I’ve long wanted to make a movie on something like the sneeze that goes around the world, or the dollar bill that goes from hand to hand. A cinematic display of the layers of interconnection large and small that make up our lives every single day, through joys and sorrows and complacent idylls and wild shatterings of expectations like lockdowns and COVID. A movie about how even in the most turbulent times, some things remain true. Maybe that sneeze started in Battery Park in New York City, and by the time we see someone’s nose start to wiggle in just-about-to-sneeze mode in Dubai, we have settled back into the most salient truth of all of our lives: We are all connected. 

Watching the film The Same Storm, which came out in September 2021, it struck me that writer and director Peter Hedges had just made my longed-for film about interconnection and intersectionality, and made it with great skill. The film consists of twenty-four actors filming vignettes on laptops and iPhones during the early days of the pandemic. No film crews and no trailers involved. “The Same Storm revolves around our ache to connect and the extraordinary lengths we go in order to,” the filmmakers say. “We crafted a multi-protagonist story that explores how—in spite of the pandemic and the havoc it has caused in a nation convulsing on multiple fronts—we remain connected through various technologies and platforms that have quickly become a critical part of our daily lives.” 

Interconnection tips over into intersectionality—we are each more than one thing, not so easily reduced or even categorized. Maybe that nurse on the screen, in addition to having a patient, has a mother, and a racial identity, and a lot of longing in his heart to not feel so alone. Everyone is kind of complicated that way. Some facets of our being are sources of power, some of disconnection, some of clarity, some of confusion. These unchanging truths greet us as we swirl through the extreme change of our recent traumatic experiences of the pandemic. 

How close to the time of a traumatic event one can write or produce or create a work that is more art than trauma is a subject of much debate. I’ve gotten various pieces of advice from different people about that topic, along with watching varied cultures around the world work on healing in real time while sometimes also producing some of the greatest literature the world has known, and sometimes producing, in terms of public art … pretty much nothing. Any healing on any level itself is an awful lot. We go down the chakras, as a friend of mine cleverly said. Sometimes our main job is just to survive. And brava that we do.

A lot of people don’t want to look back at all right now, and you can read that in the dismissive language chosen in some of the reviews of works done soon after a traumatic time. But I’m so glad that Peter, who is a friend, and his producers, who are also friends, did, and that those amazing actors got a chance to perform, despite the reported awkwardness of the technology or having to do their own makeup. Acting on that level really is a matter of the soul, and there we were at that point in time, so often cut off, more and more isolated from one another, and for those for whom making art means collaboration, mostly out of luck. 

The actors in The Same Storm include Mary Louise Parker, Sandra Oh, Ron Livingstone, Jin Ha, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Raul Castillo, Joel Delafuente, Noma Dumezweni, and Elaine May (in her first film performance in twenty-one years!) The performances are luminous. This isn’t a mere recounting (which in the end wouldn’t be all that enticing.) This level of storytelling reveals that there could be a way forward. There must be, please, and look! There is.

It has something to do with empathy, and compassion.

I once heard the Dalai Lama on creativity, as part of a panel at Emory University, responding to a question about suffering, transformation, and art. 

He was quite interesting. He said that in Tibet, beautiful art was considered so because of the inner transformation artists went through during the act of creation. Had they become more enlightened, kinder, more deeply aware? To him, that’s what made a poem or a sculpture or painting more valuable, worthy of being held in higher esteem. Alas, we tend to have different criteria. 

Watching The Same Storm I’m tempted to ask Peter Hedges what he thinks of the Dalai Lama’s answer. Gratefully seeing the extant hope shimmering across the screen, remembering the despair, I have a feeling I know the answer.

♦

This article was first published on November 18, 2022. 

The post ‘The Same Storm’: A Lockdown Look Back appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Each evening a crisply attired maître d’ welcomes a small group of people to a wooded island as they disembark from a ferry that has brought them from the mainland. This is an island that has been terraformed into a destination restaurant. Ushering them along the shore with a steely hauteur, the maître d’ (Elsa, played by a marvelous Hong Chau) explains with pride how all the ingredients of the evening’s meal will have been harvested from the island’s delicate natural systems—the tide pools, the forests, the gardens, and the fields. What then surfaces is a bitter mélange of systemic violence, both visible and invisible. The Menu, directed by Mark Mylod, provides Buddhist viewers with a way to reflect on the three poisons in their systemic form, and on the ecological implications of dharma as a vehicle for transformation that integrates the personal and the social.  

What unfolds is a grand guignol indictment of contemporary grind-work culture with an ethical slant relevant not just to a 20th-century Christian moral framework, but to contemporary Buddhism as well. Moving inland, the steely Elsa guides the diners through the kitchen staff’s Spartan living quarters—two rows of beds, as straight and spare as a military barracks. Hawthorne is not just a restaurant, she explains, it is a family. So far we have been keeping company with Hawthorne fanboy Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) along with his date Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), whose name Elsa does not find on the evening’s reservation list. This discordant note points toward the horror-movie genre, linking Margot to the final girl, the one left standing at the end, the one who survives. As it turns out, the horror in The Menu is one we all are more familiar with than we might wish—how the high-end luxury market of our new Gilded Age is often fueled by extravagant suffering.

Once they are seated and chatting amiably, we are introduced to the evening’s guests: a pretentious restaurant reviewer with her sycophantic companion, a trio of shark-like finance bros looking for any opening to throw their weight around, an older wealthy couple masking their genteel rage at each other with a pleasant smile, and an over-the-hill action movie star (memorably played by John Leguizamo) who has sold his soul to commerce, dining tonight with his young assistant and lover. Finally, Chef Julian Slowik, the Prospero of this Fantasy Island, appears. Drifting ghost-like through the kitchen in his white coat, he calls his guests to attention with a thunderous clap. Played with a haunted reserve by Ralph Fiennes, Slowik has designed the evening’s menu as a single culinary narrative—a hallmark that sets Hawthorne apart from all the other Michelin destinations around the globe. 

Beginning with the amuse-bouche, each course is announced with one of Slowik’s deafening claps, along with a brief statement explaining how it fits into the evening’s menu. The dozen members of Hawthorne’s kitchen staff labor to make each presentation Zen-elegant, echoing the spare compositions cinematographer Peter Deming used earlier to frame the island’s landscapes. And yet Mylod does not go overboard lampooning the preciousness of restaurant culture, offering just enough foodie porn so that our mirror neurons respond when one of the guests finally samples the fare. 

Initially, at least, the film instead emphasizes the spiritual dimension of food. He tells the guests that they are “eating the island itself.” “Taste,” Slowik instructs, “savor… be mindful.”  Explaining his adulation to the skeptical Margot, Tyler states that chefs are more worthy of worship than movie stars or musicians because “they play with the ingredients of life itself,” and work “at the edge of the abyss, where God works too.” 

