A young Buddhist apprentice lives with his master in a small floating monastery, drifting on a lake in the serene forested mountains of Korea.

One day, in a creek among the rocky hills, the apprentice torments a fish by tying a small stone to it with string and laughing as it struggles to swim.

Shortly after, he does the same to a frog and a snake; his master quietly observes all three occasions, and that night he ties a large, smooth rock to the apprentice as he sleeps.

Over the next few days, the apprentice gets 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.

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.

Foreseeing his protege's return, he modifies the teenage monk's garments by hand, and soon afterward, the apprentice appears at the spiritual door at the lake's edge, full of anger and carrying the bloodstained knife with which he stabbed his wife for having an affair with another man.

He ties his bloodied apprentice to the ceiling and sets a candle to slowly burn through the rope, then begins writing out the "Heart Sutra" on the monastery deck, holding the cat in his arms and dipping its tail into a bowl of black ink.

The apprentice eventually falls and, beginning his repentance, cuts his hair off and is ordered to carve the Chinese characters into the wood to quiet his heart.

Influenced by the soothing presence of the master, the detectives help the old monk paint his apprentice's carvings in orange, green, blue and purple.

When the monk brings back the cat (before he has gained information about the former apprentice), it demonstrates that at his advanced age, he has, in his solitude, achieved some form of inner peace and foreshadows his death.

She leaves her son and flees into the night, but as she runs across the frozen lake, she accidentally falls into a hole in the ice dug by the monk.

Finally completing his long self-discipline, he ties to his body the monastery's large, circular grinding stone emblematic of the Buddhist Bhavacakra,[2] the wheel of life and rebirth.

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.

[3] 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).

[5][6] Peter Rainer of New York praised the film's "tranquil beauty" and argued, "Kim exalts nature—life's passage—without stooping to sentimentality.

"[7] James Berardinelli wrote that the film's pace "is deliberate, but there is too much richness in the movie's emotional tapestry for it to be considered dull or drawn-out.

[11] The traditional song used near the end of the film, while the adult monk is climbing the mountain, is called "Jeongseon Arirang," sung by Kim Young-im.