Deep in the Zhongnan Mountains of central China, a scattered community of Buddhist and Taoist hermits still lives the way solitary practitioners have for centuries, in stone huts with no electricity, growing their own food and meditating for years at a stretch. Director Edward A. Burger spent two years earning access to these reclusive monks and nuns, whose existence contradicts the assumption that Zen's contemplative tradition died out under Communist rule. The film follows several hermits through daily routines of farming, tea drinking, and sitting meditation, with interviews conducted in their own huts rather than in any studio setting. One recurring figure is an old monk who has lived alone on the mountain for decades and speaks plainly about solitude as a discipline rather than an escape. Burger's camera stays quiet and patient, matching its subjects' own rhythm instead of narrating over them. The result is less an argument than a record, a look at a way of life that has mostly stayed invisible to outsiders and, by the hermits' own account, is not something they particularly want changed.