ABSTRACT
Buddhism addresses many concerns in contemporary film and media theory, and it enables us to rethink the cinematographic image and its embodied experience as a process of interbecoming between the reality in which the film was shot, the reality in which the spectator forms a relationship with the image, as well as the technical intervention that forms part of the overall assemblage of interdependent conditions. This process of interbecoming is driven by memories and dispositions. Some of them are shared by many people and sentient beings, whereas others are personal. All philosophical discourses of the cinema are affected by memories and dispositions. Meanwhile, each film, as an image-consciousness, arises out of an assemblage of personal, socio-political, historical, and cultural conditions, which are all active agents in its process of becoming. Fan introduces the basic principles of Buddhist philosophy and expounds how it can help us rethink contemporary film and media philosophy. He also examines how we can dismantle the discrimination between universality and particularity in the larger Asia as method debate. He uses the film Love and Duty to illustrate Buddhism as one out of many technai that actively inform the film as an assemblage of interbes and interbecomes.
