Translate this Article...
Tadanobu Asano in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Invisible Waves, discussed below. |
The Stoic philosophy of the Romans teaches that�much as in Buddhism�suffering is an unavoidable part of life. Now, you can�t necessarily control or prevent suffering, but you can (theoretically) control your reaction to it. As the wise woman says to Ashitaka at the beginning of Princess Mononoke: �You can�t escape your fate, but you can rise to meet it.� And the Stoic method of rising to meet one�s fate was to cultivate an active dispassion and emotional neutrality. Your spouse died? It is in the nature of spouses to die. Can�t be helped. Your crops failed? Well, that�s just a fact. Why get upset about it? You�ll be dead eventually anyway, and the dead don�t suffer. The Emperor has ordered you to commit suicide? That�s what emperors do.
Stoicism doesn�t necessarily tell you to stop engaging with the world, it merely tells you to act without worrying about the outcome. This is the gist of Krishna�s counsel to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.
Krishna and Arjuna. |
Pen-ek Ratanaruang�s 2005 film Invisible Waves was just added to Netflix�s streaming service. I�d wanted to see it for years, ever since I first saw Pen-ek�s Last Life in the Universe back in 2008. Both films feature the coolly elegant cinematography of Christopher Doyle (who�s done the cinematography for every Wong Kar-wai movie since 1990�s Days of Being Wild) and wonderfully understated performances by Tadanobu Asano (my favorite contemporary Japanese actor). In Invisible Waves, Asano plays an expatriate hitman on the run after killing his boss�s wife. The film takes him from Macao to Hong Kong to Phuket and then back to Hong Kong again, and as his life quietly unravels, he never loses his cool. And it�s not that he�s apathetic about the outcome of the situation. He clearly wants to live; but if he�s going to suffer, well, that�s going to happen, and if he�s going to die, well, that�s also going to happen. He doesn�t get upset about things if it serves no practical purpose to do so. If only we could all face life with the equanimity of Tadanobu Asano�s affectless hitman.