What is the geography of an inner journey, and where does it lead? How might spiritualism appear on a screen? Can a film — a moving picture — capture stillness?
These are not unanswerable Zen koans, but instead aesthetic challenges filmmaker and Buddhist Edward A. Burger encountered in his making of the 2021 film “The Mountain Path,” a deeply personal story about his journey into the Zhongnan Mountains of China, in search of his lifelong teacher.
Along the way, Burger himself encounters a host of solitary Buddhists — monks and a nun, an old master and his disciples — who offer lessons in living and dying, doing without and looking within.
Now down from the mountain, Burger brings to our local flatlands his film for an intimate, and potentially enlightening screening.
Sponsored by the Yellow Springs Dharma Center, “The Mountain Path” will show at Little Art Theatre on Wednesday, July 8, at 7 p.m. A question-and-answer with Burger will follow.
In speaking with the News last week via Zoom from his Washington, D.C., home, Burger said the Little Art’s screening of “The Mountain Path” is a kind of homecoming — “the closing of a circle,” he said. Were it not for a fleeting connection to Antioch College, the film might have never been.
As a young man exploring academic interests in Buddhism in the late ‘90s, Burger was drawn from The College of Wooster in central Ohio to participate for a semester in a Yellow Springs-grown program. This was villager Robert Pryor’s Antioch’s Education Abroad Buddhist Studies program, which since its implementation in 1979, regularly brought college students from all over to study and stay in Bodh Gaya, India — the holy town where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment under the sacred Bodhi Tree.
“It turned me from someone who’s really interested in Buddhism to someone who said, ‘This is all I want to do with my life,’” Burger said. “From this program, you learned all about how to live in a new country, how to navigate Buddhist cultures and how to learn, how to explore. Robert handed his whole lifetime of experience and knowledge to us. What a transmission.”
Members of the Antioch Education Abroad Buddhist Studies program, when it celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2009 with a reunion of students and faculty. Shown above are, from left, Sayadaw U Nyaneinda, abbot of the monastery in Bodh Gaya, India, which provides housing for AEA students; Robert Pryor, program director since the program’s beginning; Dianeah Wanicek; Sister Dharmavijaya and Sister Molini, also of Bodh Gaya. (YS News archive photo)
In a separate interview at the Dharma Center, where Pryor leads all Vipassana practices, the former Antioch administrator chuckled as he recalled the academic sojourns he led over the years.
“This kind of education was too spiritual for universities back in those days, but not for Antioch,” Pryor said. “Antioch, in its true style, gave credit for meditation. That’s not something you’d see often!”
Pryor has stayed in touch with Burger over the years since his fateful trip abroad, and clearly recalls a pivotal moment for the soon-to-be filmmaker. Burger picked up a copy of Bill Porter’s “Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Monks.”
That book lit a fire in Burger, and his own mountain path became clear: move to China, learn Mandarin and gain a deeper understanding of Chán Buddhism — the ancient Chinese progenitor school of Zen. And for more than 12 years, that’s what he did.
“Meanwhile, every chance I got, I’m going up to the mountains to study with my shifu,” Burger added, referring to who would become his lifelong teacher and, later, a central figure in his films.
After some time, some experience and some fluency later, Burger found work in Beijing working on TV crews — lending a hand or a translation on what he described as “an influx of TV and Hollywood projects that came to China in the early 2000s.” When working on a reality TV show, Burger got wise to the magic of the handheld DV camcorder.
“What a game-changer,” he said of the little digital device. “So, I wanted to make a film about my shifu in the mountains. What else would I make a film about? That was the central thing in my life at the time.”
That first movie of his? Terrible, Burger said. Nothing but talking heads and shoddy footage he had collected from 2003 and 2004.
Following some words of encouragement from fellow filmmakers and digging deep within, he went back, made it a little better, and that film eventually became his directorial debut, the 2005 “Amongst White Clouds.”
Again, time passed and Burger’s spiritual journey progressed. His filmography grew by four more works. And in 2020, he felt it was time to revisit the clouds.
“I wanted to remake it,” he said. “I went back to my box of tapes and it was totally new and fresh to me. It looked totally different because I had been studying Buddhism and Chinese for 15 additional years. So, it was like picking up a book that you had read as a child, and not recognizing it at all.”
He again went into the mountains, gathered new footage of his teacher and the hermits on the Zhongnan mountain side, and eventually, “Among White Clouds” became an entirely new film — “The Mountain Path,” in fact.
Filmmaker Edward A. Burger. (Submitted photo)
“As I understand, people from all different Buddhist traditions have watched this and have been inspired by it in some way — Theravada monks, Westerners ordained as monks have said it’s been the first time they’ve seen these kinds of traditions lived out in such intensity and sincerity,” Burger said.
Buddhist or not, Burger — and those at the Dharma Center sponsoring Wednesday’s screening — said that “The Mountain Path” can appeal to most anyone.
“Most everyone is either living or wanting to embark on their own spiritual journey,” the filmmaker said. “For those who aren’t, this could bring some inspiration to step into that. It’s a good ol’ fashioned spiritual journey film.”
Burger continued: “The film is like those old Chinese landscape paintings where, as you unroll it in your hands, you’re moving through a natural space. I mapped an inner experience, a spiritual journey onto a physical landscape. We’re all moving through all kinds of terrain — going into dark forests, into caves, coming onto a precipice, and everything is wide open. The film traverses all that, and as you go from one place to another, you learn something new from each hermit you meet.”
Bringing moviegoers from their cinema seat into the hermits’ misty mountaintop dwellings is one thing for an artist, but Burger said bringing audiences into his subjects’ inner worlds is a different feat altogether.
“Chán has a whole lineage of arts — music, calligraphy, painting, poetry, architecture, clothes — all helping those who practice turn their gaze inward,” he said. “I try to craft my films with that in mind — to somehow re-create something that is really shapeless and formless in many ways. But there’s this grammar of experience in meditating that can interact with cinema in an interesting way.”
Watching a film, after all, is its own form of meditation, he noted. Cinema requires patience, seeing, listening, and experiencing — the same as making the work to begin with.
“As you move through these landscapes, you’re moving through your own mind,” Burger said. “But you know, really there is no mountain. There is only your mind.”
“The Mountain Path” will be screened at Little Art Theatre on Wednesday, July 8, at 7 p.m. Adult tickets are $13, senior tickets are $11 and child/student/military tickets are $9. Director Edward A. Burger will hold a Q&A following the film. For more information, go to http://www.littleart.com
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