“When it comes to Reality, however, there is no such thing as common sense.  Unlike the case of trees, there are no platitudes accepted by both the vulgar and the learned.  In some circles, you can get general agreement that the ultimate nature of Reality is atoms and void.  In others, you can get a consensus that it is God—an immaterial, non-spatio-temporal, being.  The reason quarrels among metaphysicians about the nature of Reality seem so ludicrous is that each of them feels free to pick a few of his favorite things and claim ontological privilege for them.”

—Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry

“My self is a sort of field where my work originates or certainly must struggle to be made.  It can be described by the various voices that originate there.  Most—if not all—the voices are me talking to myself.  Others are personalities like thinkers, fellow creators, and critics who may or may not be actual persons.”

—Bill T. Jones, Story/Time: The Life of an Idea

Does human life have a purpose?  What are the sources of knowledge, joy, peace?  How much of identity is personal, how much public; how much psychological, philosophical, and political?  Are the religions that were created in ancient cultures, in other nations, primitive conditions, still of use?  In the eastern world, enlightenment is awareness and acceptance, recognizing life and world as they are, a state of being achieved as a result of a spiritual journey, a path to the virtues of fulfillment and peace; and in the western world enlightenment is intellectual and instrumental, with reason able to analyze, identify, and pursue various virtues, such as knowledge and liberty.  Can we identify, with confidence and corroboration, the purpose of life in a world of contentions and conflicts?  Buddha means awakened; and Buddhism, a philosophy and spiritual practice that recognizes suffering in the world, its causes and consequences, affirms the pursuit of ethics and thoughtfulness, the pursuit of wisdom: and the path to wisdom is right understanding and right thought, the rightness of speech, action, work, moral effort, meditation, and concentration.  The films Siddhartha (Conrad Rooks, 1972) and Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1993) offer a chance to consider the quest for wisdom and the philosophy of Buddha.

Siddhartha

Gotama (or Gautama) was the family name, and Siddhartha the name of the seeking boy born into the Gotama family, part of the Sakya or Shakya clan (located near the Himalayas, their capital was Kapilavastu): the boy who would grow and learn, who would become known as the awakened one, the sage of the Sakyas, the Buddha.  He was but one of a tradition of Buddhas.  A telling of a search for enlightenment, the film Siddhartha was written and directed by Conrad Rooks (1934 – 2011), an American writer-director and world traveler, born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of a leading Avon Products executive.  Conrad Rooks had directed an experimental (psychedelic) film about drug addiction and its cure, Chappaqua (1966), recalled by Variety magazine writer Yvonne Georgina Puig: “Loosely based on Rooks’ life, Chappaqua tells the story of an ailing heroin addict suffering from withdrawal in a French sanitarium.  Rooks, the fortunate son of the president of Avon Products, spent $500,000 out of pocket to shoot scenes in India, Thailand and the Yucatan, and rounded up a crew that included Robert Frank as cinematographer, Ravi Shankar as composer, along with Philip Glass as music supervisor, and Man Ray as an adviser.  Its cast boasted William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who appeared chanting mantras with Peter Orlovsky in Central Park.  Rooks, of course, starred as the thinly veiled recovering addict” (December 16, 2005).  Chappaqua, which received positive notices from The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and Newsday, won the Silver Lion at the Venice film festival.  Conrad Rooks would live in India and Thailand.

For the motion picture Siddhartha (1972), inspired by Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel of the same name, a book about a journey to enlightenment, director Conrad Rooks collaborated with distinguished colleagues, cinematographer Sven Nykvist; art director Malcolm Golding, an artist known for paintings and murals; costumer Bhanu Athaiya, who worked on more than 100 films and won an Academy Award (Oscar) for Gandhi (1982); editor Willy Kemplen, who worked on The Looking Glass War (1970) and Under Milk Wood (1971), the latter featuring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; and music composer Hemanta Mukherjee, a longtime film music composer and singer, and recipient of many awards and several honorary doctorates.  In Siddhartha, a film of contemplation and restrained drama, there are two Siddharthas, one a student, and one a teacher; but the film begins in India, on a beautiful old stone estate, with two young men, friends, both sons of Brahman families, the sons of the spiritual elite, Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor) and his friend Govinda (Romesh Sharma).  In India, Brahmans (Brahmins) were priests, worshippers of Brahma, a creator deity (part of a supreme trinity, with the preserver deity Vishnu and the destroyer deity Shiva), and the Vedas were their scriptures and Sanskrit their sacred language; and, Kshatriyas were the military class, the warriors; Vaishyas were the merchants and traders; and Shudras were the workers.  “The Brahmaviharas are teachings and practices that include metta (loving-kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (empathetic joy), and upekkha (equanimity).  Known as the Four Immeasurables, they are identified as the Four Faces of Love of the Hindu god Brahma,” explained scholar Rima Vesely-Flad, the director of Peace and Justice Studies at Warren Wilson College, and a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, in the book Black Buddhists and The Black Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (New York University, 2022; page 184).

The friends Siddhartha (Kapoor) and Govinda (Sharma) have respect for each other; and Hermann Hesse notes that Govinda “loved everything Siddhartha did and said; and, above all, he loved his intelligence, his lofty and fiery thoughts, his burning will, his high vocation” (Siddhartha, translated by Stanley Appelbaum, Dover Publications, 1999; page 2).  They share intimacies of habits and thought: together, they go to bathe in a river; and they talk about being free.  Siddhartha wants to be a wandering ascetic, a sadhu.  Siddhartha wants to move beyond the routine of his prestigious life with his privileged and pious father (Amrik Singh) and mother (Shanti Hiranand): “everything’s the same,” Siddhartha says, questioning his father’s knowledge, piety, and rituals (despite his father’s many devotions, has he found wisdom?).  Yet, Siddhartha wants his father’s permission to pursue the life he wants.  Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor) meditates alone—he waits for his father’s permission, but his father (Amrik Singh) says that Siddhartha is a man and cannot be stopped: Siddhartha can leave, and if he finds truth in the wilderness he should return and tell his father.  “If you find salvation in the forest, come and teach me salvation.   If you find disappointment, then come back and let us once more sacrifice to the gods together,” his father says (page 7).  Siddhartha’s friend Govinda (Romesh Sharma) goes with him to join other spiritual seekers—many of whom are old men.  (The film features the holy sadhus of Rishikesh, and the Buddhist monks of Tibet.)  They chant to music. 

Time: duration, magnitude, and measure, the condition of change in physical properties—in quality and quantity, in motion and velocity.  Time passes; people change.  Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor) has a beard, longer hair, as does his friend, Govinda (Romesh Sharma), who says that Siddhartha has learned quickly and is expected by others to be a holy man.  Siddhartha says that meditation is a form of escape—and he says that it is similar to drink.  His friend says that meditation can lead to knowledge, unlike drink.  Siddhartha remains critical; and he does not feel different than being in his father’s house.  He thinks the older ascetic men have not gone further than he has (“it’s all tricks,” he says).

“For years we’ve been asking questions and there’s no answer from god,” says Siddhartha, who doubts the value of learning, of teaching, to his friend Govinda.  His criticality may be the criticality of youth, of the intelligent, of the misfit: he has observed that the lessons and rituals that are supposed to lead to deliverance from cause and effect (from consequences), from stress and struggle, from the cycle of birth and death, have not delivered nirvana to the old ascetic men, the sadhu.  Yet Siddhartha agrees to seek the Buddha with Govinda.  In the novel, the Buddha is seen: “The Buddha went his way modestly and lost in thought; his calm face was neither merry nor sad, but seemed to be gently smiling inwardly.  With a concealed smile, calmly, peacefully, not unlike a healthy child, the Buddha walked, wore his robe, and planted his feet just like all the monks, in accordance with precise rules.  But his face and his step, his calmly lowered gaze, his hands held calmly at his side, and indeed every finger of his calmly held hands, spoke of peace, spoke of perfection, sought nothing, imitated nothing, but breathed softly in unfading repose, in unfading light, in unassailable peace,” Hesse’s writes (Dover Publications, 1999; page 15).  Human existence is marked by suffering—but Gotama Buddha is calm, a man of peace.  Buddhists acknowledge evolved spiritual beings, deities or devas, rather than the singular authoritative divine being that other religions teach.  Existence is suffering; desire causes suffering; and eliminating desire eliminates suffering; and the Buddha path is a way to eliminate desire (these are recognized as four fundamental truths).  The Buddha, who is only very slightly glimpsed in the Rooks film, says that what he offers is not religion, but the disciplining of want, self-control, meditation, the probable path to wisdom: and that eightfold path is reiterated, as it is by many adherents, by Warren Wilson College scholar Rima Vesely-Flad, in Black Buddhists and The Black Tradition (New York University, 2022; page 169), as being right view, right intention, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.  Govinda (Romesh Sharma) asks to be accepted into the spiritual order—and is.  Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor) says that he must go on his own path.  Siddhartha seeks wholeness—seeks unity, beyond cause and effect.  The Buddha says that Siddhartha is clever, possibly too clever—and warns him to be aware of cleverness.  Yet, Siddhartha feels as if the Buddha has given Siddhartha himself.  Siddhartha leaves his friend Govinda to the Buddha and goes out to travel alone.  “I’m awake.  I’ve been born today,” Siddhartha exults.

