A floating hermitage sits on a still lake, surrounded by mountains and ancient trees. The water reflects the sky. A gate—wooden doors flanked by carved guardians—stands at the water’s edge. There are no walls attached to it. You can walk around the gate as easily as through it. And yet the characters in the film always walk through it. The gate is a choice, not a barrier. Morality is not a wall that prevents you from transgressing; it is a door you choose to open and walk through every time.

Inside the hermitage live two people: an Old Monk (Oh Young-su) and a Child Monk. The child has no parents, no backstory, no name. He is simply a boy living with an old man on a floating platform in the middle of a lake, learning to meditate, pick herbs, and pray. The film is divided into five segments—Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring—each separated by roughly a decade, each taking place during its namesake season, each depicting a stage in the monk’s life.

Spring. The child is perhaps five or six. He plays in the forest, catches creatures in the streams. One day, with the casual cruelty of all children, he ties a small stone to a fish, laughing as it struggles to swim. He does the same to a frog. Then to a snake. The Old Monk watches silently all three times. That night, while the boy sleeps, the master ties a large smooth stone to the child’s body.

In the morning, the master tells him: you cannot remove this stone until you have untied the creatures you tormented. And if any of them have died, you will carry that stone in your heart forever.

The boy struggles through the forest with the weight on his back. He finds the fish at the bottom of the creek, dead. The frog, still alive, still struggling where he left it. The snake in a pool of blood—killed by another animal, unable to escape because of the stone the boy tied to it.

The boy weeps. He weeps not because he has been punished but because he has seen what his cruelty produced. The Old Monk does not lecture. Does not explain karma. Does not say “this is what happens when you’re cruel.” He simply created the conditions for the boy to discover the consequence himself. This is the film’s pedagogical method—and it will remain consistent across all five seasons. The master never explains. He arranges. He waits. He trusts experience to teach what language cannot.

Summer. The boy is now a teenager. A woman arrives at the hermitage with her sick daughter—a girl roughly the monk’s age, suffering from an unspecified illness. The Old Monk agrees to treat her. The mother leaves. The girl stays.

The young monk is consumed by desire. He gropes the girl while she sleeps; she wakes and slaps him. He prays obsessively, wracked with guilt. She forgives him. They begin a sexual relationship, sneaking away from the hermitage into the forest, returning together in the boat. The Old Monk knows. Of course he knows. He says only one thing: “Lust awakens the desire to possess. And the desire to possess awakens the intent to murder.”

The young monk does not hear this. Cannot hear it. Desire has filled his ears. When the master declares the girl healed and sends her home, the young monk is shattered. That night, he flees the hermitage, taking the Buddha statue and his meager possessions, rowing to shore to pursue the girl into the world.

The Old Monk watches from the floating platform as the boat reaches the shore. He does not call out. Does not pursue. Does not prevent. He lets the young monk go, because this leaving is also part of the cycle.

Fall. Ten years have passed. The Old Monk is older, slower, alone with a cat he has adopted as a companion. One day, the monk he raised arrives at the lake’s edge—no longer a boy, no longer a teenager, but a man in his thirties, carrying a bloodstained knife and a face full of rage. He has murdered his wife. She left him for another man, and the master’s prophecy—”lust awakens the desire to possess, and the desire to possess awakens the intent to murder”—has come true with devastating precision.

The young man returns the stolen Buddha statue to the hermitage. Then he attempts suicide—sealing his eyes, mouth, and nose shut with cloth, painting the character for “closed” on each seal. He sits before the Buddha and waits to die.

The Old Monk finds him. Beats him. Not gently, not symbolically—beats him with a stick until the man is bleeding and gasping. “You killed her,” the master says. “But you will not kill yourself so easily.” He ties his pupil to the ceiling by his wrists, places a candle beneath the rope so it will burn through slowly, then begins the extraordinary sequence that is the film’s visual and spiritual centerpiece.

