Zen Stories



Five traditional Zen stories, with their tongue in cheek humor and elegant intellectual twists form the base for this 70 minute fiction film. All five episodes take place in contemporary New York. “A Cup of Tea,” one of the best known Zen stories, introduces a welder in an unlikely role of a famous Tea Master who gives a lesson in true Buddhism to a visiting Zen scholar. In “The Subjugation of the Ghost” a West Village bartender is transformed into a teacher of Zen as he helps a widower get rid of his former wife’s ghost. In “Trading Dialogue for Lodging,” two amateur Zen aficionados are convinced that a closed-down Bowery homeless shelter is a Zen monastery, and that a retired wrestling champion is a Zen Master whom they have to challenge to a dialogue about Buddha. “Hokusai’s Rooster’ is based on an anecdote from the life a famous Japanese woodprinter Hokusai and explores the age-old question of how to assign a monetary value to the artist’s search for perfection. “Fishmonger’s Zen” is the story of a young sales-girl who searches for love at the Fulton fish market, only to learn that on the market, as well as in life, all fish are the same.