The settings in the film Siddhartha are natural, seem authentic—the cinematography is beautiful but unembellished, I thought.  (I, decades ago, had gone to some Buddhist gatherings in New York, but I suspect I might have been more impressed if the settings had been less mundanely urban.  I always loved walking on Louisiana grasslands—that was more transcendent, although the surrounding culture was not.)  Siddhartha was filmed in India, in the city of Rishikesh, and on the Maharajah Bharatpur’s estates.  (Often in cinema we have been presented with an Orient that was not Asia, and with people who were supposed to be, but were not, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese.  Here, for the observer attuned to what is true, a certain persuasive power comes from fact: this is the land that nourished this people, this philosophy.)  The scenes of nature, of landscape, and animals are distinct.  In fact, it is thought that the sedentary life, allowing for contemplation and the cultivation of agriculture—rather than the continual activity of hunting and gathering—helped to inspire the origin of religion.  “The movie is good to look at: Rooks worked with Sven Nykvist, who at the time was photographing all of the Ingmar Bergman films.  The trouble is that the movie’s almost too pretty.  We get sunsets and vistas and slow-moving rivers and dust in the sunlight and magnificent Indian settings (man-made and real).  And against all of this splendor, the activities of the characters seem somehow unreal and not crucial,” wrote reviewer Roger Ebert not long after the film’s original release (Chicago Sun-Times, July 18, 1973).  More recently, another view: “Alongside the legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist, director Conrad Rooks filmed Siddhartha in Northern India, where the original events are said to have taken place.  It’s a film that adheres closely to the content of the written version, but the gorgeous visuals enhance the transcendent feel of the fable in a special way.  For anyone who remembers the book fondly, and for those who are unfamiliar with the story of Siddhartha, this film is essential viewing,” wrote Martin Wilson in his survey article “The 10 Best Movies Influenced by Buddhist Philosophy” (the online Taste of Cinema, March 25, 2019).  The other recommended films are: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003); Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? (Bae Yong-kyun, 1989); Kundun (Martin Scorsese, 1997); The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956); Master of Zen (Brandy Yuen, 1994); The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006); Zen (Banmei Takahashi, 2009); Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953); and, possibly surprisingly, Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927).

However: “The look of Siddhartha, for example, is achieved by master cinematographer Sven Nykvist.  He exquisitely frames each loud and poorly dubbed ‘esoteric’ pronouncement (such as: “I am awake!  I have been born today!”).  Yet you might fall asleep because Nykvist’s technical know-how serves no discernible philosophical plan.  The soft-focus, high-contrast color photography is an expertly achieved cliché—it’s hippie-dippy acid-trail lighting, not cinematic enlightenment.  Promoting ‘counter-cultural’ sentiments he undoubtedly shared with that audience, Rooks hypes up Siddhartha with silly editing techniques.  An argument between Siddhartha and his father (Amrik Singh), for instance, relies on groovy shock cuts that reveal Rooks’ style as a matter of us-them, in/out generational conflict” (PopMatters.com, January 23, 2003.)  Is such dismissal critical rigor or typically misplaced aesthetic snobbery, the kind of nasty attitude the cultural theorist Edward Said discussed in 1978 book Orientalism?  Years ago, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in his influential 1837 book Lectures on The Philosophy of History (translated by Ruben Alvarado, Woodbridge, 2011) stated, “India is the region of fantasy and feeling” (page 126); and “On the whole, the diffusion of Indian culture is only a dumb, deedless expansion, that is, without a political act.  The people of India have achieved no foreign conquests, but have been on every occasion vanquished themselves” (page 129).  Imagine saying that of a culture that has given the world the Vedas and the Upanishads and the Ajanta cave paintings, the Bakhshali manuscript on math, binary code, cashmere, cotton, cuisine, Chandragupta Maurya, medicine, the Nātya Shastra on performance, the ruler, shampoo, and the Taj Mahal.  (Is war the principal standard for Europeans?)  In Orientalism (1978), in which he looked at the negative assessment of the Orient—of Asia—by westerners, the debonair Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said asked, “How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world?...How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another?” (The Selected Works of Edward Said, Vintage, 2019; page 81); and Said commented, “India itself never provided an indigenous threat to Europe.  Rather it was because native authority crumbled there and opened the land to inter-European rivalry and to outright European political control that the Indian Orient could be treated by Europe with such proprietary hauteur—never with the sense of danger reserved for Islam.  Nevertheless, between this hauteur and anything like accurate positive knowledge there existed a vast disparity” (Selected Works; page 95).

The film Siddhartha, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice film festival in 1972, was based on the Hermann Hesse novel inspired by the life and philosophy of Siddhartha Gotama or Gautama (c. 563 BCE or 480 BCE), a boy born to privileged parents in Lumbini (Nepal) and who becomes a wandering ascetic before attaining nirvana, which involves acceptance of life and an affirmation of ethics, kindness, and meditation—and the exorcism of anxiety, of tormenting passions.  However, the lead character in Hesse’s fiction, the student Siddhartha, differs from the historical figure and spiritual teacher Siddhartha Gautama; and the student challenges some of the teacher’s assumptions and beliefs—the student does what many of us do, he takes the philosophy and adapts it to himself.  Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962), who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, was a German novelist and poet, a painter and violinist, a friend of Thomas Mann and Romain Rolland; and when young, Hesse (the son of a doctor and missionary) studied briefly in a seminary, before working in a clock factory, a bookstore, and becoming a published writer.  Hermann Hesse often took as his subject the conflict between man and society.  Hesse published a collection of poetry in 1899, and his first novel Peter Camenzind in 1904, then Beneath the Wheel (1906), about a troubled student; and after a visit to Asia, to Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Sumatra, countries with long-established Buddhist traditions, Hesse wrote and published the novels Siddhartha in 1922, and Steppenwolf in 1927. 

Hermann Hesse’s character Siddhartha explores knowledge and pursues the acquisition of wisdom, and experiences family, friendship, sacrifice, charity, love and sex, work, wealth, loss and disorientation, and further reflection; and he realizes that situations and subjects are complex, containing contradictory elements, and that there is good everywhere.  Siddhartha appreciates nature and world while learning the value of discipline.  Hesse, inspired by his personal experience (his desire for learning despite difficulty with formal schooling), was informed by his travels, and his thinking about what he found; and out of all that he imagined his novel Siddhartha.  What might Hesse have found in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Sumatra?  Two important schools of Buddhism, Theravada and Mahayana, are not primarily in India but elsewhere: Theravada Buddhism scriptures of Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Kampuchea and Laos, originally written in the Pali language of ancient India, document life in North India and the character and actions of Gotama the Buddha (whose home was Lumbini, near Kapilavasta, now Nepal; and who died in north India, near the city of Kushinagara), according to World Religions: From Ancient History to the Present by editor Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File / Hamlyn, 1971).  Theravada Buddhists, in the cultivation of morality, meditation, and wisdom, strive to leave the cycle of perpetual death and reincarnation.  The liberal tradition of Mahayana Buddhism, although begun in India, can be found in China, Korea, and Japan; and it affirms that there is no real self and that one might choose to remain in the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, partly to participate in the human condition and to help others (what evolved beings, bodhisattvas, choose).  Hermann Hesse explored psychology as a man and a writer; and as Hesse grew older, for his explorations of psychology, philosophy, and personal principles, he was seen as something of a guru.  His Siddhartha, is more linear, more logical, than many spiritual documents, which are often circular (declarative, repetitive); and its writing had “a highly poetic style reminiscent of ancient scriptures,” as the translator Stanley Appelbaum notes in his introduction; and the book has been translated into dozens of languages.  The most seductive aspect of the novel may be how much love is in it.