The Old Monk takes his cat, dips its tail in a bowl of black ink, and begins writing the Heart Sutra—one of Buddhism’s most essential texts—on the wooden deck of the hermitage, using the cat’s tail as a brush. The calligraphy flows across the planks in beautiful, deliberate strokes, the words of wisdom laid down by an old man using a living creature as his instrument.

When the rope burns through and the young man drops to the floor, the master gives him a knife—not for violence but for carving. He instructs his pupil to carve each character of the Heart Sutra into the wood, following the ink the master has written. The young man begins. He carves through the night, through the following day, through another night—the physical labor of cutting scripture into the floor functioning as both penance and meditation, transforming the body’s energy from violence to devotion, from murder to prayer. Two detectives arrive to arrest him. They watch the carving. They wait. They help paint color into the carved characters when the man finishes. The arrest happens with a strange gentleness—as if the sutra itself has softened everyone who touched it. The young man is taken away in handcuffs.

Winter. The Old Monk is alone. He knows his time is near. In one of the film’s most astonishing sequences, the master performs a final act: he seals his own eyes, mouth, ears, and nose—the same ritual his pupil used in his suicide attempt—builds a funeral pyre inside the boat, and immolates himself on the frozen lake. His death is not despair; it is completion. He has carried his pupil’s suffering, taken responsibility for the man he raised, and now releases himself from the cycle. A snake—echoing the snake from Spring—crawls from the fire.

The lake is frozen. The hermitage is falling apart. Then the man returns—now in his forties, played by Kim Ki-duk himself. He has served his prison sentence. He enters the hermitage, finds the ashes of his master, collects them, and fashions an ice Buddha from the frozen lake, placing his master’s remains inside it. He begins rigorous physical and spiritual training—martial arts exercises on the ice, meditation in the freezing cold—rebuilding himself from the broken thing he was.

He finds a Bodhisattva of Compassion statue and places it in the hermitage. Then, in the sequence that gives the film its deepest visual metaphor, he ties a heavy millstone to his body with a rope and drags it up the mountain above the lake, carrying the Bodhisattva statue in his arms. The ascent is agonizing—the stone dragging behind him through snow and rock, the statue of compassion clutched to his chest. This is not any traditional Buddhist ritual; Kim invented it specifically for the film. It is the adult version of the lesson from Spring: the child carried a stone as punishment for cruelty to animals; the man carries a stone as penance for cruelty to his wife, and as practice for the compassion the Bodhisattva represents. The weight you carry in your heart, you must learn to carry with your body.

At the summit, the man places the Bodhisattva where it can look down over the lake, the hermitage, the entire valley. He meditates. Below, the ice begins to thaw.

One night, a woman arrives at the frozen lake carrying a baby. Her face is covered. She leaves the child at the hermitage and walks away across the ice—and falls through into the water, drowning or disappearing. The man rescues the baby. He is now the master. The cycle has begun again.

…and Spring. The final segment. Spring again. The man is now the Old Monk. The baby has grown into a small boy—perhaps five or six. They live together on the floating hermitage. The boy plays in the forest. He catches a frog. He catches a snake. He ties stones to them. He laughs.

The camera pulls back to reveal the Bodhisattva of Compassion on the mountain peak, looking down at the valley, the lake, the hermitage, the old man, the boy, the cruelty, the cycle beginning again. The film ends where it began. Nothing has been solved. Everything has been learned. And it will all need to be learned again.

Content Breakdown

Language: None. The film contains virtually no profanity. Dialogue is minimal throughout—entire segments pass with fewer than a dozen lines spoken. The film communicates through image, gesture, and silence. Context: “This is the quietest film in the entire Objective #28 lineup. Students accustomed to dialogue-driven storytelling will need to adjust. The absence of language is not a limitation—it is the method. The Old Monk teaches through arrangement and silence, and so does the film.”

