White Lotus : Season Three

 

A Buddhist-like renunciation of the world is at the center of this season. Can Americans pull it off when immersed in a lush, palatial, tropical island sanctuary under the care of therapists and spiritual counselors? Are you kidding me?  Of course not. We are what we are.  The wellness resort is just more bling - a well appointed pit stop in the rat race.  Even the local Thai characters become, if anything, more worldly by the last episode ( as the peaceful Gaitok learns to use a pistol which he eventually uses to kill Rick and get promoted to chauffeur)

Rick, by the way, is the extreme example of an unredeemable lost soul.  His motivations remain a mystery until the fifth episode and his background is never told.  Was he a professional criminal? We’ll never know.  A last minute therapy session may have averted disaster - but this would not be his fate. I love to watch the charismatic, rubbery face of the actor, Walton Goggins - but he did fail to make this character very believable. It may have been an impossible task.

This is mostly the story of a spiritual crisis in the Ratliff family whose patriarch abruptly learns that he faces financial ruin over a brief episode of white collar crime for which he takes no responsibility. Contemplating suicide, he has an audience with the Abbot of the local Buddhist monastery- asking him what happens after we die. The venerable monk tells him that our lives are like drops of water thrown up momentarily like spray from the great ocean of being - into which we fall back when we die.  It’s a beautiful, peaceful image, and lacking evidence to the contrary, I prefer to believe it.  Zero moral content.  No merit-based reincarnation. No eternal ego.  And as some critics have pointed out, not especially Thai Buddhist. More appropriate for a spiritual retreat in the hills of California.  But this series is about Americans, by Americans and for Americans. So it’s quite appropriate. (see quote at end)

All of which may be fascinating, but the series is really about narrative ambience as far as I’m concerned. The music, sets, costumes, flow of story, control of tension and release.  Mike White is a genius - and he’s still getting better.

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BTW - we might note that one set of characters, the three amigas, has zero interest in spirituality at all. They’re just looking for fun and friendship.  The two career ladies get fucked by a handsome young Russian dude, and the third, a housewife, just wants to hang out with women who are unlike the ladies at church.

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Luang Por Teera's answer to "where do we go when we die" closely follows text on page 46 of “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki  (1904-1971), abbot  of the first Zen Monastery outside Japan, in Los Padres National Forest.

 Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called "mind-only," or "essence of mind," or "big mind," After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life. When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it; it resumes its own nature, and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river! If this is what feeling will we have when we die? I think we are like the water in the dipper. We will have composure then, perfect composure. It may be too perfect for us, just now, because we are so much attached to our own feeling, to our actual feeling is not so easy. But by your practice of zazen you can cultivate this feeling.