When Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker (2012) was released on Youku, one of China’s leading video streaming platforms, it triggered more than ten thousand comments within a day and broke the site’s records for responses received by short films. While some hailed the film—which quietly observes a monk performing slow walking meditation around Hong Kong—as an embodiment of true Buddhism and right mindfulness, others lambasted it as trash, lunacy, and waste of time. Many even expressed an overwhelming urge to slap, punch, and kick the monk. In the months that followed, homages and parodies of the film appeared across the internet. From Shanghai to Southern California, inspired fans recorded themselves performing walking meditation in their own locales. But in one impatient viewer’s version, the entirety of the film’s twenty-four minutes is fast forwarded and compressed into a matter of just ten seconds.
Why did an unassuming, meditative short film affect such mixed and heated responses? What does its reception reveal about prevailing patterns of media consumption and sociopolitical subject formation in contemporary China? How does its film language—such as its use of the fixed camera, long takes, and direct sound—seek to foster mental and emotional states traditionally shaped by Buddhist contemplative practices? And in what ways does the film reflect its famed director’s longstanding interest in Buddhism, whether in his artistic career or his personal life?
This paper explores the interrelations between religious ethics, slow aesthetics, and popular culture through the prism of Tsai’s Walker. In its production, text, distribution, and reception, the film exemplifies what I call “wisdom cinema,” that is, the practice, visualization, and diffusion of Buddhist-inflected wisdom via film and related media spaces. Dynamically evolving beyond formal institutions and rituals, this wisdom reshapes one's psychoaffective interpretation of reality and guides skillful, embodied action in everyday life.
My paper begins with a brief sketch of Tsai’s religious biography, highlighting the porous relationship between his personal Buddhist devotion and his filmmaking. Drawing on the director’s media interviews, personal essays, and public talks, I argue that the religion gave him a fresh lens to reinterpret his artistic radicalism and cinematic self-reflexivity during the late 2000s and early 2010s. Next, locating Walker within Tsai’s ongoing “Slow Walk, Long March” omnibus (2012–), I analyze how its mise-en-scene, cinematography, and editing work together to foster subtle shifts in viewerly perspective. Whether through visual search puzzles or perspectivist tricks, the film playfully challenges modernity’s fixation with speed and proposes slowness and simplicity as more beneficial ways of seeing and being in the world. These existential and perceptual orientations are rooted in Tsai’s lay appreciation of Mahayana Buddhism, especially its thoroughgoing vision of the empty and transient nature of things. Finally, I discuss Walker’s colorful reception both on and beyond the internet, examining (inter alia) movie review sites, discussion sites, newspapers, and popular magazines for empirical data on how viewers have responded to it. While the film’s ambivalent reception suggests the limited reach of Tsai’s slow cinema under prevailing sociocultural conditions of Chinese and global modernity, it by no means betokens aesthetic or theological failure when seen against the long temporal horizons of wisdom cultivation.
In pursuing the foregoing lines of inquiry, this paper addresses certain gaps in current scholarship. In religion and film studies at large, and in the study of Buddhism and film in particular, discussions of Chinese cinema remain curiously underrepresented. By framing Tsai—one of the most prolific figures in Sinophone and even world cinema alive today—as a Buddhist filmmaker and foregrounding the spiritual dimensions of his work, this paper complicates deep-seated assumptions about the shape and location of religion in Chinese contexts. Meanwhile, even as scholars like Francisca Cho (2017), Victor Fan (2022), Ronald Green (2014), and Sharon Suh (2014) have illuminated the ways that the modern cinema relates to premodern Buddhist ideas, themes, and theories, they have largely focused on film texts and their ontology. And while vital work has been done on the cognitive and phenomenological parallels between filmic and meditative experiences within individual subjectivities, the wider affective reception of Buddhistic cinematic media in specific lived contexts remains poorly understood. Extending S. Brent Plate’s (2017) holistic approach to studying the worldmaking capacities of cinema before, during, and after “the show,” the methodological POV that I adopt is akin to an extreme long shot: it observes the shape of wisdom cultivation throughout the full life cycle of the cinematic process, from its germinal stages before preproduction proper to its affective reception even years after a film’s formal release.
References
Cho, Francisca. 2017. Seeing Like the Buddha: Enlightenment through Film. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Fan, Victor. 2022. Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Green, Ronald. 2014. Buddhism Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Buddhist Thought and Practice. New York: Routledge.
Plate, S. Brent. 2017. Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World. 2nd Edition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Suh, Sharon. 2014. Silver Screen Buddha: Buddhism in Asian and Western Film. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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.