Violence: Moderate. A child ties stones to animals, causing their suffering and death (the fish and snake die; this is shown directly and is genuinely distressing). The adult monk murders his wife offscreen—we see only the bloodstained knife and his confession. The Old Monk beats his returned pupil with a stick (drawn blood). The Old Monk immolates himself in a ritual self-burning (shown at a distance, more symbolic than graphic). A woman drowns or disappears through ice. Context: “The violence is sparse but lands with unusual force precisely because of the film’s prevailing stillness. The child’s cruelty to the animals is the most disturbing sequence for many viewers—not because it is graphic but because it is casual, recognizable, and irreversible. The film makes no distinction between small cruelties and large ones; the stone tied to the fish and the knife driven into the wife are the same impulse at different scales.”

Sexual Content: Moderate. The teenage monk and the girl have a sexual relationship—shown in two scenes with partial nudity (bare breasts, bodies intertwined, no explicit content). The young monk gropes the sleeping girl’s breast before their relationship begins (she slaps him). A brief scene of the adult monk with a woman. Context: “The sexuality is handled with a naturalism consistent with the film’s spiritual framework—desire is presented as a force of nature, neither condemned nor celebrated but observed. The Buddhist perspective does not moralize about sex; it simply notes that attachment to desire produces suffering. The Old Monk’s warning—’Lust awakens the desire to possess’—is descriptive, not judgmental.”

Substance Use: None. Context: “The hermitage exists outside the world of substances.”

Mature Themes: The cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth; karma and consequence; the relationship between cruelty in childhood and violence in adulthood; sexual desire as a force that disrupts spiritual practice; the Buddhist concept of attachment and suffering; penance and redemption through physical labor; self-immolation as spiritual completion; the transmission of wisdom from master to disciple across generations; the impossibility of preventing suffering versus the possibility of transforming it; the “art versus artist” question raised by the director’s legacy. Context: “This film asks students to sit with cyclical rather than linear thinking. Western narrative expects problems to be solved; Buddhist narrative expects them to recur. The final Spring—the new boy tying stones to animals, repeating the cruelty of the first Spring—is not a failure of the master’s teaching. It is the teaching. Life recurs. Cruelty recurs. Compassion must also recur.”

Why This Film Works for Developing Unconditional Love and Compassion

After six films that taught compassion as action—showing up, speaking truth, giving grace, cooking feasts, enduring burden, crawling through fire—Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring teaches the lesson that must come last: compassion is not a destination. It is a cycle. You do not arrive at unconditional love and stay there. You arrive, you lose it, you find it again, you lose it again, and the practice is the arriving, not the staying.

This is the contemplative capstone of Objective #28 because it reframes everything that came before. The previous six films could be misread as a progression—as if compassion were a skill you develop until you’ve mastered it. Dead Man Walking: learn to love the guilty. Good Will Hunting: learn to love the guarded. Les Misérables: learn that love creates love. Babette’s Feast: learn to love without recognition. The Green Mile: learn that love is a burden. Hacksaw Ridge: learn that love survives the worst. A student might conclude: I’ve learned all six lessons, therefore I am now compassionate.

This film says: no. The boy in the final Spring has learned nothing from the previous four seasons—because he is a new boy. The cycle starts over. The cruelty starts over. The stone will be tied to the fish again. The Old Monk—who was the boy, who was the teenager, who was the murderer, who was the penitent, who dragged the millstone up the mountain—watches and does not prevent it. Because he knows the boy must discover consequence for himself. Because he knows compassion cannot be taught in advance; it can only be learned through the experience of causing harm and understanding what harm means.

This is the hardest lesson in the objective, and it is the one students will resist most: compassion is not a permanent achievement. It is a daily, seasonal, lifelong practice that must be renewed constantly because the conditions that produce cruelty—desire, attachment, ignorance, the casual thoughtlessness of being alive—never stop recurring. The monk who dragged a millstone up a mountain in penance will watch a child tie a stone to a frog and will not intervene, because the child must learn the same lesson the monk learned, in the same way, through the same suffering.

For students who have spent seven films learning what compassion looks like, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring offers the ultimate humility: you will forget. You will fail. You will cause harm again. And the practice of compassion is not avoiding this failure—it is returning to the hermitage after the failure, carving the sutra into the floor, dragging the stone up the mountain, and beginning again. Every spring.

