Seeing Slowly: The Affective Formations of Buddhist Wisdom in Tsai Ming-liang's "Walker"

When Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker (2012) was released on the Chinese internet, it generated a maelstrom of emotional responses. While some lauded it as an expression of authentic Buddhism, others voiced an overwhelming urge to pummel the eponymous walker—a monk who quietly performs slow walking meditation across Hong Kong. How did an unassuming short film affect such heated responses? This paper explores the interrelations between religious ethics, film aesthetics, and popular culture in Tsai’s slow cinema. Analyzing the film’s production, text, and reception, I trace the formations of Buddhistic wisdom, which reshapes psychoaffective experience while guiding skillful action in everyday life. Reflecting its artist’s devotion to Mahayana Buddhism, Walker’s film language resists modernity’s fixation with speed, seeking to foster viewerly states traditionally shaped by Buddhist ritual practices. Despite slow cinema’s limited reach under regnant patterns of media consumption, a diachronic perspective reveals generative possibilities that bear fruit over time.