Tyler’s obsequiousness is appalling to Margot. “You are paying him to serve you,” she points out, drawing the reality of the power relationships at Hawthorne into the light. As if taking its cue from her, the spiritual aura Slowik has conjured begins to dissipate with the menu’s second course. Bread has always been the food of the poor, he explains, and so tonight, since Hawthorne’s guests are not poor, they will get no bread. The diners are scandalized and titillated as the servers distribute elegant platters of condiments sans the bread itself. Food as a history of class, we are told, is among Slowik’s favorite themes. 

The only one who sees through the odd gesture of the breadless bread course is Margot, and it is here that she and Slowik first cross swords. When he demands to know why she is not eating, she sensibly replies that she is perfectly capable of deciding when it is time to eat. 

Dejected, Slowik retreats to a table in the corner where an older woman sits alone, drinking. When Slowik next introduces the menu’s third course, we learn that this woman is his mother and that she is, indeed, an alcoholic. One night when he was a boy, Slowik explains, his enraged, drunken father tried to strangle his mother with a telephone cord. Slowik saved her by stabbing him in the thigh with a pair of kitchen scissors—and this memorable event is commemorated in the barbecued chicken thighs served up next! Each serving is brought to the tables with the chicken thigh impaled by a pair of tiny scissors. The chicken, it turns out, is part of Slowik’s trademark taco dish, for which the guests have been issued tortillas laser-printed with images pointing toward crimes they have committed. Examining a tortilla embossed with incriminating accounting data, one of the finance bros laments “a taco that could hold up in court.” 

Despite the familiar way in which we discover that this seemingly random collection of strangers is not so random after all, and that Slowik is there to enact justice for their sins, The Menu continues to deliver its surprises with droll confidence. “All a part of the menu,” is the refrain Slowik uses to calm his guests as the evening darkens. The casting pays off here, as Fiennes portrays the chef as a man who has already died and is just waiting for the news to finally register. 

Chef Slowik adheres to the philosophy of serving his customer, quite literally it turns out, and he has planned this evening’s menu to be his final masterpiece and swan song. “You represent the ruin of my art and my life,” he tells his guests with a taut, genial smile. The deep pain in Slowik’s eyes speaks to us—having met his mother we understand how childhood trauma has left him defenseless against the service economy’s predatory imperatives. 

Violence comes first in The Menu, but the film’s real taboo is this element of class conflict. Confronting Margot in the women’s room where she has gone to sneak a cigarette, Slowik bemoans his life of unrelenting pressure. Slowik’s misguided devotion to “pleasing people he will never know” has elevated Hawthorne to a price point where he now only feeds those who, like hungry ghosts, can never be satisfied. We sense here a systemic dimension of Slowik’s woundedness—he is a victim, finally, of the consumer economy. Margot too, it turns out, is a refugee from the implacable economic imperatives producing the luxury and excess on display at Hawthorne. Like Slowik and his staff, she is a “shit shoveler,” a service industry worker who knows what it is like to have to serve bad customers. 

A capacity to shine a light on the dynamics of wealth has been creeping back into popular entertainment recently after being banished for several decades. Mylod is a veteran of the acerbic series Succession, for example, and in The Menu he again leavens the sociopolitical critique with humor. How, The Menu asks, are we being harmed by our passive complicity with social and economic systems that enact violence on others and on the planet itself? The film’s early evocation of the link between the alimentary and the ecological returns now to underscore our complicity in the harms that system causes. 

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“Victorians denied sex; our modern youth-obsessed culture rejects death. Failing to face up to this basic fact of life results in great fear and suffering. Tukdam: Between Worlds shines a light on this inescapable part of life and gives occasion to reflect on what a good death might be.” —Donagh Coleman 

Death awaits us all. And what happens to our consciousness at the time of death continues to captivate people’s imagination. In Tukdam: Between Worlds, a new film by Finnish-Irish-American filmmaker Donagh Coleman (available for streaming), we get a glimpse into a contemporary exploration of death and dying through renowned neuroscientist Richard Davidson and his team’s investigation into the Tibetan Buddhist phenomenon of tukdam (var. thukdam). Blurring the line separating life and death, this documentary provides a rich discussion in its search to understand one of life’s great mysteries.

Tukdam means to hold or bind (dam) the mind (tug). In this advanced state of meditation, the practitioner’s consciousness remains in a state of awareness or deep meditation focused at the heart center. In Himalayan Buddhist traditions, those who practice tukdam at the time of death are reportedly able to slow down the decomposition of their body and remain in this meditative state. Practitioners who achieve this consciously controlled death reportedly display certain characteristics: the body remains fresh for days and even weeks after death; there is no rotting scent of decomposition; the skin remains supple; a warmth around the heart area remains, even though there is no heartbeat; and the body often remains upright in a meditative posture. Tibetan Buddhists consider this an advanced meditative state of “mind over matter,” and such control of consciousness during dying can reportedly lead to full awakening, or, at least, to a positive reincarnation.

Tibetan Buddhist masters have long studied the process by which consciousness leaves the body and have transmitted those teachings for centuries. Not considered a magical or miraculous event, the practice of tukdam requires discipline, training, effort, and the right motivation. When master meditators fully realize this practice, they can also help lead others out of suffering and ignorance. These rituals and practices are an integral part of Tibetan culture and beliefs.

Tukdam: Between Worlds provides an accessible introduction to this death practice, focusing on real-life cases and the scientists investigating them. Including interviews with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, American scientists, embalmers, and Tibetan doctors with backgrounds in both Buddhism and Tibetan medicine, this documentary juxtaposes the Western scientific quest to understand tukdam with Buddhist understandings of the continuity of consciousness and reincarnation. Coleman, a follower of Tibetan Buddhism and currently pursuing a PhD in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley, expertly weaves together both scientific and human stories into a narrative of differing viewpoints on death, the limits of scientific investigations, and the extraordinary, and often mysterious, qualities and capabilities of the mind. 

Although sympathetic toward Buddhism and friends of the Dalai Lama, Davidson and his team of scientists clearly want to examine tukdam through Western scientific methods. Highlighting the tension (but also confounding agreement) between the scientific and Buddhist approaches to consciousness, one of the Tibetan doctors in the documentary points out the futility of trying to pinpoint consciousness through physical characteristics and brain activity alone, exercises he sees as illustrating the limits of their Western scientific understanding and approaches. Despite the team’s best efforts to scientifically measure why these physically dead bodies were not decaying, the results were inconclusive. Acknowledging that the phenomenon is rare and unusual, they are continuing their investigations. 