Characters as Individuals

The Old Monk (Oh Young-su) is not a character in the conventional sense—he is a presence. He has no backstory, no name, no revealed inner life. He simply is: calm, watchful, occasionally sharp, never explanatory. Oh Young-su plays him with a stillness that suggests decades of practice—the body has been trained to want nothing, the face to reveal nothing, the voice to say only what is necessary. His teaching method is entirely experiential: he creates conditions (the stone tied to the sleeping boy, the girl sent away, the Heart Sutra written on the floor) and then waits. He does not protect his pupil from suffering. He does not prevent mistakes. He arranges the environment so that mistakes produce their own lessons.

His self-immolation in Winter is not suicide in the Western sense—it is a final act of compassion, a release of the body when the body’s work is done. He has taught everything he can teach. His pupil has returned, served his sentence, begun to rebuild. The master’s remaining presence would be a crutch. By dying, he forces the pupil to become the master. The snake that emerges from the fire suggests transformation, not death—the soul continuing in a different form.

The Child/Teenager/Young Adult/Adult Monk is played by four different actors across the five segments, plus Kim Ki-duk himself in Winter—creating a discontinuous character who is nonetheless recognizably the same person across decades. The child’s cruelty to animals is not malice; it is the thoughtlessness of a mind that has not yet learned that other beings suffer. The teenager’s desire is not wickedness; it is the body’s natural demand asserting itself against a lifetime of ascetic training. The young adult’s murder is not psychopathy; it is the precise fulfillment of the master’s warning: lust leads to possession, possession leads to murder. The adult’s return, penance, and renewal are not redemption in the Christian sense—there is no forgiveness from an external source. There is only the slow, painful work of carrying the stone until the carrying itself becomes the teaching.

Kim Ki-duk casting himself as the Adult Monk is significant. The director—factory worker, Marine, street painter, self-taught filmmaker—embodies the character’s journey from outsider to master through a path no one would have predicted or designed.

The Girl (Ha Yeo-jin) appears only in Summer and serves as the catalyst for the monk’s departure from the hermitage. She is not a character so much as a force—the intrusion of desire into a contemplative life. The film does not blame her (she arrives sick, is healed, is sent home). The responsibility for what follows lies entirely with the monk’s response to desire, not with desire itself.

Themes for Deeper Discussion

The cycle versus the line:

Western storytelling typically follows a line—beginning, middle, end, resolution. This film follows a circle—beginning, crisis, resolution, beginning again.

Discussion questions:

• The final Spring repeats the first Spring. Is this depressing or reassuring? Does the repetition mean nothing was learned, or that learning must happen fresh each generation?
• Think about your own life in terms of seasons. Which season are you in now? Have you already experienced a cycle—a pattern that repeated?
• Compare this film’s structure to the other six films in this objective. Those films all end with some form of resolution. This one ends with repetition. Which feels more truthful to your experience of life?

The master’s method:

The Old Monk never lectures, never explains, never prevents harm. He creates conditions for the pupil to learn through experience.

Discussion questions:

• Is this good teaching or negligent teaching? The master watches the child tie stones to animals and does not stop him until after the harm is done. Should he have intervened earlier?
• Think about how you have learned your most important lessons. Were they taught to you in advance, or did you have to make the mistake first?
• The Old Monk’s only verbal warning—”Lust awakens the desire to possess”—is ignored by the teenager. Can wisdom be communicated in words, or must it always be discovered through experience?
• How does the master’s approach compare to the other mentors in this objective: Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking), Sean Maguire (Good Will Hunting), the Bishop of Digne (Les Misérables)?

The doors without walls:

The hermitage has doors but no walls. Characters always walk through the doors rather than around them.

Discussion questions:

• What do the doors represent? If morality has no walls—if nothing physically prevents you from going around the rules—what makes you choose to walk through the door?
• In your own life, which moral principles function like doors without walls? Things you choose to follow even though no one would stop you from breaking them?
• The young monk first transgresses by going around the “door” of the master’s authority to reach the girl. What follows is the destruction of everything he had. Is this karma, or is it just what happens when you abandon your own principles?