However, in “Teaching Indian Buddhism with Siddhartha—or Not?),” a teacher of Asian studies and comparative literature, Catherine Bannon states, “I emphasize that Siddhartha is problematic only when used as a reflection of Indian Buddhism, not when presented as a narrative reflecting Hesse’s internal struggle to understand his own life as a spiritual process.  Problems arise when Siddhartha is taken out of its European, and more specifically German Protestant Christian, context, and used to present Indian Buddhist thought, because many of the fundamental perspectives of the Buddhist tradition are obscured, if not turned completely upside-down” (Education about Asia, Spring 1997, Vol. 2.1).  Hesse idealized India as a lost paradise, a paradise of natural beings.  His Siddhartha sought a personal self—and Buddha said that self is an empty concept (there is an appearance of self, but no solid, stable self).  Primary Buddhist texts (of “Asvaghosa or Nagarjuna or Vimalakırti”) are difficult and can be made more difficult by the novel, which seems to reject the predictable rigor of study, of discipline.  Bannon asserts, “Studying patterns of thinking and perceptions of a culture different from one’s own should feel at the very least unfamiliar, if not unsettling, but Hesse’s presentation of Indian ways of thinking flows easily into our own cultural frameworks—influenced, as American intellectual thinking is, by European literary and philosophical ideas.”

The complexities and contradictions of human existence and experiences challenge philosophy and politics.  We find consolation and guidance in new discoveries of knowledge.  Yet, who responds to philosophy without adapting it to himself?  “Knowledge can be imparted, but not wisdom,” Hesse’s Siddhartha tells Govinda late in life (Dover Publications, 1999; page 76): one comes to wisdom through experience, not simply by repeating the lessons learned by others.  Buddha (Siddhartha Gotama or Sakyamuni) taught—and others learned, and added to a growing body of thought.  Of course, primary texts should be identified and taught; but diverse perspectives and responses can be taught, too.  For instance, Buddhism was introduced to China, during the Han dynasty, around 206 B.C.E by traveling Indian monks; and Bodhidharma, thought to be an Indian prince, introduced Zen Buddhism to China in 520 A.D. (he conversed with Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty), but it is Hui-neng who is credited with Zen’s flourishing.  The Chinese Buddhist Hui-neng (638 – 713 A.D.) believed, like Bodhidharma, in seeing into one’s own nature, observing the self not in silence and stillness alone but in observing the self in action, while living and doing.  Yet, the founding of Zen Buddhism was rooted in the interpretation of Sakyamuni’s showing a bouquet of flowers to his students, encouraging them to know what is before their eyes (and there is skepticism of intellect in Zen, which also doubts the existence of absolute opposites such as enlightenment and darkness, and infinite and finite, seeing supposed opposites as part of the same phenomena—the unity of being).  That seems in accord with Hesse’s young Siddhartha.   

Hesse was not the only famous admirer, or practitioner, of Buddhism, of course.  There have been others in a diversity of fields: John Cage and Allen Ginsberg and Tiger Woods and Jack Dorsey and Laurie Anderson, Orlando Bloom, Roshi Merle Kodo Boyd, Leonard Cohen, Mark Epstein, Chris Evans, Seth Evans, Richard Gere, Mazie Hirono, Dennis Hirota, Joseph Jarman, Michio Kaku, Lucy Liu, George Lucas, Peter Matthiessen, Meredith Monk, Brad Pitt, Duncan Sheik, Wayne Shorter, Gary Snyder, Venerable Bhante Suhita, Alvin Sykes, Uma Thurman, Tina Turner, Taitetsu Unno, Leonard West, and Leon E. Wright.  There are more than 500 million Buddhists in the world.  The celebrated writer Gore Vidal (1925 – 2012), the author of the novels Williwaw (1946), The City and the Pillar (1948), Julian (1964), Burr (1973), and Lincoln (1984), as well as the commentary on film Screening History (1992), and the anthology United States: Essays, 1952 – 1992, featured Gotama Buddha in his novel of the ancient world, Creation (Random House, 1981).  Gore Vidal, a man and writer of charm, wit, and political consciousness (who was profiled in the 2013 documentary by Nicholas Wrathall, United States of Amnesia), wrote about the ascetic fourth-century Roman emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus who resisted Christianity in Vidal’s alluring novel Julian; and Vidal invented for Creation a character, the Persian ambassador Cyrus Spitama, who travels the world and meets Buddha, Socrates, and Confucius.  The ambassador observes, listens to, and speaks with Buddha, who has the support of King Bimbisara and whom Cyrus finds to be an old man who entertains questions but has no fixed theories about the origins of the cosmos and world; and, of Buddha’s thinking, Cyrus says, “I can accept the notion that all creation is in flux and that what we take to be the real world is a kind of shifting dream, perceived by each of us in a way that differs from that of everyone else, as well as from the thing itself.  But the absence of deity, of origin and of terminus, of good in conflict with evil…The absence of purpose, finally, makes the Buddha’s truths too strange for me to accept” (page 243).

The complexities and contradictions of human existence and experiences challenge philosophy and politics.  Some books on India, its history, culture, and spiritual practices: Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India by Gregory Schopen (University of Hawaii Press, 1997): Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings by William Edelglass, Jay Garfield, editors (Oxford, 2009); Buddhist Scriptures by Donald Lopez, editor (Penguin Classics, 2004); Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism by Philip J. Stern (Harvard University Press, 2023); Empireland: How Imperialism Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghara (Pantheon, 2023); Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, editors (Routledge, 2003); The Essential Gandhi by Mahatma Gandhi (Vintage, 2002); The Evolution of Pragmatism: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction by Scott R. Stroud (University of Chicago Press, 2023); Field Notes on Democracy by Arundhati Roy (Haymarket, 2015); The Films of Mira Nair: Diaspora Verite by Amardeep Singh (University press Of Mississippi, 2018); The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press, 1998); The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); In Light of India by Octavia Paz (Harcourt Brace, 1995); In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon by Bhikkhu Bodhi, editor (Wisdom Publications, 2005); India: People, Place, Culture, History by Abraham Eraly, Yasmin Khan, George Michell, Mitali Sarah (DK Publishing / Dorling Kindersley, 2008); Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism by Eugene Burnouf (University of Chicago Press, 2010); The Lotus Sutra by Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuvama, translators (BDK America / Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, 2007); The Middle Way by H.H. the Dalai Lama, translated by Thubten Jinpa (Wisdom Publications, 2009); Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths by Taylor C. Sherman (Princeton U Press, 2022); and The Political Philosophy of His Holiness the Dalai Lama: Selected Speeches and Writings by H.H. the Dalai Lama, edited by A.A. Shiromany (Tibetan Parliamentary and Policy Research Center, New Delhi, 1998).

Gotama Buddha did not promote religion: rather he promoted a unique path, a contemplative and spiritual practice.  He wanted to give others a way to live with compassion and peace.  The innovative writer Jean Toomer, a father-abandoned boy with a rebel high school friend, not long after his college years, was interested in spiritual and social matters, and Toomer, who would later write a modernist portrait of a disappearing folk life in Cane (1923), read eastern philosophy, and how that would complement his thinking can be intuited in his assertion: “I am both pessimistic and optimistic, a realist and an idealist.  I am an egotist.  I can be genuinely humble.  I am promiscuous; I am single.  I have regard for nothing.  I am devoted and sincerely deeply care.  To care for—this is one of my main feelings.  I am crude and cultured, weak and strong, slow and quick, without morality but with conscience—and all of these in extreme degrees,” writing collected in Toomer’s book The Wayward and the Seeking (edited by Darwin T. Turner, Howard University Press, 1980; page 20).  Jean Toomer, born Nathan Pinchback Toomer (1894 - 1967), the grandson of Louisiana lieutenant governor and governor Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, admired Walt Whitman, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Sinclair Lewis, Walter Pater and Freud; and Toomer, an aristocrat of culture, wrote beautifully about African-American life but resisted racial categorization; and he explored the thinking of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, before becoming a Quaker.  Toomer was driven to attempt to achieve the reconciliation of his deepest concerns.  

“The Four Nobel Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path provide an analysis and a roadmap that is particularly compelling for people whose ancestors have been enslaved: suffering is a part of life, and there is a path of liberation from suffering,” writes Rima Vesely-Flad in Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (New York University Press, 2022; page 169).  Suffering for many is not merely existential, but is social, political: that is true of certain castes in India, and it is true of people in Africa and the Americas and other places.  “The long history of racial slavery, segregation, and discrimination has led to particular forms of suffering—separation of Black families, violence and rape, poverty and housing discrimination, patterns of symbolic racism that denigrate the beauty of Black bodies and intelligent Black minds—that Black practitioners acknowledge as core aspects of their suffering,” Vesely-Flad said in “Turning toward Internal Suffering” in Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition (page 170), a book that is a research document, full of original interviews, and also a critical analysis, a history, and a spiritual manual by Vesely-Flad, an associate professor of religion and philosophy and the founder of Interfaith Coalition of Advocates for Reentry and Employment (ICARE) in New York State.  Yet, despite that political history, a recognition that change is constant, that all phenomena is impermanent, can be key to a liberating way of thinking, talking, and traveling through the world: there is relative reality (the material and social world), and ultimate reality (unity, beyond dualities).  “Teachings on observing without judgement foster inner stability, as does the practice of cultivating joy,” wrote Rima Vesely-Flad (page 190); and the seven factors of awakening are “mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, relaxation, concentration, and equanimity” (page 191).  Personal transformation and social reform are part of the same continuum: the liberation of humanity.