Having recently experienced the unexpected death of someone close to me, this documentary struck an emotional chord through its reminder of the fragility of life. As a practitioner who has received the empowerment and transmission of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of phowa, another form of conscious dying, I understand the difficulty of such practices. If the mind is not prepared or trained for the moment of death, then controlling the death process and guiding the consciousness to a good rebirth will be difficult, if not impossible. And that training requires real discipline, effort, and motivation. Tukdam: Between Worlds does not explain the intensive training process required, but it successfully reveals the mental and physical possibilities during death. In that respect, it was both an inspiring and moving film.

After a screening at the Dharamshala International Film Festival on November 6, 2022, Coleman shared his motivations for making the documentary. Having made other films about Tibetan culture, in 2012, while visiting a Tibetan monastery in India, he heard reports of a well-known Tibetan lama in Nepal in a state of tukdam that piqued his interest. He started interviewing some monks at the monastery about the phenomenon, which eventually led to the creation of the documentary. 

During the Q&A session, a participant asked Coleman why he presents only one example of a female tukdam and why the documentary lacks the voices of female practitioners. Coleman acknowledged the existence of other recorded examples of female tukdam, but said they were unable to gain access to them, despite trying, and thus could not include them in the film. When I later pressed this question in person, Coleman revealed that he interviewed the well-known British Tibetan Buddhist nun Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, but did not include the conversation due to time and narrative constraints. (I requested that he consider releasing the footage in the future.)

Like searching for the jewel hidden in the mud, the journey to discover our true mind sometimes requires a leap of faith—a confidence that the jewel is indeed waiting to be revealed. Similarly, our perception of life and death depends on how we choose to perceive them. Although the scientists in Tukdam: Between Worlds did not come to any final conclusions about why the bodies stay in such a good state, by looking closely at the practices and beliefs around tukdam, they demonstrate a sentiment attributed to Helen Keller, that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, but must be felt in the heart. 

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“When there are problems, we must be able to provide help, because the purpose of [the Tibetan Children’s Village] is to serve the Tibetan children,” says Jetsun Pema, younger sister of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in the opening sequence of Amala. Filmmaker Geleck Palsang’s graceful, succinct documentary about Jetsun Pema’s life and work is currently touring film festivals and will soon be available to wider audiences.

Alternating between historical footage and recent interviews with Jetsun Pema and the children of Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV), the organization serving Tibetan orphaned and refugee children in India that she ran from 1964 to 2006, the film recognizes Jetsun Pema’s decades of work on behalf of the Tibetan people. The message of the documentary is clear: without Jetsun Pema’s remarkable leadership, the Tibetan Children’s Village would not be what it is today. 

The majority of the documentary consists of engaging, original interviews with Jetsun Pema’s friends; her older brother Gyalo Thondup; teachers from Tibetan Children’s Village who also grew up there as children; and Jetsun Pema herself. Fascinating details about Jetsun Pema’s life as the sister of the Dalai Lama abound. As the first sibling in the family born after her brother was enthroned in the Potala Palace, Jetsun Pema was also the first child whom the Dalai Lama named, following the Tibetan tradition where parents request a lama choose the name for their child. His Holiness was 6 years old at the time. He later personally guided his sister’s education: after she graduated from Catholic boarding school in India, having been described as a “sober” young woman by her friends, she went to study in Switzerland on His Holiness’s specific advice. He told her that she would be better able to serve the Tibetan community if she had additional education. In 1964, he gave her the special task of directing the Tibetan Children’s Village.

In the process of depicting the personal trajectory of Jetsun Pema’s life, Amala also documents the development of the Tibetan Children’s Village. Beginning as a nursery for orphaned refugee children, it grew over time into a network of schools organized around a unique family model in which groups of 20 to 25 children live in homes cared for by foster parents assigned to each house. The schools became a critical agent of preserving Tibetan language and culture by educating the children in both. Cognizant that the children living in exile have both the opportunity and the responsibility to maintain the language and culture denied to their counterparts in Tibet living under the rule of China, Jetsun Pema personally translated textbooks into Tibetan and eventually helped open the Tibetan Language Institute for higher learning.  

The film also captures painful moments in TCV’s history, including early on when the organization lacked the facilities and medical care the children sorely needed. At one point, Jetsun Pema describes the year (1964–65) when 150 children arrived after walking to India from Nepal, all extremely ill. Swiss Red Cross doctors volunteering for TCV did their best, but in one night alone, four children died. In the days that followed, a child died every three to four days because of the lack of adequate medical facilities.

The documentary also covers Jetsun Pema’s leadership of the third fact-finding delegation to Tibet in 1980 that revealed horrific abuses of the Tibetan people by the Chinese government. “We spent 105 days in Tibet, over three months, and during all that time, I shed buckets and buckets of tears,” she says in the film. Personal tragedies, such as the death of Jetsun Pema’s husband and one of her daughters, are mentioned too, but only briefly. What is notable, however, in the representation of these personal losses, is that friends recount that even after the death of her husband, when her children were still young, and after the death of her daughter, she did not let her pain affect her work. 

Overall, Geleck Palsang balances heartbreaking moments with interviews by TCV graduates and teachers as they describe what the school has meant to them. A particularly moving and heart-lifting scene shows TCV alumni gathering to formally honor Jetsun Pema, and weeping as they sing to her and pray for her long life.

It’s no wonder that she is known as Amala, or “mother,” to the thousands of children who grew up at TCV. Indeed, Jetsun Pema’s own daughter says that her mother was equally mother to all of the children there as much as her own.

By celebrating Jetsun Pema in this documentary, Geleck Palsang honors both the accomplishments of an intrepid and resourceful leader, and the contribution of the Tibetan Children’s Village itself. Not only has the center provided a safe and loving home and education for thousands of Tibetan children over decades, but it has also helped preserve Tibetan language and culture for current and future generations. While viewers may leave wanting to know even more about Jetsun Pema’s personal story and fascinating life, it is likely that this film features her just as she would prefer: as a dedicated servant for the Tibetan people and the preservation of their unique culture in the face of a challenging and increasingly integrated world. 

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In September 2022, the French-German public access channel Arte aired Buddhism: The Unspeakable Truth (Bouddhisme: La Loi du Silence), a documentary by French journalists Élodie Emery and Wandrille Lanos. The 90-minute documentary, which was cut to 52 minutes for an English-speaking audience, discusses Buddhist communities that have been embroiled in scandal, including Rigpa, the international organization founded by Sogyal Lakar (Rinpoche), and Ogyen Kunzang Choling (OKC), established by Robert Spatz (Lama Kunzang Dorje), weaving in the modern history of Tibet and that country’s main export: Tibetan Buddhism. 