Cruelty and compassion as the same impulse:

The child ties stones to animals out of playful curiosity. The adult drags a millstone up a mountain out of penance. Both involve stones. Both involve suffering. One is cruelty; the other is practice.

Discussion questions:

• The film suggests that the same energy—the capacity to cause another being to suffer—can be redirected into the capacity for compassion. Do you agree? Is cruelty the raw material from which compassion is made?
• The Bodhisattva of Compassion is carried up the mountain by a man who murdered his wife. Can someone who has caused great harm become a source of great compassion?
• Think about the other characters in this objective who caused harm and found compassion: Matthew Poncelet (Dead Man Walking), Will Hunting (Good Will Hunting), Jean Valjean (Les Misérables). What do they share with the monk in this film?

Art versus artist:

Kim Ki-duk created one of the most spiritual films in cinema history. He was also credibly accused of violence against women.

Discussion questions:

• Can a morally compromised person create genuinely moral art? Does the director’s conduct change how you experience the film?
• The film itself is about the cycle of cruelty and redemption—the very pattern its director appears to have lived. Does this make the film more authentic or more troubling?
• Where do you draw the line between appreciating art and endorsing the artist? Is the line the same for everyone?

Visual Literacy

Kim Ki-duk’s Vision

Understanding the directorial choices deepens appreciation:

The floating hermitage: The single most important visual decision in the film. A monastery that floats—that drifts slightly on the water, that has no fixed foundation, that could in theory float away—is the perfect visual metaphor for Buddhist impermanence. Nothing in this film is solid. The floor moves. The background shifts. The buildings can be rearranged. The set was constructed to drift subtly during filming, so that behind the actors, the mountains and trees are never in exactly the same position twice. This is not a set design choice; it is a philosophical argument made visible.

The gate without walls: The film’s most discussed visual symbol. Doors imply walls; these doors have none. Anyone can walk around them. The characters don’t. This transforms the doors from barriers into rituals—each passage through them is a voluntary act of discipline, a choice to honor a boundary that exists only because you choose to recognize it. When the young monk first transgresses the boundary (sneaking past the sleeping master to reach the girl), he walks around the door for the first time. The visual grammar is precise: every violation of moral order begins with walking around a door.

Seasonal color: Each segment has a distinct palette dictated by the actual season in which it was filmed. Spring is green and golden—new growth, warm light, the innocence of a world just waking up. Summer is lush, humid, saturated—the visual equivalent of desire. Fall is burnt orange and grey—the world contracting, cooling, hardening. Winter is white and blue—ice, absence, penance. The final Spring returns to green, completing the circle. Kim shot on location at Jusanji Pond, using the actual seasonal changes as his color design—the landscape does the work that a cinematographer’s color grading would do in a conventional film.

The mountain ascent: The sequence where the adult monk drags a millstone up the mountain while carrying the Bodhisattva of Compassion is the film’s visual climax—and its only non-Buddhist ritual (Kim invented it). The image is archetypal: a man carrying impossible weight upward, toward a summit where perspective changes. It echoes Sisyphus but reverses the meaning—Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder that always rolls back down; the monk carries his stone to the top and leaves it there, because the Bodhisattva of Compassion, placed at the summit, can now look down over the entire valley. The penance is not eternal. It is completed. The stone is put down. The compassion remains.

The overhead shot: The film’s final image pulls the camera back and up—an overhead view of the lake, the hermitage, the mountains, with the Bodhisattva on the peak looking down. This is the compassion perspective: seeing the entire cycle from above, seeing Spring and Winter simultaneously, seeing cruelty and kindness as parts of the same turning wheel. The camera has become the Bodhisattva. The audience has become the Bodhisattva. You are now looking down at the cycle of human suffering with the eyes of infinite compassion—and what you see is a small boy tying a stone to a frog, because it has always been Spring, and it will always be Spring again.