While not a committed practitioner, I, Daniel, long have been interested by Buddhism, by its promise of enlightenment, of peace, intrigued with the idea of controlling anger, of controlling desire, of moving beyond them.  What is healthy and what is neurotic?  What is self-expression, and what self-sabotage?  When I was a very young man, I went with a woman friend, an intelligent, generous, and practical woman, a grown-up, to several Buddhist gatherings, where there was quiet, and chanting: the focus on moving the mind beyond the world of things, into acceptance and joy, and beyond that into pure being.  At one of the meetings, I had smiled—probably in amusement—and one of the leaders saw and sat next to me, facing me, and I think my friend was a little suspicious of his move (she was mostly a grown-up); but I think that the man thought that, rather than seeking joy from others, I might have had my own joy.  I recall discussing eastern philosophy—Buddhism, Taoism, the I Ching / Book of Changes—with a college friend, a young man (a sociology student and English tutor) who was a more advanced reader in the field than me.  He and I talked about Charles Johnson’s satirical narrative of enslavement and escape, Oxherding Tale (1982), which was influenced by such ideas.  I valued my friends, those and others, for their personalities, their intelligence and humor, cultural interests, and for their political consciousness—and I hoped those relationships would be lasting.  I was mistaken about many things; and would learn the differences to be found among solitude (strength), loneliness (vulnerability), and isolation (a disfiguring lack of resources).  I recall, too, a co-worker in a film distribution company—it promoted art films and horror films—and he invited me to meetings of his branch of Mahayana Buddhism, Nicheren, and I went a couple of times; but this man, who said he saw some sorrow in me, was a little too insistent.  Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.  Literature and the arts, then, as now, were my principal sources for cultivation of imagination, insight, and intensities: a refreshment of mind and spirit.  I took a college course in which we read translations of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain texts and more.  I went to museum exhibits and saw films set in India or featuring Indians of the diaspora.  How could I not be interested in a country and culture that had given the world Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahakavi Kalidas, Anish Mikhail Kapoor, Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair, Satyajit Ray, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Salman Rushdie, Ravi Shankar, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, and Raja Ravi Varma?  Buddhism remained a distant but pleasant possibility.  Yet, while Buddhism has not been a primary resource for me, I still find it fascinating to consider two films, Conrad Rooks’ Siddhartha and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, that attempt to present the subject for large audiences: both films are about beginnings, about composed study, about rebellion, about life, love, and loss, about reconciliation.  Om.

“Conrad Rooks’ Siddhartha is a film of great grace and beauty, but somehow it failed to move me,” wrote critic Roger Ebert when the film opened in America (Chicago Sun-Times, July 18, 1973).  Ebert perceived the film’s adherence to the Herman Hesse book Siddhartha, and its attractive Sven Nykvist cinematography, culminated in its precious artifice; and Ebert declared, “The movie is an allegory, set 2,500 years ago, about a young man who sets out one day to discover the secrets of life.  We follow him until his death many years later, and along the way we see him accumulate wealth and then dispose of it, fall in love and then renounce carnal pleasures, and finally discover that truth lies within himself and can never be taught.  At the end we are happy for Siddhartha, but we wonder (in the words of the famous British election cry), what about the workers?  And what about us?  Thanks for nothing, Siddhartha.”  Nothing?  The film is a critique of conformity, of established religions, of materialism.  It affirms seeking.  Might the film, like the book, be an encouragement?

“Mr. Rooks’ film is a fairly faithful adaptation of Hesse’s fable, the product of a journey to India undertaken by the author a half-century before the Beatles and Mia Farrow had even booked passage.  The time is a mythical past and the conflict is one that continues throughout Hesse’s work.  Flesh battles spirit to a mystical draw, to the revelation that all things are one: youth, age, sin, grace, life, death, stones, tadpoles,” wrote longtime reviewer Vincent Canby (The New York Times, July 19, 1973), in a tone of almost relentless exasperation, having interpreted Hesse’s novel about the pursuit wisdom as anti-intellectual, and an apparent encouragement of irresponsibility, and the film, which Canby found simple and solemn, likely to do the same.  Is it plausible to believe that a work—book or film—that suggests what might be learned from meditation, sacrifice, work, love, and grief is actually anti-intellectual?  Or that a spiritual practice that puts mindfulness at its center is anti-intellectual?  Vincent Canby was known as a gentleman, but some of his reviews, as this one, are full of rage.  However, a July 29,1973 New York Times film bulletin (“What’s at the Movies?”) notes that “Siddhartha, directed and written by Conrad Rooks, got six favorable reviews (Archer Winsten, New York Post; Rex Reed, Daily News; Bernard Drew, Gannett News Service; Jeffrey Lyons, WPIX‐TV; Chris Chase, New York; William Wolf, Cue), two mixed (Howard Kissel, Women’s Wear; Frances Taylor, Newhouse News papers)” with seven negative reviews, including from Canby and “Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic; Penelope Gilliatt, New Yorker; Jay Cocks, Time; John Simon, New Leader.”

In the Rooks film, Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor) meets a ferryman, Vasudeva (Zul Vellani), who speaks lovingly of the river—of its beauty, of what can be learned from it.  “Everything returns,” the man says.  (Siddhartha cannot pay for a ferry trip now—but maybe someday he can.)  In Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha thinks of the kind ferryman, “He is like Govinda” and “everyone I meet on my journey is like Govinda.  They are all grateful, even though they are the ones who deserve the thanks” (Dover, 1999; page 27).  Siddhartha, subsequently, sees a beautiful woman—Kamala, a courtesan (Simi Garewal)—in a carriage.  He visits a large temple, but seeks the courtesan (he shaves for her).  He wants love with the beautiful woman, who says young men bring her gifts.  Siddhartha considers himself, and what he possesses: he says that he can wait; think; and fast.  What else?  He offers a poem for a kiss.  Siddhartha says that he can read and write, and she, Kamala (Simi Garewal), says she may be able to find a job for him.  The courtesan finds a job for Siddhartha with a rich merchant, Kamaswami—she thinks him lucky.  Siddhartha thinks that she, the courtesan Kamala, believes that she will be his guru of love.  “I have no possession, of my own free will,” Siddhartha says.  “You live on the possessions of others—you’re a parasite,” the merchant says.  Kamaswami (Pinchoo Kapoor), the merchant, gives Siddhartha simple tests of reading and writing, which he passes.  Siddhartha, a virgin, kisses the courtesan—who begins to teach him about love and sex.  (She enjoys it too, and asks for his devotion.)

In the marketplace, working for the merchant Kamaswami (Pinchoo Kapoor), Siddhartha is diligent, and uses an abacus; and the merchant is pleased with Siddhartha’s work.  The first sign of good business is friendship, says Siddhartha, but the merchant is frustrated when every situation does not yield profit, and offended by Siddhartha’s lack of gratitude.  Siddhartha advises the merchant that everyone can learn, including the merchant, and suggests the merchant can learn from Siddhartha’s observations—as Siddhartha has learned about business from the merchant.

Siddhartha, as well, likes the courtesan’s ability to be still, to have her own sanctuary.  Their relation remains passionate—and she says that he is the best lover, more strong, more supple, more flexible and willing.  The courtesan and Siddhartha realize that they practice the art of love—but that neither loves the other in the usual way.  Neither loves personally, solely.

More time passes; or do events simply occur, at different moments, possibly simultaneously, within the universe?  Siddhartha feels adrift, becomes impatient—dissatisfied.  He feels his successful life a cage.  He leaves.  He meets the ferryman Vasudeva (Zul Vellani) again—and asks to become the man’s apprentice.  The ferryman talks about the river’s nature—its presence, its flowing everywhere in one form or another, its immediacy and vibrance.  The ferryman and Siddhartha go to see the Buddha—whose life is coming to an end.  The cycle of life, birth, growth, decay, death (and rebirth?): time changes people.  If time exists—or is there only now, the eternal present?  Life changes us.  Siddhartha encounters a woman, a mother, who is bitten by a snake—and she is the courtesan, the teacher of love lessons, Kamala, who is seeking the Buddha too.  (Kamala has retired as a courtesan, allowed monks to use her gardens, and begun her own spiritual practice.)  Kamala sees peace in Siddhartha (who looks sad for her)—but she dies and is given a funeral.  Siddhartha keeps Kamala’s son, his son, with him—the boy is rebellious: the boy is a third Siddhartha.

