Imagine the perfectionist forms Kurosawa had achieved with samurai epics, Ford and Lean with lyrical, volatile nature, Tarkosvky and Bresson with the spiritual-bound outer space or dinky office desks of priests and cops, then add a too-generous wallop of Clouzot's suffocating suspense flooding from the dark recess of human nature - and King Hu's universe of the Wuxia STILL has plenty of its own identity left! This is truly groundbreaking in every way, in context of envisioning the worlds of Jiang Hu, civilian life, elite politics, and spiritual dissidents.<br /><br />A previous comment noted "A Touch of Zen" as a "minor masterpiece" next to its Japanese contemporaries, which is as ethnocentric as saying Asian films deserves such broad-sweeping generalization DESPITE their completely different context of cosmology, specific relations and development of individual and social structure, etc., even given the surface similarities of skin color, religious practice, select cultural affinity, and more. <br /><br />(For example, what's the value in judging Billy Wilder's best _at the expense of_ those by Ernst Lubitsch, or vice versa, simply because both had Germanic backgrounds and exiled to America and excelled at witty romantic comedy? They operated in rather different production settings, cultural milieu, sources of inspiration, etc.)<br /><br />Back to "Zen". Forget all the hierarchies of Taoism, Confucianism some elite reviews want to force upon the film. Just watch what's really on screen: a well-mapped structure is charting the course of violence itself. See bookish nerd get inducted in the ways of bloodshed, see that self-congratulatory reflecting its power-hungry society collapse, and finally see that collective last gasp sacrifice its own young - in vain of any redemption. <br /><br />The ending is less about Buddha (in fact THROUGHOUT the whole film when characters' gaze perpetually hint at a mythic, towering world order and all-enveloping consciousness larger than their conflicts or King Hu could cram on screen), than such spiritual path as critique of all the commotions that preceded it - and made up the film. Hu's remarkable balance of nihilism and transcendent possibilities, are pretty much the same aspirations of the increasingly personal film-making in 60s/70s America, Europe, and Japan. It's also astounding to see Hu reach in the same epic manner this conclusion, more than a decade before the venerable Kurosawa's "old man's lament" in "Ran".<br /><br />A last note: "A Touch of Zen" may rub fans of the usual wuxiapian the wrong way, since its artistic ambitions are a bit more personal than regaling the audience-as-king. There are no immediate gratifications (not even Hitchcock at his bleakest or Clouzot teased viewers for 45 minutes straight without rewards!) And even when they occur, the style is often serving the story and Hu's point (i.e. bamboo scene is NOT for pure thrill of spectacle so it's shorter than the "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" version; the "too dark" photography during ambush is setting up for "nerd's epiphany" later.) So expect none and the experience will be more enriching.