Stuff from ‘Nine Temples’

Some interesting dialogues from the movie ‘Nine Temples’:

Poon: Why do you have to go on a pilgrimage? Aren’t you scared? I heard that pilgrims have to sleep over in a cemetery.
Monk: We do that to purge fear from our mind.
Nat: And why do you have to go to Bo Kleu? Can’t you just go ‘camping’ in a cemetery in Uthai?
Monk: I don’t desire to feel attached to one place.
Nat: If you don’t want to feel attached, anywhere is good enough. If you refuse to stay at the same place, it’s just another form of attachment, isn’t it?
Monk: That is a good question.

Does that make monkhood a form of attachment too? Is there no escape from attachment then? We can use more skilful attachment to escape less skilful attachment, just as we hang on to a raft to escape the sea, before letting it go to step ashore. If we use the raft only to romance the sea and the raft itself, we’ll be stuck.

Monk: Have you ever seen a bloodhound? It’ll pursue it’s prey to the end. No matter how far you run, no matter how long you run, the bloodhound will always find you. Karma is that bloodhound.

That makes karma seem like an unforgiving sentient force, like the classic anthropomorphism of death as a demon. The truth is, as karma is a law of nature, it is non-sentient, and neither forgiving nor unforgiving. It just functions naturally. And karma does not always find us the way we expect it to, as freshly created karma mitigates or accentuates past karma’s effects too.

Monk: Mother, do you really think you could cheat karma? You didn’t realise that you created a new cycle. You dragged innocent people into this. They’re now a part of our karma and now I have to repay it… Mother, you attach yourself too much to the force of karma. You know well that attachment brings suffering. It’s worse than enduring the blow of karma. We suffer because we can’t let go.

As karma is a law of nature, it can’t be cheated, though we can use it to work with it. Attachment to past mistakes is itself a mistake. We should just create fresh karma to dilute, to clean up past mistakes best we can. This isn’t cheating; it’s the only right thing to do.

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