The ferryman, Vasudeva, says that he is too old to work anymore—and leaves; though he thinks they, he and Siddhartha, will meet again.  Govinda and Siddhartha do meet again—when Govinda seeks to cross the river.  Siddhartha tells Govinda what his own life path has been: gods and sacrifices, ascetic practices, community with penitents, hearing Buddha’s wisdom of the world’s unity, a woman’s love lessons, accumulating money, unlearning and learning (Hesse’s Siddhartha, Dover Publications, 1999; pages 51 and 52).  Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor) tells him (Romesh Sharma) they must live in the present.  (Shashi Kapoor, the son of Indian actor Prithviraj Kapoor, appeared in many films, including two of Merchant Ivory’s wonderful Indian films Shakespeare Wallah and Heat and Dust.)  In Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha says, “When someone seeks, it is all too easy for his eye to see nothing but the thing he seeks, so that he is unable to find anything or absorb anything because he is always thinking exclusively about what he seeks, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by that goal” (page 74).  In the Conrad Rooks film Siddhartha, the seeker, the student Siddhartha, says that the Buddha is in all—and what is sacred in life can be found everywhere.  Stop searching, stop worrying, and learn to give love, says Siddhartha.  Stay and work with me by the river, Siddhartha tells Govinda.

Little Buddha

“What fascinated me was the challenge of confronting our present times with the thought of a man who lived twenty-five hundred years ago.  That’s why the story of my film Little Buddha takes place today, and why out of the whole life of the Buddha I chose to show only a few episodes, which the Tibetan lama who is searching for the reincarnation of his teacher narrates to the American boy—just as a grandfather would tell a fairy tale to his grandchild.”

—Bernardo Bertolucci, “Postcards from the East” (Entering the Stream)

“Bertolucci is not the kind of moviemaker who can make epics for a huge international audience...”

—Pauline Kael, For Keeps

Pauline Kael recognized genuine visionaries working in cinema—Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Alexander Dovzhenko, Sergei Eisenstein, Abel Gance, Jean-Luc Godard, D.W. Griffith, Akira Kurosawa, Max Ophuls, Gilles Pontecorvo, Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles.  These were men of imagination who used technique to express their understanding of human relationships, of society—artists who surprised her, who delighted her and dismayed her.  Kael appreciated Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda and other performers of charm, intelligence, and will.  Pauline Kael (1919 – 2001), who attended Girls High School in San Francisco and studied philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, made experimental short films and managed the arthouse Berkeley Cinema Guild, and whose work was collected in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (Dutton, 1994) and The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (Library of America, 2011), was an admirable critic, and a companionable one—she was affectionate, educated, observant, and funny, and could be appreciative or scornful in her commentary.  She helped the reader, the viewer, to recognize what was before his/her eyes, and to respond both naturally and thoughtfully.  She attended to the details of film technique when it mattered—when it was excellent or terrible.  Kael received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1964, and a George Polk Memorial Award in 1970.   Kael, after publishing in periodicals such as City Lights, Partisan Review, and Film Quarterly and broadcast film commentary over the Pacifica network, published the bestselling book I Lost it at the Movies (Little Brown, 1965).  The rambunctious Kael, nearly mad with passion for film, willing to bless or blame, wrote for the mannered New Yorker magazine from 1967 to 1991, publishing collections of her reviews in books such as Deeper into Movies (1973), which won the 1974 National Book Award, and Reeling (Little Brown, 1977).  She did not idolize cowboys and gangsters or the old men and young boys who had not grown beyond them (so much of heterosexual white male film criticism reads like the program for a circle jerk, and their evaluations of each other’s top ten film lists sound like men comparing penis length).  Yet, Kael was patient with Sam Peckinpah and Brian De Palma (until she called Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs fascist); but, like James Baldwin, Kael despised The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), disliking its false religiosity, its lurid triviality—and the possessed child’s crab walk and twisting head defied the laws of physics, the nature of the human body.  Pauline Kael wrote about James Agee, Fred Astaire, Ingmar Bergman, Bonnie and Clyde, Cabaret, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Arlene Croce, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Earrings of Madame de, Fires on the Plain, Morgan Freeman, John Huston, Henry James, Jessica Lange, D.H. Lawrence, The Leopard, Norman Mailer, Louis Malle, My Beautiful Laundrette, Richard Pryor, Vanessa Redgrave, Diana Ross, Robert Ryan, Fred Schepisi, Shakespeare, The Sorrow and the Pity, Meryl Streep, Cicely Tyson, The Trojan Women, and Edmund Wilson. 

Pauline Kael was a great critic and she, in the August 13, 1965 issue of Life magazine, welcomed Bernardo Bertolucci when he, in his early 20s, made the richly romantic motion picture Before the Revolution (1964): “It is the story of a boy who discovers that he is not singleminded enough to be a revolutionary, that he is too deeply involved in the beauty of life as it is before the revolution” (For Keeps, Dutton, 1994; page 75); and of Bertolucci Kael said, “He has the kind of talent that breaks one’s heart: where can it go, what will happen to it?  In this country we encourage ‘creativity’ among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us” (page 76); and, despite her reservations about the film’s sometimes obtrusive editing and questionable continuity, she concluded, “The greatest achievement is that you come out of the theatre, not dull and depressed the way you feel after movies that insult your intelligence, but elated—restored to that youthful ardor when all hopes are raised at once” (page 76).  Pauline Kael would write about Bertolucci’s subsequent films, being honest about both the strengths and weaknesses of his work.  “What makes Bernardo Bertolucci’s films different from the work of other directors is an extraordinary combination of visual richness and visual freedom” she began her review of The Conformist, Bertolucci’s adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel of cowardice, sexual repression, and fascism (For Keeps; page 371); noting that “Bertolucci brings the period close, and we enter into it.  His nostalgia is open; it’s a generalized sort of empathy, which the viewer begins to share” (page 372).  Kael celebrated his Last Tango in Paris (1972), seeing it as a truthful advance in cinema; but she did not like Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990), his visualization of Paul Bowles’ 1949 novel—as Kael had reservations about the plotting (that of both Bowles and Bertolucci) and thought that what happened to Kit, her erotic immersion in a stranger’s desert harem, was more her husband Port’s fantasy than her own. 

Bernardo Bertolucci’s oeuvre contains The Grim Reaper (1962), The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), Luna (1979), The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), Besieged (199), The Dreamers (2003) and Me and You (2012), but it’s The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, and his epics that most people know.  Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novecento) was an extraordinay though flawed work: “Bertolucci is trying to transcend the audience appeal of his lyrical pyschological films.  He is trying to make a people’s film by drawing on the mythology of movies, as if it were a collective memory.  1900 is a romantic moviegoer’s vision of the class struggle—a love poem for the movies as well as for the life of those who live communally on the land” said Kael, For Keeps (Dutton, 1994; page 745).  Pauline Kael surveyed the film’s abundance, its crazed idealism, its focus on two boys who grow into men, the peasant Olmo (Gerard Depardieu) and aristocratic Alfredo (De Niro), its resonant childhood sequences, its problematic sound design, its demonic fascist couple Attila and Regina (Donald Sutherland, Laura Betti), its coverage of two world wars, its forced framing of the long story within Liberation Day; and Kael declared, “This film is about Bernardo Bertolucci’s need for myth, and his self-denial.  For those who are infatuated with what they loathe, the battle with themselves never stops.  1900 has all of Bertolucci’s themes and motifs: one could call it the Portable Bertolucci, though it isn’t portable.  It’s like a course to be enrolled in, with a guaranteed horror every hour...The film is appalling, yet it has the grandeur of a classic visonary folly” (page 752).  Sometimes a film can be sabotaged by its own ambition.  Sometimes an artistic failure can be a commercial success; and sometimes a commercial success can be an artistic failure.  Writing about Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), about China’s last royal ruler Pu Yi, Pauline Kael declared, “Bertolucci is not the kind of moviemaker who can make epics for a huge international audience: he doens’t have the gusto, the animal high spirits, or the low cunning” (For Keeps; page 1154).  Was she wrong?

