In 1971 the French filmmaker Arnaud Desjardins travelled through Japan with Taisen Deshimaru as his guide into a world normally closed to cameras. The result is one of the few films that shows Japanese monastic Zen from the inside, and its opening line sets the terms: a finger points at the moon, and so much the worse for anyone who looks at the finger. What follows is offered as a set of signs, never as the thing itself.
The structure follows Deshimaru as an itinerant master. Where young monks once walked from temple to temple in search of a teacher, here a teacher moves from monastery to monastery, invited to pass on what he received from Kodo Sawaki. Each arrival is a lesson in form: homage to the Buddha and to the founder, a greeting at the tombs of the abbots who carried the transmission across the centuries, an envelope of handwritten paper offered to the resident roshi, and only then the bow between two men who have each given their life to the same reality.
Desjardins films all three orders, Soto, Rinzai and Obaku. At Eihei-ji, Dogen's mountain monastery, the camera lingers on the founder's portrait and on original manuscripts, among them the Fukanzazengi, the text Deshimaru himself partly translated into French. He meets Taishun Sato, the blind 82-year-old abbot of Eihei-ji; the Obaku abbot at Manpuku-ji near Kyoto; Sogen Asahina at Engaku-ji in Kamakura, then head of the Rinzai federation; and a Rinzai master at Nanzen-ji whose serenity the commentary traces back to a hard teaching, that a practitioner must go past his own last extremity before he finds emptiness in himself.
Most of the running time goes to ordinary monastic days. Silence broken by wooden and metal instruments, each sound a call back to vigilance. The kesa, originally sewn from discarded rags, carrying the idea that today's most abject person may be tomorrow's most awakened. Ordination, with its final question, are you ready to die to yourself, and the last tuft of hair cut away. Samu, under the old rule that a day without work is a day without food. Morning sutras and the Hannya Shingyo. A tantric rite preserved inside a Soto temple. Tea, meals, the bath, even the latrines, all treated as places where nothing is too trivial to be done completely.
The zazen sequences are the most detailed. Knees pressing the earth, head pushing towards the sky, left hand resting on right, the joined thumbs by which a master reads a disciple's inner state. The kyosaku is explained as help rather than punishment, and as a skill: anyone can strike with a stick, few can strike with a kyosaku. Kinhin is broken down breath by breath, one half-step per exhalation, the weight held low in the hara.
The film closes on change: nuns at a monastery near Nagano, married temple priests, generations succeeding one another. The fire burns out. Zazen remains.