General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? (달마가 동쪽으로 간 까닭은?)

Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? (달마가 동쪽으로 간 까닭은?) is a 1989 South Korean art film written, directed, photographed, edited, and produced by Bae Yong-kyun, which follows three monks in a remote mountain temple as they confront death, attachment, and the pursuit of enlightenment. It won the Golden Leopard, the top prize, at the 42nd Locarno International Film Festival, the first Korean award in that festival's history, and it is regarded as a model of 1980s Korean art cinema.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	September 23, 1989, South Korea; drama, all audiences; 175 minutes in the Korean release¹
Director	Bae Yong-kyun, who also produced, wrote, shot, edited, designed, and lit the film³
Cast	Yi Pan-yong (Hyegok), Sin Won-sop (Kibong), Hwang Hae-jin (Haejin); all were amateur actors with no prior acting experience¹^•³
Production time	Eight years of planning and four years of production, made outside the commercial Korean film industry³^•⁴
Festival honors	Golden Leopard, director, cinematography, and youth jury prizes at the 42nd Locarno Film Festival (1989); screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes the same year²^•⁵
Domestic audience	143,881 admissions, a commercial success for a Korean art film¹
International release	The first South Korean feature-length film to gain theatrical distribution in the United States⁶

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film is set at an old, dilapidated temple deep in the mountains where the elderly Zen master Hyegok lives with the orphan boy novice Haejin. A young monk, Kibong, arrives at the temple, introduced by its abbot, seeking the way of seeing one's nature and becoming Buddha (견성성불, 見性成佛). Kibong is tormented by worry for his blind mother left alone in the world, and although he undergoes penance and ascetic practice, he cannot free himself from worldly desire, family bonds, and the anguish they produce.³^•⁷

Hyegok is portrayed as a monk of ferocious discipline: he sat in meditation so relentlessly that he developed frostbite on his side from pressing against an ice wall to fight sleep, cut away the dead flesh, and laughed; the wound remains. Knowing his death is near, he asks Kibong to cremate his body without telling anyone. Kibong carries out the cremation, passes on what Hyegok left to Haejin, and leaves the temple to wander again; asked where he is going, he answers only by looking up at the sky.⁷^•⁸

The boy Haejin gives the film its observational center. After he kills a bird with a stone, he confronts for the first time the duality of life and death that governs the phenomenal world, and comes to feel guilt, fear, impermanence, and attachment. The film's teaching, delivered through the three characters' exchanges, is that life is empty and that being born and perishing are not what they seem.¹

The title

The title is a Zen koan, a paradoxical riddle meant for meditation that has no worldly answer; understanding it is itself framed as a form of enlightenment. The koan refers to Bodhidharma, the fifth-century monk credited with bringing Zen Buddhism to East Asia, and it provokes the question of the distinction between leaving and arriving.⁶^•⁹

Production

Bae Yong-kyun came to filmmaking from painting. According to an MBC report at the time of the Locarno award, he graduated from Seoul National University's art department, earned a doctorate in plastic arts in France, and then founded an independent production company.² He was a professor of fine arts at Dongguk University, a Buddhist-founded institution in Seoul, when he undertook the project, and he worked entirely outside the Korean film industry, with no studio backing.⁴

Total authorship. Bae took personal charge of nearly the entire filmmaking process: production, direction, screenplay, cinematography, art, editing, and lighting. The only substantial credits outside him are the music by Jin Kyu-young and the sound recording by Kim Kyung-il. The cast were all amateurs with no acting experience.³^•¹ The film was shot on 35mm with minimal equipment, relying on natural light and long, patient exposures of landscape and weather across changing seasons.⁴

The production period is reported as eight years of planning and four years of production.³ English-language accounts commonly describe it as a four-year labor of love financed by Bae himself; the exact overall timeline is not precisely documented.⁹^•⁴

Style

The film is built around images rather than plot. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture describes it as an art film expressed through painterly cinematic images rather than story, and credits its high reputation to a style that alternates long takes and montage, long shots and close-ups, capturing people and nature with a sensitive, careful gaze.³ The critic Lee Seung-gu, a professor of film at Chung-Ang University, wrote in 1996 that the film's driving element is not its story but the visual situations formed by every object in it, water, rocks, wind, sky, clouds, fire, trees, birds, cattle, and cats, which carry as much weight as the three human figures.¹⁰

The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, formerly the film critic of the Chicago Reader, reviewed the American release in 1994 and described the film as full of "ravishingly beautiful images rather than ravishingly beautiful shots," conveying a Buddhist intelligence translated step by step into film terms, with the narrative at times suspended almost entirely for the sake of its contemplation of the natural world.¹¹ The film's length is integral to its effect: the 175-minute Korean cut slows perception until small changes become events.¹^•¹²

Reception and significance

The film premiered internationally at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, then swept five awards at the 42nd Locarno Film Festival in August 1989, including the Golden Leopard for best film, chosen from 18 competition films from 11 countries, among them Park Kwang-su's Chilsu and Mansu. It was the first Korean award in Locarno's history.⁵^•² Bae received a 4 million won cash prize and a 150 million won encouragement grant from the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation for an international festival winner.²

Domestically, the film drew 143,881 admissions, and the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture records it as the first Korean art film to succeed at the box office on release, drawing about 140,000 spectators.¹^•³ It was the first South Korean feature to gain theatrical distribution in the United States, where it circulated in a 137-minute version and became something of a cult film.⁶^•¹¹

Place in Korean cinema. The film arrived during the late-1980s Korean New Wave yet stands apart from that movement's realist, politically engaged program; it is spiritual, rural, and solitary in its making. Its Locarno victory preceded, and in some ways prefigured, the later global recognition of Korean cinema, and it is now treated as a canonical work of Korean art cinema and of Buddhist film generally, frequently cited in discussions of contemplative or slow cinema.⁴ A 1996 poll of Korean films placed it among the ten most-voted works of the country's first eighty years of cinema.¹³ Bae made very few films afterward and is understood to have largely returned to painting and teaching, which has sharpened the sense of this work as a singular vocation rather than the start of a career.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026