An epic is a long narrative, full of characters and complexity, full of events; and, usually, an epic has scale, scope, and spectacle—and is about matters of importance, of influence; and, certainly, there are many kinds of epics, some based on fact and some of fiction, some set in ancient times, some in modern, some focused on singular individuals and some on communities, some about the pursuit of enlightenment and peace, and some about war: All Quiet on the Western Front, Apocalypse Now, Barry Lyndon, Ben-Hur, Boyhood, Braveheart, A Bridge Too Far, Che, El Cid (The Lord), Cleopatra, Confucius, Doctor Zhivago, Dune, Exodus, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Fitzcarraldo, Gandhi, Gertrude, Gone with the Wind, Harriet, Harry Potter, Heaven’s Gate, Hero, Intolerance, Ivan the Terrible, Joan of Arc, Last of the Mohicans, The Leopard, Lincoln, Lord of the Rings, Malcolm X, The Mission, Napoleon, 1917, Quo Vadis, Ran, Red Cliff, Reds, Sankofa, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, Spartacus, A Spring River Flows East, The Ten Commandments, There Will Be Blood, The Thin Red Line, 300, Titanic, Twelve Years a Slave, War and Peace, and The Woman King.  The better of them can be appreciated both for the entertainment they provide and for their explanatory power. 

Of course, for many people “epic films” are Homeric, after The Iliad, about the abdication of Helen of Sparta by Prince Paris of Troy and the war that followed, in which the great warrior Achilles fought and grew enraged when his companion Patroclus was killed; and, after The Odyssey, about the long journey home of another warrior, the king of Ithaca, Odysseus.  Homeric, or Reevesian—that is after the work of internationally popular actor Steve Reeves (1926 – 2000), the bodybuilder, actor, and writer who appeared as a warrior in sword and sandal pictures, wearing short tunics in films such as Hercules (Pietro Francisi, 1958), The Last Days of Pompeii (Mario Bonnard, 1959), and Duel of the Titans (Sergio Corbucci, 1961).  I recall seeing as a boy and liking Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), in which a prince, Jason, begins a quest for the golden fleece and encounters harpies, clashing rocks, a guardian beast, and armed skeletons.  And, I never forgot Jay Robinson as Caligula in The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953) and Demetrius and the Gladiators (Delmer Daves, 1954).  The book Epic Films by Gary Allen Smith (McFarland, 2004) is a great compendium on what are often called peplum films, hundreds of them, such as Fabiola (Alessandro Blasetti, 1949) and Alexander the Great (Robert Rossen, 1956). 

Epic Films includes plot summaries of the motion pictures, notation of the cast and crew, and sometimes details of the films’ making and reception: including Aida (Clemente Fracassi, 1953), an adaptation of the opera in which an Egyptian general, Radames (Luciano Della Marra), loves an Ethiopian slave, Aida (Sophia Loren); The Bible (John Huston, 1966), depicting the tales in Genesis; Caesar and Cleopatra (Gabriel Pascal, 1945) with Vivien Leigh, a fine actress, and one of most beautiful of women, as Cleopatra, and Claude Rains as Caesar, in a scenario written by George Bernard Shaw; The Crusades (Cecil B. DeMille, 1935) takes King Richard of England (Henry Wilcoxon) to the Holy Land; Fellini Satyricon (Federico Fellini, 1970), a notorious and spectacularly perverse interpretation of a Petronius’s fragmented Latin prosimetrum, a blend of poetry and prose, featuring sexual intrigue, the corruptions of wealth, and cannibalism; Helen of Troy (Robert Wise, 1956), with Rossana Podesta as Helen and Jacques Sernas as Paris; King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961), with Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus; The Silver Chalice (Victor Saville, 1954), released in the last month of the year, featuring Paul Newman’s debut performance in cinema, as Basil, a defrauded rich heir who becomes a slave-artist commissioned to embellish a sacred cup, but a film that embarrassed Newman—though he was nominated for a Golden Globe award; Sodom and Gomorrah (Robert Aldrich, 1962), featuring Stewart Granger as Lot, a father and Hebrew leader, who makes a deal with the Queen of the wealthy (and decadent) salt-mining city of Sodom for land, and the conflicts and temptations that follow; Titus (Taymor, 1999), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s (tragic, brutal, and witty) revenge play Titus Andronicus by inventive director Julie Taymor, with Anthony Hopkins as Titus and Jessica Lange as his opponent Tamora; and The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958), with Kirk Douglas as Prince Einar and Tony Curtis as his slave rival Eric, two men who are, unknown to themselves, half-brothers.  More recent films such as Braveheart and Gladiator are also discussed.  Yet, when I think about epic films, films about great people and great events, I first think of motion pictures such as Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982) and Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981), films that allow one to better understand a history—colonialism, communism—that still hovers above, behind, and beneath us, a history that hurts us.  I think of The Mahabharata (1989) by Peter Brook, a challenging and unforgettable visualization of an epic poem about warring tribes, the Pandavas and Kauravas, vying for power.  I think of Twelve Years a Slave and Harriet.

The Last Emperor (1987), by Bertolucci, is an epic about the meeting of an ancient regime with twentieth-century modernity, about the divine right of kings facing the challenge of nationalism and political ideology, in the figure of a ruler who seemed a privileged puppet.  Why wouldn’t such a story be interesting to a large audience, especially when presented by someone of Bertolucci’s gifts?  Pauline Kael wrote, “Bertolucci doesn’t intend us to see Pu Yi as the hero or the anti-hero, or even the comic victim, of his life.  Rather he’s a man without will or backbone who lives his life as spectacle—who watches his life go by.  And since he experiences life as spectacle we’re given only spectacle—a historical pageant without a protagonist” (For Keeps; page 1152).  Yet, the story of Pu Yi, neither hero or anti-hero, would seem to be intriguing and more relevant than a depiction of the Crusades, and more fresh than another recounting of the life of Jesus.  Could it interest a large audience?  Did it?  Yes. 

“Bernardo Bertolucci’s visually ravishing spectacle about the life of Pu Yi (1905-1967), the last Chinese emperor, is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time,” began critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s commentary on The Last Emperor in the December 10, 1987 Chicago Reader, offering a summary of the film and a brief but useful analysis, comparing the film to the work of Kenji Mizoguchi and Roberto Rossellini, and considering it one of Bertolucci’s best films.  Jonathan Rosenbaum, the author of Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980), Essential Cinema (2004), and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader (2024), is a critic of significant discernment.  “Interestingly, Bertolucci uses Pu Yi’s remoteness from China as an objective correlative of our own cultural distance as Westerners (virtually all of the dialogue is rendered in English), and, with scriptwriter Mark Peploe, brilliantly employs a dialectical flashback structure that shows Pu Yi’s life from the vantage point of his ‘reeducation’ in the 50s.  Working with an elaborate system of visual and thematic rhymes to tell his mainly melancholy tale of solitude, Bertolucci is interested in charting nothing less than the gradual substitution of the state for the family, which describes the history of today’s China as well as that of its central character,” wrote Rosenbaum, declaring The Last Emperor a haunting meditation on history. 

Considering the film’s success more recently, Gregg Kilday recalled in the Hollywood Reporter, “Distributed domestically by Columbia Pictures, The Last Emperor grossed $44 million in North America ($119.2 million today).  It was also a big winner at the 60th Academy Awards, where it was nominated for nine trophies and, in a sweep, won all nine Oscars, including best picture and best director” (November 3, 2023).  That would not be Bertolucci’s last epic: he made Little Buddha (1993), both a telling of the story of Siddhartha Gautama, the awakened (the Buddha), and of the possible reincarnation of a beloved monk, Lama Dorje.  I do not know what Pauline Kael thought of it, as she was no longer a working critic; and I imagine that as Kael was often impatient with piety—as in her response to John Huston’s The Bible and Attenborough’s Gandhi—she might not have been entertained.  Bernardo Bertolucci knew something about Vajrayana Buddhism, known as Tibetan Buddhism, and its assertion that the lasting qualities of being human are enhanced with the enactment of Buddhist ideas: one might reach enlightenment through meditation and mantras, through exercise, and living an ethical life.  Bertolucci’s account of the Buddha is the central story—and the family story, featuring the alert, responsive little boy, Jesse (Alex Wiesendanger), as a possibly reincarnated monk, is the frame.  Buddha’s story is imaginative, illustrative—vivid.  Keanu Reeves, austere, slim, brown, is good as Siddhartha.  (Bridget Fonda and Chris Isaak play more predictable characters, the boy’s parents—decent, restrained people—though a loving couple and good parents.)

Little Buddha: A monk unwraps an illustrated text, in which a story is told of a sacrificial goat talking of reincarnation, a story for children (lesson: make no sacrifices of living creature).  The monk, Kenpo Tenzin (Sogyal Rinpoche), receives a message: he says that he has been waiting years to receive the message, about a possible reincarnation of a beloved teacher.  The monk sees a figure on a bridge—a bridge will be of symbolic significance.  After the monk’s dream of connection, the monk, Kenpo Tenzin, in the United States, in Seattle, visits the home of a boy born a month after the spiritual leader’s death, Jesse (Alex Wiesendanger).  The monk Kenpo Tenzin speaks with the boy’s mother, Lisa Conrad (Bridget Fonda), about teaching, her profession.  (Lama is an honorific word for monk or teacher.)  He, Kenpo Tenzin (Rinpoche), inquires about the boy’s birthday; and tells her that an important lama (Norbu), wants to meet her, Lisa Conrad (Fonda).  Her husband, Dean Conrad (Chris Isaak), is an architect and engineer, she says, as she brings the monks into her new home.  The monks like the emptiness of the living room in the home.  “No room is empty if your mind is full,” says the teacher’s teacher Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng).

