as the boy begins to cry heavily at seeing what he has done to the snake. Summer The apprentice (now in his teenage years) encounters a mother and daughter (dressed in modern clothes, indicating that the film takes place in modern times) walking along the forest path, looking for the monastery. The apprentice silently greets them and rows them across the lake to the monastery, where a colorful rooster is now part of the household. In Buddhist art, this bird is the representation of desire and craving. The daughter has an unspecified illness (she displays symptoms of a fever) and has been brought to the Buddhist master by her mother, hoping that she will be healed. The master agrees to take in the teenage girl for a time, and the mother leaves. Over the next few days, the apprentice finds himself sexually attracted to the girl, but is too shy to say anything; however, when he finds her sleeping in front of the Buddha statue, he gropes her breast. She wakes up and slaps him. In a guilty panic, the apprentice begins to pray incessantly, something his master notes as strange. Touching the apprentice's shoulder, the girl seems to forgive him. Eventually, the two wander off into the forest and have sex. They repeat the act over the next few nights, hiding their relationship from the master, until he discovers them asleep and naked, drifting around the lake in the rowboat. He wakes them up by pulling the plug out of a drain hole in the boat. Rather than expressing anger or disappointment, he merely warns his apprentice that "lust leads to desire for possession, and possession leads to murder" and tells him that since the girl has recovered from her illness, she will have to leave. After the master rows the girl ashore the following morning, the apprentice is distraught and runs away that night in pursuit of her, taking the monastery's Buddha statue and the rooster with him. The implications of his two thefts are that while he is burdened with his craving as symbolized by the bird, he also has with him the "burden" of his master's teachings as symbolized by the Buddha statue. Fall Many years later, during the fall, the aging master returns from a supply run to the local village, bringing a cat in his backpack. By chance the master glimpses a story about