Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
There are several scenes with snakes in this beautiful Korean film. A young boy (5 or 6) is learning from his Buddhist master. They live in a one-room temple that sits on a floating island on an isolated lake in the mountains of South Korea. The master tells the boy to watch for snakes as he goes out to pick herbs. The boy sees a snake coming toward him. He picks it up and throws it. It appears to be a Korean Tiger Keelback (aka Oriental Tiger Snake.) Later, when the boy is walking along a creek, he ties stones to several animals, including a snake, so it can barely move. As punishment, the master ties a large stone to the boy when he is sleeping and makes him drag the stone back uphill to free the snake. If he fails he will carry the stone as a burden in his heart for the rest of his life. He fails to save the snake which he finds dead.
About 10 years later, the boy finds a pair of mating snakes. Immediately after he sees the snakes, he sees a girl, who later becomes his first romantic attachment.
Several years later in the Fall, after the boy has grown up and left the lake, the master is ready to die, so he removes his robes and piles them in the temple, and builds a pile of wood in a rowboat and sits on top of it, then sets himself on fire. As the boat burns, we see a snake swim away from it and crawl onto the deck of the temple.
Later, in Winter, the young man returns to find the lake frozen over, and a snake coiled up in a pile of the monk's clothing. The snake is seen a couple more times living in the temple on top of a chest, and in the man's bed.