Creative Extensions

The letter you can’t send: The adult monk has returned to the hermitage after prison. His master is dead. His wife is dead. Write what he would say if he could speak to one of them—the master or the wife. What would he say? What could never be said?

The season you’re in: Map your own life onto the film’s five-season structure. Which season are you in now? What happened in your Spring—your earliest memories of innocence and carelessness? What is your Summer—the desire or passion that pulled you away from something stable? What Fall might be ahead? Write a meditation on your own cycle.

The door without walls: Identify a moral principle you follow that has no enforcement mechanism—something you do (or don’t do) purely because of an internal commitment, not because anyone would punish you for violating it. Describe this principle. Why do you walk through the door instead of around it? What would it take for you to walk around it?

Teaching without words: The Old Monk’s entire pedagogy is experiential—he arranges situations and lets the student learn through consequence. Design a lesson for someone younger than you that teaches an important moral principle without using words or direct instruction. How would you create the conditions for someone to discover the lesson themselves?

The cycle of Objective #28: Now that you have seen all seven films, trace the cycle of compassion they describe. Does the arc from Dead Man Walking to this film feel like a progression, a circle, or something else? If you were to add an eighth film to continue the cycle, what would it be about?

Related Viewing

Other contemplative Buddhist cinema:

• Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? (1989, Not Rated—mild content) — Bae Yong-kyun’s meditative masterpiece about three Zen monks; the film most often compared to Spring, Summer; extraordinarily beautiful and demanding; ages 15+ 🇰🇷
• Samsara (2001, Not Rated—sexual content) — Pan Nalin’s film about a Buddhist monk who leaves the monastery for worldly desire—strikingly parallel plot to the Summer segment; ages 16+ 🇮🇳
• Into Great Silence (2005, Not Rated—no objectionable content) — Philip Gröning’s documentary about Carthusian monks in the French Alps; the purest cinematic meditation on contemplative life; ages 12+ 🇩🇪/🇫🇷

Other films about cycles and repetition:

• Groundhog Day (1993, PG) — The comic version of the same philosophical question: what happens when you are trapped in a cycle? How does repetition become practice? Ages 10+
• The Tree of Life (2011, PG-13) — Malick’s meditation on childhood, loss, nature, and grace—a Christian counterpart to this film’s Buddhist cosmology; ages 14+
• Ikiru (1952, Not Rated—mild content) — Kurosawa’s masterpiece about a dying bureaucrat who discovers meaning through one final act of compassion; ages 14+ 🇯🇵

Other Kim Ki-duk films (for mature students, 17+):

• 3-Iron (2004, R) — A nearly silent film about two people who inhabit empty houses; Kim’s most tender and accessible work after Spring, Summer
• Pietà (2012, Not Rated—extreme content) — The Golden Lion winner; brutal, austere, and ultimately compassionate—but extremely violent and not for younger viewers

The spiritual source:

• The Heart Sutra (Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya) — The Buddhist text that the Old Monk writes on the floor and the young man carves into the wood. One of the shortest and most essential texts in Mahayana Buddhism. Its central teaching: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Available in numerous translations; the text itself is only about 260 words. Students who read it before or after watching the film will recognize its principles throughout the story.

Recommendation: Essential viewing for students aged 15+, with content warnings for animal cruelty (the child’s treatment of fish, frog, and snake), moderate sexuality, and violence. This is the quietest, slowest, and most demanding film in Objective #28—and it is the necessary capstone.

After six films of active compassion—running into fires, walking death row corridors, cooking feasts, giving candlesticks—this film asks students to sit still. To watch. To breathe. To notice that the boy in the final Spring is tying a stone to a frog, and that this is not a failure of everything that came before but the beginning of everything that will come after. Compassion is not something you achieve and keep. It is something you practice, lose, rediscover, and practice again—season after season, spring after spring, for as long as you are alive.

The Bodhisattva looks down from the mountain. The lake reflects the sky. The hermitage floats. The door has no walls. Walk through it anyway.