In-Class Reflective Essay: "Spring" in Kim Ki Duk's Film

  What a little monk found funny was, in fact, extreme pain to fish, frog and the snake. The little monk realizes it after he got punished with same way by an old monk. This is life. You can never sympathy with someone or something before you get a similar experience to those. The reason we can sympathy is that we have experienced many events and people directly or directly before. Thus we are watching the world above our recognition base formed before.
  Mr. Kim Jung Hwan told me similar thing. He said that we tend to say "I know you", but actually this means "I know you who I know." It made me reflect in many ways. How many times I thought I know him/her and evaluated easily, and how can it be different from what the small monk did in the movie. I was, without even realizing it, hanging stones to them. Experience I got from the movie has widen my view to the world.
 With Buddhism's perspective, what he monk did has another meaning. Buddhism taught that people has to pay for their karma of their life in the life after their death. This can be said that you have to be responsible what you did. The little monk got a rebirth by hanging stone to his back, which is a same thing he did to animals, and he suffered from pain and found out the animals he made suffer. This behavior enabled him to repay the karma he made, so he could be responsible to what he did.
  You reap what you sow. It seems so evident, but a valuable life lesson. This is what karma means and what the little monk did. The belief that bad guys would be punished and good guys would be praised was the impetus making the world better place. We should keep this belief and meaning of karma.
  Also there is a wisdom of 'nothing' in the name of the movie, spring summer fall winter and spring. After winter, the spring comes finally. What we think confusing and disrupting returns to its position afterwards. I don't know what life the little monk will live, it would be tranquil afterwards. Let it be, this is another wisdom the movie lessons. In many ways, the movie has many Buddhism meanings.