In Zen & Its Opposite, 5 master filmmakers offer the bloody and all-too-human spectacle of sin, folly and frailty, in unforgettable tales of crime and punishment, vengeful ghosts and delirious soldiers, mad samurai and deranged marauders, fire and brimstone, and spiritual darkness. The selection promises to satisfy the courteous viewer with an appetite for dark eroticism, macabre poetry and the exquisite monstrosity of the human heart, which will haunt long after viewing.
In his book Zen at War, ordained Soto Zen priest Brian Daizen Victoria documented Japanese Buddhist support for violence and warfare, from 1868 until the end of World War II. He tracked down a surprising embracing of war-making to the intimate relation between Zen and samurai warrior culture.
Each film in Zen & Its Opposite illustrates one or several of the Six Planes of Existence-a Buddhist concept commonly referred to in Japan as “Six Paths” (rokudo) within “the realm of Birth and Death” (samsara). Kobayashi’s Kwaidanpersonifies the Realm of Humans, a form of hell where tormented souls hover between good and evil, being and nothingness. Shindo’s Onibaba bites from the Realm of the Animals, a condition of servitude in which one is governed by instinct, and in which one has no sense of morality and lives only for the present. Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain feeds from the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, characterized by agonizing craving and eternal starvation. Nakagawa’s Hell burns from the Realm of the Beings in Hell, the lowest and worst of all realms, wracked by torture and violence. And Okamoto’s Sword of Doom roars from the Realm of the Asuras-a realm of anger, jealousy, and constant war.
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