Samsara

“There are things we must unlearn, in order to learn them. And there are things we must own, in order to renounce them”; a quote from Pan Nalin’s film Samsara. Samsara is the endless cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. In Buddhism it simply refers to rebirth.

 

In one of the beginning scenes of the film, the question “how can we stop a drop of water from ever drying?” is shown engraved onto a stone. At the end of the film the protagonist, after reaching a height in his spiritual journey, goes back to that stone and turns it upside down and finds the answer: “by dropping it in the sea.”

 

The film Samsara was a tremendous experience. I remember watching an equally powerful Korean film with a surprisingly similar theme a few years ago; it had the elegant title of “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring”.