When the filmmakers reached out to Tricycle and sent a link to the documentary, our New York City office watched it together. Other editors who work remotely, including me, watched from our home offices. It should come as no surprise that a Buddhist publication steeped in many of these issues for decades would find shortcomings with a documentary produced for a mainstream audience. One of us compared it to a 60 Minutes exposé that exposed but didn’t explain what attracts one to Tibetan Buddhism or the complexity of student-teacher relationships. Others noted that while the documentary makes the point that the Dalai Lama—who is a Tibetan Buddhist leader, but not the Buddhist-equivalent of the pope—is also a political leader, it falls short in exploring this dual role more deeply. A deeper investigation here would have added a lot to the film. 

But for me, the documentary is an important contribution because it puts faces and stories to the revelations we’ve heard for years, sometimes anonymously through organizations and projects like Buddhist Project Sunshine. (I don’t blame anyone for not going public, and those who have are very brave.) It illuminates that there are big problems when students are willing to buy their guru’s old glasses or underwear (as happened with Sogyal Rinpoche) or send their very young children to live at a remote Buddhist center (as happened with Spatz). And there are issues when Buddhist teachers have been asking the Dalai Lama to make a public statement that sexual relationships between lamas and students are improper, and when lamas accused of abuse continue to operate and receive visits from the Dalai Lama and other dignitaries. 

The documentary begins with aerial images of the mountains of southern France and photos of children at Château-de-Soleils, OKC’s center. “That’s me, in the photo. I was 5 when my parents abandoned me here,” says Ricardo Mendes. Now in his 40s, Mendes describes his childhood as an “endless cycle of prayers and prostrations,” and says he was subject to food deprivation, cold, and beatings. The girls, he said, had it worse, as they were raped. And it was all in the name of a religion that to Westerners is “above suspicion.” 

Mendes is the spokesperson for Initiative de Justice OKCinfo, a nonprofit organization working to bring legal action against Robert Spatz in Belgium and France. 

The film is framed around the trial of Spatz in a Brussels court. Spatz didn’t appear at the trial, and in 2016, nearly twenty years after law enforcement first searched Château-de-Soleils, he was convicted of child sexual abuse, taking children hostage, and economic crimes, and received a four-year suspended prison sentence. Both Spatz and OKC were ordered to pay more than four million Euros in restitution. That conviction was overturned in 2019, and in October 2022, Spatz was resentenced to five years in prison (also suspended), and ordered to pay a €5,500 fine. 

Spatz, a former TV repairman, spent six years in the 60s studying Tibetan Buddhism in India with Kangyur Rinpoche, who gave him the name Lama Kunzang Dorje and authority to open Buddhist centers in Europe. OKC was visited by high-ranking Tibetan Buddhists, and letters displayed at the centers declared Spatz as an authentic teacher. A news report by the European Academy of Religion and Sciences concludes it was possible that visiting teachers knew nothing about the abuse until 2010, when students began blowing the whistle on Spatz. 

The documentary also examines the inner circle around Sogyal Lakar’s Rigpa community. Lakar, who authored the massively popular Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and whose community has grown to 114 centers in twenty-four countries, resigned from Rigpa in 2017 after longtime students accused him of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, entering a “period of retreat and reflection.” Lakar died two years later.  

Weaved throughout is the story of Tibetans who fled by the thousands following China’s invasion and suppression following the failed 1959 Tibetan uprising. Tibetans of all social standings escaped through the highest mountains on earth to India, Nepal, and Bhutan. The Tibetan-government-in-exile was established in Dharamshala, India, with the Dalai Lama as a dual spiritual and political leader. Though the Dalai Lama relinquished his political title in 2011, he was and remains a political figure who, the documentary points out, tried to rally the world’s support behind Tibet’s cause. 

Meanwhile, as refugees, the Tibetans worked to rebuild everything from nothing and take care of their people. “Any kind of help from the outside was very welcome,” reflects Tenzin Geyche Tethong, who worked for many years as the Dalai Lama’s secretary and press liaison. As Rob Hogendoorn, an investigative reporter, independent researcher, and coauthor of Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism: The Rise and Fall of Sogyal Rinpoche, puts it, the community-in-exile is a “beggars economy,” with a codependent relationship between wealthy lamas in the West and Tibetans back East. 

This important political backdrop to the abuses that were occurring at the time puts in context the two smoking guns that the filmmakers present. One is, who knew what at what point, and if large donations led Buddhist leaders to overlook teachers acting unethically. 

One payment in question is the €100,000 donation that Spatz made in 1995 to Shechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Shechen is home to Matthieu Ricard, a French Tibetan Buddhist monk, best-selling author, “happiest man alive,” and one of Buddhism’s best-known figures. In the documentary, Jean-François Buysschaert, a former OKC member, recounts Ricard returning to him a briefcase that contained indictment documents against Spatz. Ricard, who participated in a two-hour interview with the filmmakers, later retracted his interview in a letter sent by his lawyers. He maintained in a blog post that he never knew about Spatz’s abuse, and also that the documentarians were misleading with the purpose of the interview. Separately, former Rigpa members recall Lakar giving empowerments in exchange for cash, and a monk, Michael Nolan, talked about smuggling €60,000 and gold into Delhi.  

Another smoking gun is the Dalai Lama’s knowledge of Tibetan Buddhist teachers having sexual relationships with students. The documentary includes a 1993 conference between the Dalai Lama and a group of Western Buddhist teachers, during which the Westerners asked his holiness to denounce teachers from having sex with their students. The Dalai Lama said that every effort must be made to “stop this situation,” but that “how” to stop would need further discussion. 

“We just said this is not right, teachers should not have sex with students,” said Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede, codirector of the Rochester Zen Center, at the conference. “But if your Holiness could join in on that kind of statement, it would give enormous power to it. It would help enormously.… Teachers won’t listen, maybe … but the students, they’ll listen to you.”  

“Because you’re giving a standard, which people trust,” added Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, founder of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in India. 

Conference attendees, some of whom have since revealed that they had sexual relationships with their students, signed an open letter outlining the meetings and presenting the findings, including the Dalai Lama’s guidance on sexual relationships. As Stephen Batchelor recounts, the letter was passed along to the Dalai Lama’s office for his signature, but returned with his name crossed out.

Why wouldn’t the Dalai Lama lend his name to this cause that is so important to warrant a series of meetings over two days? Bad guidance from his advisors? Or, as the filmmakers seem to imply, more nefarious and calculated reasons? 

In the film, we see the Dalai Lama say more than once that the responsibility of bad lamas should not fall solely on his shoulders. His office has released clarification on tantric texts that advise students to see all of their teachers’ actions as perfect. And when the Dalai Lama says people like Sogyal Lakar are not practicing Buddhism, he seems very sincere—but this sincerity doesn’t lay out the next steps for either a fallen teacher or his community.  

