anger. He finds his master's clothes, laid out just before his death, and digs his master's teeth out of the frozen rowboat. He carves a statue of the Buddha out of ice, wraps his master's "sarira" (small crystals sometimes found among cremated remains of monks and regarded as sacred relics) in red cloth, and sets them in the statue where the "third eye" would be located, under a waterfall. He finds a book of choreographic meditative stances and begins to train and exercise in the freezing weather. Eventually, a woman comes to the monastery with her baby son and a shawl wrapped around her face. She leaves her son and flees into the night, but as she runs across the frozen lake she accidentally stumbles into a hole in the ice dug by the monk. He finds her body the next day, and he removes her from the water to look at her face, although it is not shown to viewers. Instead, in the next shot, the scarf is open on the ice, and a carved stone head of Buddha is sitting on it. Finally completing his long self-discipline, he ties the monastery's large, circular grinding stone to his body. It is emblematic of the Buddhist Bhavacakra, the wheel of life and rebirth. He takes a statue of the Buddha-to-come, Maitreya, from the monastery and climbs to the summit of the tallest of the surrounding mountains. As he climbs, dragging the stone wheel behind him and struggling to carry the statue, he reflects upon the fish, the frog, and the snake he tormented. Attaining the summit, he prays and leaves the statue seated on top of the circular grinding stone, overlooking the monastery in the lake far below. ...and Spring Returning to spring again, the cycle recommences: The new master lives in the monastery with the abandoned baby, now a young boy and his apprentice. The boy is shown tormenting a turtle in front of the monastery, ominously a traditional symbol of longevity and prognosticating the future. Wandering into the same rocky hills his master had in his boyhood, the giggling boy echoes his predecessor by forcing stones into the mouths of a fish, frog and snake (these last scenes were deleted in the U.S. release of the movie). A final image shows the buddha statue on top of the mountain looking down over the lake. Production Ki-duk said of