Life is change: the development of monastic life, the withdrawal from social life, among Buddhist in ancient India diminished the practice of Buddhism among the lay people; and Tibet, among other countries, became a principal site for Buddhists—their symbols, chants, and devotions melded well with the local Tibetan culture’s inclinations, according to World Religions by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File / Hamlyn, 1971).  The Tibetan monks have been living in various places since 1959—Bhutan, Nepal, India, since occupation of Tibet by China.  The monks in Bertolucci’s Little Buddha talk about a spiritual rebirth, a special project.  Lama Jorje is the person they’re looking for, the one they think might be reincarnated—and the boy Jesse (Alex Wiesendanger) comes out wearing a mask, which he made (a mask of a red rat); and Jesse asks why the monks do not wear shoes (bare feet are their tradition).  The monks say that Jesse might be a reborn teacher.  They give him a book, Little Buddha—a children’s book about life of Siddhartha.  His mother, Lisa (Fonda), later reads the book to the bathing boy—the story comes to life (cinema): A young woman of privilege, Queen Maya (Kanika Pandey), is returning to her parents’ home for birth of her child—and her entourage make a rest stop near a forest; and she enters the woods, and remembers a dream of being blessed by elephant (elephants are symbols of good fortune; of fertility, loyalty, power, wisdom).  Queen Maya has labor pains—she will not make it to her parents’ home for the birth; and, she gives birth to an alert, strong child with a sense of purpose.  Siddhartha’s arrival is celebrated (his name means one who has fulfilled a purpose).  An old seer anticipates Siddhartha’s significance in the world—as king or spiritual leader.  (Queen Maya soon dies.) 

The scenes set in Asia are golden, full of color; and the scenes set in the United States seem tinted blue and gray.  (Is the blue tint a suggestion of cold, a distancing device?  Or simply a tool for organizing the scenes?)  These are tones of mood as well as color.  Dean (Chris Isaak), the boy Jesse’s father, seems a bit skeptical about reincarnation.  He is anxious about his own concerns—he reveals that an associate and friend, Evan, is bankrupt.  Jesse, the boy, goes on monorail ride with a couple of the monks, Lama Norbu and a young monk.  Jesse shows the monks a Buddha statue—and Norbu recalls the life of Siddhartha (Keanu Reeves) as young man.  A life of sports, of fun, of public admiration.  Siddhartha was given three lavish homes by his father Suddhodana (Rudraprasad Sengupta); but Siddhartha hears a strange song—and follows it (he is told it is about a beautiful place—and that suffering lies beyond the palace walls).  Siddhartha says he hasn’t even seen his own city.

Jesse and Lisa visit the Dharma Center, where Jesse greets young monks, who are restoring, and decorating, the interior of the building.  The Dharma Center is the kind of community space that offers information about Buddhism—dharma is moral law, an embodiment of virtues such as truth, generosity, and peace; and at such a center one might learn about a bodhisattva, one who attains liberation for the benefit of all; karma, the consequences of intentions and actions; loving-kindness (metta), a friendliness that extends to others, wanting health and happiness for them as for oneself; and meditation, contemplative and focused attention on a particular experience, idea, or object, calm and honest; sangha, a community of spiritual followers; and yoga, the practice of breathing exercises, physical postures, and meditation that facilitates spirituality.  There at the Dharma Center, Jesse asks about a bowl, whether it is the late teacher’s bowl, that of Lama Dorje: who is also called Lama Thunderbolt.

The story of Siddhartha is continued by Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng): Siddhartha (Keanu Reeves) goes out to tour the world, but what he sees is arranged by his father Suddhodana (Rudraprasad Sengupta), who intended to eliminate difficulties.  Yet, Siddhartha (Reeves) sees old, poor men—getting a glimpse of life’s troubles.  Siddhartha observes people working and people who are sick.  He observes a ritual of death, of grief.  “When a body grows cold and stiff like wood, it has to be burnt like wood,” a young guide says.  Siddhartha discovers compassion, identification with others, through observing suffering. 

Dean (Chris Isaak), Jesse’s father, talks to Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng) about his and his wife Lisa’s not believing in reincarnation.  Norbu talks about the survival of the spirit—and he wants to take Jesse and his family to Bhutan for an examination of Jesse by experts.  Dean abruptly, angrily, takes Jesse of out the Dharma Center.  Siddhartha (Reeves) confronts his own father Suddhodana (Rudraprasad Sengupta) about the protective life his father has provided him, and the protective lies Suddhodana has told him, keeping Siddhartha from the world and its suffering.  His father tells him to think of his own duty to his wife Yasodhara (Rajeshwari Sachdev) and his newly born son—Siddhartha has responsibilities and cannot wander.  Siddhartha’s father admits that all must die and be reborn and die again—but Siddhartha thinks he can find a remedy for that.  His father decrees that the prince is not to be allowed to leave the palace.

Leaving the Dharma Center, going home, on the highway with his son, Dean (Isaak) receives sad news about his colleague and friend Evan—and tells Jesse that Evan had an accident (probably a protective lie—the hiding of the fact of suicide?).  Dean stops the car, cries.  There is a sense of tragedy.  Jesse returns to the book about Siddhartha—reads of Siddhartha (Reeves) visiting his own wife and son; of Siddhartha waking the young guide Channa (Santosh Bangera) with plans to leave palace.  Siddhartha’s journey of awakening—as others slept—has begun.  He leaves the palace, and he sees ascetics in the forest—naked, chanting, looking for enlightenment.  Siddhartha cuts his hair, and gives his ornaments to Channa; and says that he is looking for freedom.  He meditates—and the ascetics circle him.  A large snake shields Siddhartha from the rain, a wondrous sight—an example of the kind of spiritual vision, the kind of symbolic thought, that cinema can make real.

There’s difficulty in conveying a story—history or myth—oriented in a foreign country but I think this film, Little Buddha, does that well.  The search for one’s place in the world—one’s relation to land and people—and for one’s happiness and peace of mind are universal; and that makes the subject accessible.  “This exquisitely beautiful film with its stunning visual sequences and its story unfolding within a story is a well-realized teaching parable about Buddhism,” wrote Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat of Little Buddha of the online Spirituality and Practice, in an undated review, accessed June, 2024.  Jesse’s father Dean (Isaak) returns from San Francisco, where he went in connection with his colleague Evan.  There is a passionate kiss between mother and father, who now says that Jesse should go to Bhutan.  The crisis may have awakened something in Dean, as a man, as a husband and father: his assumptions shaken by tragedy, he sees aspects of his life differently.  The parents, Dean (Isaak) and Lisa (Fonda), argue about the proposed journey.  Dean wants to go with Jesse—while he waits for lawyers to do their work, following the death of Evan.  Dean may need a respite.  (The scenes with the American family still have that blue tint—but when Jesse and father and monk are on the plane, the light is golden—no blue/gray tint.)

Siddhartha left his old life behind.  Dean and Jesse leave their organized life behind.  Can the reader or observer of their stories leave old thinking behind?  Roger Ebert could be a generous critic—but was sometimes an inattentive and intemperate one (the reader must discern the difference); and about Little Buddha, Ebert wrote, “The modern sequences lack realism or credibility.  The ancient sequences play like the equivalent of a devout Bible story.  The result is a slow-moving and pointless exercise by Bertolucci, whose The Last Emperor was a much superior telling of a similar story about a child who is chosen for great things” (Chicago Sun-Times, May 25, 1994). 

In Little Buddha, Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng) continues the story about Siddhartha (Keanu Reeves) and his early followers of ascetics—meditation and deprivation.  Siddhartha (Reeves) hearing a musician tell a pupil about the tightening and slacking of a musical string realizes he has been following the wrong path.  There is a musician on a boat—and the musician’s words are about avoiding extremes—finding balance, the middle way, adapting, accepting change.  Norbu is on his own journey with his new associates.  Jesse and Dean, with Norbu, arrive in Nepal, where they walk a busy street.  Beige, tan, and brown are the dominant colors.  Jesse sees children praying.  Raju (Raju Lal), another candidate for reincarnation, and Jesse see each other; and they share an electronic game.  Another boy, Mantu (Mantu Lal), runs away with the game.  Jesse follows Raju and Mantu—and Jesse sees a place where people are spinning pottery, a scene similar to what Siddhartha saw.  The cycles of time, of life, continue.