We may never know who knew about Lakar and Spatz’s abuse, and what happened along the way. We do know, however, that Tibetan Buddhist leaders were aware of Lakar’s behavior, and continued to support his centers, including a 2008 visit with the Dalai Lama and First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy to consecrate Lerab Ling. And that it took until 2018 for the Dalai Lama to denounce Lakar as “disgraced” and meet with a group of Tibetan Buddhist survivors. (The Dalai Lama made worldwide headlines following that meeting, when he said during a press conference that learning about sexual abuse was “nothing new.”)   

One of the main motivations of Buddhism: The Unspeakable Truth is to counter the naivety of Europeans and Westerners regarding abuse in Buddhism. It also serves to inform potential practitioners about the history of abuse in certain communities. Abuse in Buddhist communities has, indeed, been going on in the West for just about as long as the tradition has. I say this not to legitimize it—the status and treatment of women is something I’ve long grappled with as a practitioner and reporter who has covered the breaking news of sexual abuse and misconduct allegations over the past few years. But we still don’t have a clear answer as to what should happen when a guru or teacher is accused of misconduct, and what happens after accusations are proven.

What the documentary does show is that, although the Buddha’s teachings promote nonharm and an end to suffering, Buddhist teachers are fallible, and Buddhist communities are subject to the same dynamics—sometimes healthy, at other times abusive and toxic—of any group of people coming together. 

We’ve spent the last few years (decades, really) trying to understand why an abusive teacher does what he does, and where the community goes from there. In an attempt to understand and guide practitioners, we’ve published guidelines like “How to Heal After Your Teacher Crosses the Line,” and urge potential students to spend time thoroughly investigating anyone whose teachings they are attracted to before beginning a formal relationship. Indeed, we often hear that this skipped step is a reason why students are abused. 

And the age of social media has thankfully illuminated decades-old accusations and cases of abuse (in the case of Rigpa, Lakar’s victims even had their own hashtag: #metooguru). Buddhism: The Unspeakable Truth continues the momentum. 

Though Rigpa and Ogyen Kunzang Choling are still in operation—OKC’s website is scrubbed of all but the briefest mention of Spatz, while Rigpa’s website speaks glowingly of the late Lakar—now, the Arte documentary ranks on the first page of a Google search of his name.  

The first tenet of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics is to seek the truth and report it. By giving a platform to abuse survivors, the filmmakers shine a light on these horrible acts that were too long left in the shadows. In other aspects, mainly the lack of contextualizing the dual role of the Dalai Lama as a political and religious leader, what brings modern-day people to Buddhism (news flash: it’s been a while since the hippies followed the Beatles to India), and not separating Spatz and Lakar from the Tibetan Buddhism community as a whole, the documentary falls short. These are big issues, and a 2,600-year history, that can’t be synthesized and tied up in an hour and a half. 

Ultimately, it is good that Spatz and Lakar’s survivors are able to share their stories, which will, it is hoped, give them closure and warn others about what a dysfunctional community looks like. It can only strengthen the dharma when abusive leaders are held accountable for their actions. And perhaps this documentary is just another example in our ever-connected world that if high-ranking leaders know about abusive teachers and continue to support them or accept financial donations, that we’re watching.

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Early on in Everything Everywhere All at Once, the new feature film from the filmmaking duo collectively known as Daniels, a Chinese-American woman named Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) sits at a cubicle across from a stickler IRS agent named Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). Deirdre tells Evelyn, who is visibly distracted, “I cannot imagine a conversation more important than this one.” The conversation in question? Evelyn is being audited for incorrectly filing her taxes. 

However, there’s a clear disconnect between the two women. Evelyn can’t fully understand all of Deirdre’s English, and Deirdre struggles to make sense of the disorganized receipts and records from the laundromat that Evelyn runs with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). But while Deirdre lectures Evelyn about the importance of the current moment, Evelyn experiences a life-altering realization—that her universe is but one in a multiverse where endless Evelyns walk endless paths with endless potential. 

What follows from there is meticulous, curated chaos from Daniels, full of stuffed animal hoodies, a fanny pack fight scene, hot dog fingers, and a suspiciously shaped award statue. Without a minute to spare, the reluctant hero Evelyn is propelled forward on a quest to unlock her verse-jumping powers, defeat an evil villain, and restore balance to the multiverse. But as the film progresses, it becomes evident that Evelyn’s problems run much deeper than misfiling her taxes or being hunted by an all-powerful being. Everything Everywhere All At Once is not a movie about how to save the world—it’s about understanding how to be a part of it. Amidst the mayhem, the film stays grounded in its core message about the importance of human connection and cultivating compassion for all beings throughout our confusing, impermanent lives. Evelyn doesn’t arrive at these truths immediately—it takes a few action-packed trips across the multiverse first—but as she learns to cherish even the most mundane moments of time with her family, so does the audience.   

Daniels’s approach to the film is pure maximalism, and one of the highlights of their everything-is-more style is the sense that this movie is a celebration of filmmaking itself. There’s a love for film laced throughout; there’s a Ratatouille (2007) joke that evolves into its own subplot about the fate of an animatronic raccoon and his chef friend. There’s also a particularly gorgeous homage to In the Mood for Love (2000), a romantic drama by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, that sees Evelyn in a universe where she became a famous martial arts movie star and Waymond became a successful businessman. 

However, in this life, the two never married as Evelyn chose to follow her disapproving father’s advice and leave Waymond. Despite their respective financial success, Waymond laments that in another life, he’d have liked to “do laundry and taxes” with her. Everything Everywhere All at Once is both ludicrous and moving in a way that only Daniels can accomplish, and it manages to give the audience a sense of hope by impressing the idea that it’s never too late to change. Instead of dwelling on what could have been, the film encourages audiences to cherish what they do have and work to create the life and relationships they want.

Evelyn fights her way across the multiverse, but it’s only through genuine connection and understanding that any conflict is truly resolved.

As for leading actor Yeoh, in some ways, it feels as though her iconic, impressive career has been building towards this movie. Her performance contains multitudes—she’s funny, fierce, and badass but also allows herself to be vulnerable, pathetic, and lost. Yeoh as Evelyn—and the versions of herself across the multiverse—feels so real that she grounds the movie, making even the most absurd scenes relatable for the audience. A key scene depicts Evelyn facing off against a super-strong Deirdre from another universe, and to defeat her Evelyn must do something completely unexpected. She must tell Deirdre that she loves her—and mean it. In the moment it’s played for laughs but it ultimately takes on a different meaning as the movie progresses. In one universe—a universe where humans evolved to have hot dogs for fingers—Evelyn and Deirdre struggle to fix their fractured romantic relationship. It seems hot-dog-hands Evelyn isn’t too skilled at talking things out, much like the Evelyn from the core universe where the movie begins. 

