to him, the master observed all this.  That night, while the boy slept, the master tied a stone to his back.  The boy cried when he awakened , but the monk told him the stone must remain on his back until he found each of the creatures and released them from their agonies.  If any of them had died, the monk added, their deaths would remain on the boy’s heart.  It turned out the frog had lived, but the fish and snake had died in their struggles.  The boy wept.  End first act.

In the act entitled “summer,” a girl who needs a cure from some disease, perhaps melancholia, comes to live with the monk and the boy, who now is a young man. Their hormones urging them on, the couple rows across the lake where they repeatedly have sex.  Each night, when he thinks the master is asleep, the young man crosses the small house to the girl’s sleeping mat.  So intense is their passion, they sneak to the boat late at night to copulate under the stars.  The monk finds them curled up together, and asleep, in the bottom of his rowboat.  He asks the girl if she is now cured  of her ailment, and she says that she is.  The monk tells her it is therefore time to go home.  The boy in passion follows her, but not before the monk warns him that such lust can lead to murder.

Act three: fall.  The boy, now a man, returns as a fugitive  to the little home in the middle of the tranquil lake.  His wife had cheated on him, and he had killed her in a fit of jealousy. After beating and tying up the offender,  the monk paints upon the deck of his home the words of a wise Buddhist sutra. He instructs the young man to carve each of the many characters in the sutra carefully, in order that he might meditate on its meaning and learn to control his passions.  Police come, but they permit the young man to finish carving the sutra, such respect do they have for the monk, whom they call “Holy One.”  After the fugitive falls asleep in exhaustion, the police help the master fill in the carved out letters with bright colors.  Then they take the young man away to prison.  Some time later, the monk covers his eyes, mouth, nose and ears  then rows to the middle of the lake. There,  he sets himself on fire.

Act four: winter.  Years have passed.. Released  from prison, the young man has begun to gray.  He now sets out to follow in his master’s spiritual footsteps, living by himself in the house on the lake.  One day, a woman with covered face comes to him with a child.  During the night, she abandons the boy, but while trying to cross the lake back to the shore, she falls through the ice and dies.  The monk is left to raise the boy.   He ties a millstone to his waist, takes a small idol, and wiith the greatest of difficulty, hikes to a peak of the high mountains surrounding the lake—  there meditating and spiritually atoning for the taking of his wife’s life.  Cleansed, he returns to the house on the lake to raise the boy.

Act five:  It is spring.  The boy plays on the deck with a turtle he has found.  Cruelly, he turns it on his back.  Unknown to him, the master observed all this.

What universal themes! Are such really the seasons of life?  Are our sins the bonds which tightly encircle our souls?  I thank Christian for turning this Jew onto the Buddhist tale. 

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The day after I posted the story above, my friend Chris wrote messaged me: "What you missed was the reason the monk set himself on fire."  He went on to explain that the monk felt guilty over telling the youth that lust leads to murder "thereby imbedding the thought" into the young man. "By setting himself on fire,  he made sure that the young man  would never forget that his actions had such deep ramifications."