The Mandala of Compassion: Respect Women More

One winter, I received an email from my friend who was finishing a book on a Japanese author but needed help, so I asked me. I told him that Yasujiro Ozu was one of my favorite directors because he focused on women and often told the story from their point of view. I grew up in Japan and feel many do not understand what they see when they watch Japanese cinema. I wrote a couple of chapters. The following is an excerpt.

Yasujiro Ozu: Turning the Wheels of Samsara

Yasujiro Ozu cinema acts like a yantra, or mandala—a type of visual screen where movies record lives of humans struggling within their own realms within the cycles of samsara.

While watching an Ozu yantra, we see our own struggles, our own deaths, and our own rebirths. Ozu’s cinema acts like the reel of samsara, a record for the wheel of life of all humans. It is less an illusion and more a spiritual spiral of real pains, perceptions, and powers. It is our mind revealed, our psychic energy recorded, and our spirit uncovered.

In the Mahayana tradition, “samsara is nirvana” (Loy 1983, 356) because we live in an illusion or a “fog of concepts” (Loy 1986, 356). How can the opposite of samsara, being enslaved to a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth, also mean at the same time liberation or nirvana? Well, that is because liberation is also an illusion.

You can never be completely separate from the wheel of existence. So, once you can be separate from the world, you can see the world for what it is. Then you can rejoin the world and become interconnected to everything.

You become a part of everything instead of apart from everything. In the act of nirvana, you become the nothingness of everythingness. Nirvana becomes not nothingness or emptiness or even an escape. It becomes a re-union with the universes that we have always shared with all beings. With everything.

On the headstone of Ozu is the symbol Mu, which means no, not, without, or emptiness. Mu acts like a mantra possessing the power to enlighten, often associated with Zen.

Just as Ozu died on his own birthday, December 12, his spirit and artistry are reborn and revisited and re-appreciated in critical anthologies like this one.

Just as the titles of his films often repeat seasonal names or the same locations, the cinema of Ozu revisits what it means to be human again and again.

Tokyo Story, one of my favorite. . . .

Source

Loy, David. “The Difference between Samsara and Nirvana.” Philosophy East and West 33 no. 4 (1983): 355–365.