Later in the core universe, Deirdre arrives at Evelyn’s laundromat to have her arrested for attacking Deirdre—only to call off the cops once she hears that Waymond has served Evelyn with divorce papers. In a quiet moment, Deirdre recalls when her own husband divorced her, and feels she has a better understanding of Evelyn’s situation. “Unlovable bitches like us make the world go ‘round,” Deirdre tells Evelyn. In that moment they understand each other, and they embrace. They aren’t unlovable, and they aren’t alone. 

There is so much emotion at the heart of Daniels’ film, but it’s also so much fun. Enough can’t be said about the dynamic, energetic action on display in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Yeoh is an icon of the action genre, and her physical performance proves she’s still at the top of her game. And she’s not the only one to get in on the action—there’s a standout sequence featuring a Waymond from another universe who takes out a group of security guards using only his fanny pack. It’s an excellent use of Hong Kong-style choreography but is also such a creative character moment for Waymond. He is both the oft-ignored, fanny-pack wearing husband of Evelyn and the combat-ready, verse-jumping husband of an Evelyn across the multiverse.

While the movie has kinetic, well-choreographed action scenes, the message at the heart of it is a clear one of peace and kindness—another reason the classic, poetic kung fu aesthetic fits the movie’s themes. Evelyn fights her way across the multiverse, but it’s only through genuine connection and understanding that any conflict is truly resolved. 

In a climactic scene, Evelyn must confront the all-powerful villain of the multiverse, Jobu Tupaki, who is revealed to be none other than Evelyn’s deeply misunderstood daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Joy transformed into Jobu Tupaki in another universe after Evelyn pushed her too far and her consciousness split. As a result, Jobu Tupaki gained the ability to bend reality and experience every multiverse simultaneously, being quite literally everywhere all at once. At first, she seems dead set on destroying her mother and the entire multiverse, but ultimately she is not looking to destroy. What she wants is to be understood and someone to share in her experiences with—and she wants it from her mother. Similarly, Waymond is desperate to reconnect with his wife. He resorts to serving Evelyn with divorce papers, not because he has given up, but because he wants to be taken seriously. He wants to talk to her, to truly talk to her, but can’t seem to connect with her without drastic measures. 

Everything comes to a head when Jobu Tupaki successfully opens Evelyn’s mind so that she also experiences every multiverse at once. Flicking through the multiverse uncontrollably, Evelyn momentarily succumbs to Jobu Tapaki’s nihilistic belief that life is meaningless and her actions don’t matter. It is Waymond who snaps her out of it; his pleas to stop the violence and have everyone talk to one another make Evelyn realize that it is not that nothing matters if everything is fleeting, but that everything matters. Those fleeting moments of clarity and happiness are not meaningless, but instead are the most important moments to be cherished.

With her newfound revelations, Evelyn is able to make peace with her life and herself. After traveling the multiverse through countless variations of her life, Evelyn realizes what’s most important in her own world—her family. While early on Evelyn tells her husband she’s “very busy today, no time to help you,” by the end, she realizes that sometimes, depending on who you’re with, laundry and taxes are enough.

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While taking a psychedelic journey—such as with psilocybin mushrooms or LSD—many people have the experience of being in the presence of sacredness or touching the essence of spirituality. On a very successful “trip” you may not feel any separation from the journey itself. It’s an aspect of the experience that is rarely depicted in films, which tend to focus on the auditory and visual hallucinations that can be directly reproduced on screen. The movies that attempt to convey this spiritual dimension often end up creating a caricature. But the new documentary Descending the Mountain succeeds where others have fallen short, managing to an amazing extent to produce a vicarious experience of being high on psilocybin.

Shot at beautiful Felsentor Foundation, a Buddhist retreat center on majestic Mount Rigi in Switzerland, the film is a true account of what happened when psychiatric researcher Franz Vollenweider and Zen master Vanja Palmers created this groundbreaking and successful experiment.

Interest in psychedelic mushrooms is booming—having less to do with tripping for entertainment than for the potential aid to one’s health, mental and physical, as well as deep spiritual enrichment. Today, every university of high quality in the United States and Europe has researchers in psychedelic science. Michael Pollan, author, Harvard professor, and guru of the plant world, called himself a “reluctant psychonaut” and wrote a book called How to Change Your Mind.

Now fully out of the psychedelic closet, Pollan points to several good reasons why he thinks psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, and LSD have amazing potential for humanity: multiple clinical studies have already revealed effective lessening of depression, anxiety, PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol use disorder, and tobacco use disorder. Pollan believes that another reason to enlist the help of psychedelics is the shocking degree of tribalism present in current human culture. As we all know, human society is the architect of the environmental crisis, and yet the crisis is largely ignored.

Experienced psychedelic explorers like Franz Vollenweider and Vanja Palmers fully realize the exigencies of exploring the mind with psychedelics. In the 1960s and ’70s many young people had psychedelic experiences in Buddhist zendos, but they eventually faced criticism from the very people who would be most able to blend psychedelics with disciplined ritual.

For much of the film one is struck by its sincerity, as well as by its religious and scientific rigor—and its spontaneous humor, such as when Franz Vollenweider smacks his head on a zendo beam, or the coining of the phrase “extreme placebos.” Much of the film’s charm comes from the very likable Zen master Palmer. The scenery is exemplary, and the spontaneous intercuts of music and visuals unquestionably enrich the experience.

Cosmo Sheldrake, the composer son of the sound healer Jill Purce and the biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake (known for his notion of morphic resonance, which asserts that memory is inherent in nature and present in ecological systems), and the Dutch composer Michel Banabila are credited for the film’s enthralling and hypnotic music, and sound effects play a powerful role—delicate yet transfixing. Beautifully documented is the unity of pigs, goats, birds, and plants. The visuals, along with stunning animation, sounds, and strong use of artificial intelligence, create exceptional effects.

Directed by Maartje Nevejan, Descending the Mountain was an offering of the San Francisco–based International Buddhist Film Festival. All in all, I like feeling that Zig Zag Zen, my anthology of essays about Buddhism and psychedelics, is a kind of spiritual companion to the unique and lovely film Descending the Mountain.

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At the impressionable age of twelve, my older sister and her high school friends brought me to see The Matrix. I hadn’t heard of Plato’s cave or Descartes’s demon or the Heart Sutra’s declaration that there is, in emptiness, “no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind / No color, sound, smell, taste, touch, thing / No realm of sight, no realm of consciousness”—or the countless other contemplations throughout history on the limitations of human perception and consciousness that make it impossible for us to stand outside ourselves and verify that the world exists independently of us and more or less aligns with how we experience it. I didn’t even know what the premise of The Matrix was. All I knew entering the theater was that the trailer looked cool. I left with my mind blown.

