inyeon and wall facers

More and more Buddhist concepts are coming into movies and shows. After 2500 years, Buddhism, which is transferred through highly personal relationships, has finally reached the entire world.  If you consider the Chinese sailors reaching North America roughly 250 years ago, Buddhism has touched North American after 1/10 of it's history. It's only recently that monks and others have began to build sanghas in North America. Now that the internet connects the world it seems like all the ideas are available to us, and that the world is quite small, but we are still divided by languages. English might turn out to be the lingua franca of earth, but it might be another language. Maybe there will be several languages that everyone speaks. Maybe it will be a patois. English is made out of several languages, that's why it's almost impossible to really spell.

Past Lives (2023) has a romantic Korean concept of inyeon (인연), where people are connected over a number of lifetimes. Conditionality might include rough ideas of reincarnation where something is transfered, or it might not, maybe it's more like the memories in brains still influencing real life. Like my photos of my grandparents who have been gone for a long time, but I still think about them, and they influence my in known and unknown ways. Whatever the notions, the romantic notion is quaint, and could be traced to Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. 

I'm watching 3 Body Problem (2024) on Netflix, and they talk about wall facers. That I know of it was Dogen (1200-1253) that liked to meditate facing a wall. He was a Japanese Buddhist who went to China for more teachings and had some powerful writings he left us. He wanted to put all his eggs into the meditation basket instead of the traditions of reciting sutras and mantras, he chose a less devotional path. Most westerners really emphasize meditation in Buddhism, but there is Pure Land Buddhism which focuses more on devotion and other power.

Dogen might have not invented facing the wall, it's unlikely the actual person who chose that first is credited. The Buddha taught anapanasati and brahma viharas, and those were already present in the culture probably, he just tailored them to Buddhism to lead towards the insights he discovered.

There are other shows and movies that have Buddhist influence. There is an anime movie where Jesus and Buddha go on a holiday as teenagers. And then there are straight on, Buddhist movies like Little Buddha (1993), Kundun (1997), Seven Years In Tibet (1997), The Cup (1999), Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003).