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“Real sharpness comes without effort,” sings out the great warrior Li Mu Bai (“crouching tiger”1) as he lunges, rending the silence of his martial arts encounter with the masked thief of his sword Green Destiny. “No growth without assistance. No action without reaction. No desire without restraint. Now give yourself up and find yourself again. There is a lesson for you,” he concludes, in case the thief does not quite get the point. And, of course, she doesn't. Under the mask she is Jen, the Governor's daughter, her formidable talent as a martial artist in perfect proportion to the delicacy of her beauty, and supremely arrogant as well. In the words of Shu Lien (the unspoken, unconsummated love of Li Mu Bai's life and no mean martial artist herself), Jen is “a disciple worthy of Wudan's secrets.” (Wudan is the legendary school of martial arts whose disciples comprise the Giang Hu, the classless subculture of warriors in the Ching Dynasty who are part samurai, part Mafia.) But Jen, the “hidden dragon,” cannot believe there exists a master worthy of her. As the intensity of the fight subsides, Jen's former “master,” the treacherous, illiterate Jade Fox, emerges from the shadows, and Jen hurls words at her, “Once I realized I could surpass you, I fell apart.” Jade Fox had insinuated herself into Jen's father's household when, on realizing that a woman would never be completely accepted as a disciple of Wudan, she poisoned Li Mu Bai's master and fled with a training manual that the then ten-year-old Jen read to her as the two secretly studied together.
This scene takes place about thirty minutes into Ang Lee's hypnotically beautiful film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee himself has described it (in voice-over commentary on the DVD version) as an ultimate “fantasy martial arts film,” but it is the film's cogent presentation of Zen Buddhist philosophy, embedded and implicit rather than didactic, that makes it much more than casually interesting to the psychoanalyst of b