I have had many eye-opening experiences, but few are as memorable as the first time I learned what it meant for my eyes to be closed. Yet the impact that The Matrix had on me (and many others, it seems) does not mean it was a profound film. If the sequels in what would become a trilogy proved anything in their attempt to further plumb the philosophical depths it was that the original wasn’t that deep to begin with: The symbolism is often heavy-handed. The understanding of the human mind was unsophisticated. The characters’ motivations and morals were black and white. Despite the disappointing and disenchanting sequels, however, I still enjoy the first movie, not as a philosophical treatise but as an innovative action film that captures fundamental questions about existence with sleek and striking imagery that is as accessible as it is unforgettable. 

The latest sequel, The Matrix Resurrections, seems to understand this. Earlier attempts tried to recapture the magic of the original (which, seeing as how it ended with the protagonist, Neo (Keanu Reeves), essentially attaining enlightenment and god-like powers, was always going to be challenging). The fourth film takes a different approach. It opens with new characters searching for Neo, who they believe is alive despite his apparent death in the third film. They find him—I’d say “spoiler alert,” but Resurrections is in the title—plugged back into the matrix where he has been living as a video game designer who’s famous for creating his own Matrix trilogy. Years later, he’s been given the unenviable task of creating a fourth game. Neo sits through endless pitch meetings as collaborators deconstruct his past successes and try to figure out why it worked and how to top it. 

An older, shaggier Reeves has gotten a lot of experience playing a man hanging on by a thread, with his characters often enduring a gauntlet of armed combatants, and it’s a delight to watch him put that world-weary expression to use, deadpanning eager colleagues arguing about whether the fans care more about its philosophy or mindless action or dystopian trans metaphors. Director Lana Wachowski’s cynical wit flows effortlessly, presumably from her own experiences with creative achievement, in a refreshing departure from the increasingly drab and joyless tone of the previous sequels. And as we learn more about Neo’s relationship with his work—explored through flashes of scenes from the first film—and his difficulty telling fact from fiction, characters start speaking to legitimate critiques of the earlier films, most notably its over-reliance on dichotomies. 

Meanwhile, we learn that while coding his game, Neo somehow codes the matrix (or part of it). This is the most successful of a few devices that allow for some suspension of disbelief that perhaps Neo actually is outside of the matrix, and that maybe the other characters have it wrong. 

Unfortunately, the possibilities that open up in the first half of the film are one-by-one closed in the second half as Resurrection rushes toward a regrettably predictable ending. While it’s still fun to see the high-speed chases and gravity-defying fight scenes, the world-building veers into introducing new sci-fi premises with no real pay off, and in the end, Neo finds himself roughly where he did at the end of the first film. Meanwhile, increasingly heavy-handed flashbacks to the original Matrix become annoying reminders that the original had a bold aesthetic that has been replaced with something that looks like most other futuristic action movies. It makes sense to update the outfits from the old skin-tight leather, but the old costumes were unique and make the new ones look uninspired. 

How exactly should it be updated? I don’t know. Much of the earlier style came about in a time when hackers were mysterious and computers were exciting. They carry different associations now. Resurrections knows it, too. The film’s villain at one point says that he’s more interested in the human mind than his predecessors were. He wants to create a matrix where humans aren’t just fooled but trapped in self-defeating psychological loops. We, too, are no longer amused by technology as a thought-experiment, one that ultimately can be conquered by human perseverance. The concept of machines controlling our lives is no longer hypothetical, and while Resurrections does not offer any mind-blowing insights about this, it had to acknowledge this shift for the franchise to have a future. 

The Matrix was never as profound as twelve-year-old me thought it was. What made it exceptional was how well it explored timeless themes using language and visuals that were timely, singular, and had never been seen before. With Resurrections, the Matrix franchise appears to have become self-aware enough to continue to evolve with the times.

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Solitude is hard to find. That is the problem facing Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at the beginning of Paul MacGowan’s documentary Wandering . . . But Not Lost. A renowned Tibetan Buddhist teacher, best-selling author, abbot of multiple monasteries, and leader of an international network of meditation centers, Mingyur Rinpoche shocked his followers in June 2011 when he left everything behind to take up the life of a solitary wandering ascetic.

The plan was to have no plan. Following in the footsteps of the great meditation masters who sought to deepen their practice through solitary retreat, Mingyur Rinpoche absconded from his monastery in the middle of the night. With only a small backpack, a few dollars, and the robes on his back, he eluded the watchful eyes of the many aides, minders, and assistants who had tended to him since his youth. Over the next four and a half years, Mingyur Rinpoche would wander throughout India and Nepal, stopping at many of the region’s holiest sites: Varanasi, Kushi-nagar, Rishikesh, Vaishno Devi Shrine, the Boudhanath Stupa, and Lapchi Mountain. Each day he welcomed the physical and psychological challenges of the wandering life (like the lack of food, water, money, and shelter) as opportunities to develop mindfulness and nonattachment.

Wandering is decidedly in the genre of the reverential “teacher documentary”: films celebrating (and sometimes complicating) the life and legacy of influential Buddhist masters. Like Johanna Demetrakas’s Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche or Lesley Ann Patten’s Words of My Perfect Teacher about Khyentse Norbu, the film Wandering touches on the pressures of being a famous teacher and the ambivalence that such responsibility can entail. However, unlike those two films, which explore the moral complexity and fallibility of their protagonists, Wandering’s portrait of Mingyur Rinpoche is squeaky clean. Although his act is radical—undertaking a solitary spiritual quest, often at the risk of his own life—he seems to face each challenge with childlike innocence. At one point, he describes his sheltered upbringing: at 12 years old he was identified as the seventh incarnation of the 17th-century

enlightened yogi Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and was swept up in a privileged life of tutelage and training. Though his struggles intensify over the course of the film, some of the greatest shocks early on during his retreat journey were quite mundane: having to buy his own train ticket (previously, assistants had arranged all his travel), navigating lines in a crowded station, not finding a seat on the train, buying simple food on a tight budget. As a wide-eyed Mingyur Rinpoche recounts the anxiety and disorientation these experiences provoked in him, one gets the impression that he is indeed like a sheltered prince who left the palace for the first time. His journey was perhaps half spiritual retreat, half coming-of-age story.

Although Wandering is ostensibly about the spiritual work of solitude, there is another message that rises to the surface of this film: that solitude, paradoxically, is consummately social. Despite Mingyur Rinpoche’s best attempts to escape the madding crowd, at every turn the wall of his solitude is pierced by the presence of others, like flowers growing through the cracks in concrete. Mingyur Rinpoche’s recollections of his retreat are marked by the constant presence of people: he describes the overwhelming smell of passengers on the packed trains, the hustle and bustle on the streets where he slept, the dogs that stalked him on the road as he wandered. Though he has taken pains to go incognito, he is eventually recognized by one of his students, Tashila, who then drops everything to accompany him for the rest of the journey. From the Indian food peddler who donates his daily leftovers so Mingyur Rinpoche can eat, to the many Nepalese villagers who, despite their modest means, go out of their way to bring blankets and firewood to his cave, to his devoted student Tashila, who spends all his money on sleeping bags and warm shoes for his teacher, it would seem that solitude is supported by the net of sociality.

Although Wandering is ostensibly about the spiritual work of solitude, another message rises to the surface of this film: that solitude, paradoxically, is consummately social.

In one of the film’s most memorable moments, Mingyur Rinpoche recounts having nearly died—likely from food poisoning or botulism—on the steps of the stupa at Kushinagar, the site of the Buddha’s own parinirvana. Unconscious and unrecognizable—having changed out of his monastic garb to avoid attention—he awakens in a hospital to learn that he was rescued by a pilgrim he had briefly encountered a few days earlier. We know next to nothing about this man. Who was he? Where did he come from? Was he rich or poor? What did it cost him (financially and otherwise) to arrange and pay for Mingyur Rinpoche’s lifesaving medical care? One thing we do know is that Mingyur Rinpoche likely would have died—and his students would have lost their teacher—had it not been for the swift action and generosity of this stranger.

That Mingyur Rinpoche survived and could continue his ascetic practice is thanks to this unknown man. The gift of solitude, it turns out, is given by others.

Solitude is not only made possible but made meaningful by sociality. Throughout Wandering, the most profound of Mingyur Rinpoche’s contemplative insights—even when alone—lead him right back into the social world. On the brink of death, he recounts the unbinding of his mind: unable to move, he transcended his body, and his mind became a formless expanse. But within that expanse, he found others: “It felt like you’re almost unconscious and then, suddenly, completely open. No time, no direction, no up, no down. It’s completely free. . . . I am everywhere and at the same time nowhere. I was in that state for a few hours. And then I felt the connectivity with all beings. And from that connectivity, the wanting to help, was the sense of compassion. . . . The sense of compassion became stronger and stronger, connecting me with all beings.” Mingyur Rinpoche even describes his solitary struggles in terms of other people: “Some days, I didn’t have any money and nothing to eat . . . but then something happens, people give me something. . . . I thought, ‘When I love the world, the world loves me back.’”

One is left with the sense that Mingyur Rinpoche’s journey began as a retreat from the world but became a deeper immersion into it. “Now,” he says, “I feel like the street is my home. Wherever I go, I am at home.” In solitude, Mingyur Rinpoche did not escape the web of social entanglement; through solitude, he learned to experience it more fully.

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A nun sounds a femur-bone trumpet next to a wake of vultures descending upon a fresh corpse laid out in the snow. The haunting image, part of a Tibetan sky burial at Yarchen Gar Monastery in China’s Sichuan Province, is not easily unseen. Witnessing the funeral ceremony firsthand is what compelled the independent Chinese filmmaker Jin Huaqing to document the residents of Yarchen Gar. More than six years of filming later, flashes from the burial ritual now appear as a refrain in Dark Red Forest, which follows some 7,000 Tibetan Buddhist nuns who shelter inside makeshift wooden huts for a 100-day retreat that takes place during the coldest part of the year.

The director manages to create a cohesive story line despite forgoing a single protagonist. Instead, he tells the story of thousands of figures, most of them masked and indistinguishable from one another. It may be disorienting at first, but what emerges is an introspective exploration of the relationships between these women. Our admiration for them deepens with each passing scene, as we watch them prostrating themselves around a frozen lake, moving insects along their path to safety, or sitting still in meditation for hours outdoors, unfazed by the snowstorm enveloping them. The physicality of their devotion is overwhelming, and it is easy to see how their martial-like commitment to cultivating compassion drew Huaqing toward them for years after his initial visit.

While impermanence is a prominent theme in the film, it’s not all doom and gloom in the dark red forest—the sea of burgundy robes that inspired the documentary’s title. Scenes of yaks poking their heads through windows and a nun confessing to having caved into her carnal desires (indulging in yak meat on Losar, the Tibetan New Year) provide moments of levity that help to buoy viewers among the otherwise grueling realities of monastic life at 13,000 feet. Seemingly banal footage of elder nuns kneading noodles in the kitchen and a patient seeking relief from the Tibetan doctor for a toothache gives a more balanced emotional tenor to the film, centered largely around the first noble truth, the truth of suffering. After all, with the rigors of living in subzero temperatures and having minimal insulation inside their simple shelters, it is an undeniably harsh existence for the Yarchen nuns.

But these devotees consider such experiences of pain to be mainly mind-made. “There is no real suffering in the world,” one nun reminds us in the opening scene. “People only suffer because of their obsessions.” When another retreatant asks her teacher where greed, hatred, and ignorance—and, as a result, suffering—come from, the lama advises her to adopt a don’t-know mind and begin again. “Restart your path to enlightenment,” he tells her. “Work on your heart like herders work on yak leather.” Such pith instructions—from male teachers as well as female faith healers and young nuns—bring real dharmic weight to the film from the outset.

Over an hour into the film, we begin to see Chinese propaganda slogans promoting ethnic unity. One banner announces a national promise to “write a new chapter of harmonious development.” Soon after, we watch as nuns work together to disassemble their cabins. They leave the monastery hauling pieces of home on their backs, though it’s not exactly clear why. The circumstances of their departure become more obvious when practitioners exchange words with the resident lama. One fears she won’t remember her way back to her village because she’s been gone too long. “I really want to help you stay, but there’s nothing I can do,” says the lama, who feels powerless, presumably against the Chinese government’s tightening restrictions and forced evictions.

He tells her, “Work on your heart like herders work on yak leather.”

The allusion to political realities is yet another way in which Dark Red Forest brings to bear sobering lessons about the inevitability of change. Since 2017, Chinese officials have reportedly demolished the homes of several thousand Yarchen residents, forcing them to relocate, and now maintain hundreds of surveillance stations around the complex. In one of the final vignettes, a displaced nun shares a reflection with the camera, which she has gradually come to feel is less intrusive. “Here in this freezing valley, birds are not only hungry but also live in fear every day of being attacked by hawks,” she says in front of a meditation hut that she has rebuilt.

The film ends where it began, with birds of prey dancing in the clouds and the blowing of a conch shell suffusing the open sky. Read as an omen, the final ballad gestures to tensions playing out in many Tibetan Buddhist monasteries under Chinese governance today. If the fate of similar institutions is any indication, Yarchen’s future and way of life are at risk of disappearing. As the sun rises in the closing scene, we drift into the dawn of not-knowing, holding on to hope that the Yarchen nuns may one day be able to find their way back home.

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