Lama Norbu says they must visit a third candidate—and that is a long trip.  They go—and visit the candidate: the girl Gita (Greisha Makarsingh); she’s assertive, proud, has a secret garden.  (Gita says that her grandfather was a great raja.)  Gita’s mother talks of meeting Lama Dorje—and of Lama Dorje touching her stomach, and her subsequent pregnancy, and her daughter’s unexpected recitation of a Sanskrit prayer.

Roger Ebert asked questions about the relation of spiritual claims to practical life.  He wondered if American parents, really, would be willing to entertain the idea of his/her child going to live in a foreign land.  Ebert wondered if there should not be more about the cultural clashes among the different characters, adults and children.  The drama is about a desire, a quest, for dispassionate assessments, for serenity, for wisdom: that is the opposite of the instrumental thinking, the utilitarian concerns, the mundane conflicts, of the society most of us know.  Is conflict the inevitable point of all western dramas—and the inevitable point of all western relations?  Is it possible to consider another perspective, another purpose—or that, even briefly, different people might have a sustained dialogue?  Ebert wrote, “What I kept waiting for in Little Buddha, unsuccessfully, was some clue about Bertolucci’s attitude toward his material.  Here we have a fundamental clash between two cultures, presented with the simplicity of a religious comic book.  I cannot imagine a Buddhist filmmaker, subsidized with church money, making a film with less complexity or irony—rather the reverse, in fact.  Has Bertolucci become a Buddhist?  Does he believe the little boy is a reincarnated monk?  Is this movie a holy story, for our edification?” (May 25, 1994).  Bertolucci was not a believer—but he was open to experience.  Was his audience?  In Variety, Todd McCarthy wrote, “In fashioning his least intellectual work, and the one least preoccupied with politics, Freud or sex, Bertolucci has created a picture that is half a picture-book history of the origins of Buddhism and half a consideration of the possibilities of reincarnation in the context of contrasting value systems.  Unfortunately, he and his screenwriters have failed to provide a driving dramatic impetus or enough conflict to fuel the story, which is largely populated by underdrawn, dull characters that don’t serve its exalted aims” (December 12, 1993).

In “Postcards from the East: Learning through Emotions,” a foreword Bertolucci had written in September 1993 for the book Entering the Stream: An Introduction to the Buddha and His Teachings (edited by Samuel Bercholz and Sherab Chödzin Kohn, Shambhala, 1993), Bertolucci declared, “I am not a Buddhist, but my relationship with Buddhism goes back a long way,” recalling first a book about a yogi that Italian writer Elsa Morante gave him when he was twenty-one, and that years later he attended a Buddhist ceremony in Brentwood, California, and he remembered “the very strong feeling I had on meeting an old Tibetan lama in Katmandu, sitting in front of him without the comfort of a common language.  For in that moment there was an incredible sense of communion, an emotional understanding and communication which goes beyond duality.  Looking at him was like looking into a mirror where I would see my face ‘morphing’ into his face—there was no longer a teacher or a student but only one being.”  Known for his confidence, his appreciation of clothing, and his lavish spending before and behind the camera, as well as his for appreciation of Freud and Marx, and his great passion for film, Bertolucci, working with co-writers Rudy Wurlitzer, a practicing Buddhist, and Mark Peploe, and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, production and costume designer James Acheson, editor Pietro Scalia, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, made a commitment to authenticity in making Little Buddha, which he considered his most revolutionary movie.  “Buddhists associated with the film have been generally impressed by Mr. Bertolucci’s sincere desire to depict the ancient doctrines and ceremonies authentically,” reported Douglas S. Barasch in the May 22, 1994, in the New York Times article “Bertolucci Tells a Tale of Buddha,” on the making of the film.  Some Buddhist monks were cast; some helped with the staging.  Douglas Barasch informs, or reminds, the reader, “Buddhism’s American roots reach back into the 19th century.  But the religion’s wider dissemination began in earnest in the 1940s and 50s with the arrival of seminal Japanese Zen teachers who were able to skillfully communicate the essence of Buddhist dharma—its philosophy and meditative practices—in a language that could be understood by American intellectuals and artists.”  More dissemination of the philosophy and practices continued with subsequent decades of cultural change and integration—and some took it as their religion.

One might say that Little Buddha engages, or inspires, various questions: What is the relation of spirit to matter?  How much is spiritual tradition part of intellectual tradition?  Does submission to spiritual practice confine reason?  What is meditation?  Is counseling balance ever wrong?  Is it the responsibility—or merely the resource—of cinema to show us ideas, or things, only imagined—not yet seen—by philosophy, religion, politics, or science?  Why is the story of Siddhartha Gotama (or Gautama) not as well known as that of Christ, of Abraham and Moses, of Muhammad—or even of Socrates?  How can skepticism itself be tested, disproved?  Are dreams prophecies?  Is spiritual reincarnation possible?  Might a child be more than a parent anticipates?  How to reconcile differences between expectation and fact?  What is solace for death, for grief?   Has Bertolucci taken up questions that do not interest certain viewers?  Is that why they are not moved to thought?  Or is the culture on display, or the philosophy that is articulated, too different for them to see the themes of his cinema?  That would be tragic in an age—in recent decades—when more and more people have discussed, and even promoted, the clash of civilizations—tradition versus modernity, sacred versus secular, liberal versus conservative, the eastern world versus the west and north versus south, and one social group versus another, everywhere, all the time—as we need people, places, philosophies, and projects that facilitate healing, togetherness, understanding.

“Indeed, an aspect of modern Buddhism that has emerged in Asia as well as the United States is the employment of Buddhist teachings and practices to address social conflicts and environmental destruction.  This may be seen as early as 1956 with the conversion of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, an Indian scholar born Hindu into the Dalit (ex-Untouchable) class, who was a primary architect of India’s constitution,” wrote Rima Vesely-Flad in Black Buddhists and The Black Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (New York University, 2022; page 49).  Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891 – 1956) was a jurist, an economist, and a political leader; born the son of an Indian army officer, he received a scholarship for school study, and Bhimrao, after graduating from the University of Bombay, attended universities in the United States (Columbia University) and Britain (London School of Economics).  B.R. Ambedkar entered public service, and became involved in social reform, founding several journals.  Faced with continual social prejudice that he saw as based in religion (Hindu), he advocated Buddhism (Gandhi, believing that social change might be possible—that Untouchables might be treated better—did not want Ambedkar to convert); and Ambedkar converted to Buddhism with more than 200,000 others in a single ceremony, October 14, 1956, decades after first proposing conversion.  His book The Buddha and His Dhamma appeared, posthumously, in 1957.  “The concept of personality—that which is unique to each individual and that which ought to be developed through social relationships—is central to Ambedkar’s 1936 appeals for conversion.  This concept of the fundamental equality and capacity of each unique individual grounds Ambedkar’s critique of Hinduism and the caste system,” wrote Scott R. Stroud in The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction (University of Chicago Press, 2023; page 202).  Ambedkar valued Buddhism because it was native to India, and it valued equality.

“With their exotic locales and high production values, The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky (1990), and Little Buddha (1993) can collectively be considered an Eastern Trilogy, with all three films aiming for a wide international market,” said film critic and journalist Bilge Ebiri in a retrospective essay on Bertolucci for the online Senses of Cinema (October 2004); and, Bilge Ebiri, who has written for New York magazine and the Village Voice, continued, “ For at the heart of Siddhartha’s journey is a dark existentialist realisation that would have done Camus proud: sheltered by his father from the agony of the world, the Prince sneaks away and discovers poverty, disease, and finally death.  Bertolucci’s representation of Siddhartha’s visually violent introduction to mortality is one of the most powerful moments in all of the director’s films” and “Bertolucci depicts a character whose entire belief system is destroyed, and who has to negate, and then rebuild, his identity—a very strong theme running through all three films in the Eastern Trilogy.”  Little Buddha, budgeted at $30 to $35 million, made $48 million worldwide. 

In Little Buddha, Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng) recalls Siddhartha (Reeves) sitting under great tree—being visited by the five tempting daughters of Mara, there to distract Siddhartha: Pride, Greed, Fear, Ignorance, and Desire; five spirits, five daughters.  The demons can be seen as manifestations of Siddhartha’s spirits, vices to be defeated.  Gita’s privileged family has a tree similar to Siddhartha’s.  The three children, Jesse (Alex Wiesendanger), Raju (Raju Lal), and Gita (Greisha Makarsingh), seem to be watching Siddhartha’s encounter.  Siddhartha looks beyond them.  Siddhartha has visions: of an angry malevolent force; of a surrounding ocean; of an army of archers; of a mirrored self—all of which he rejects.  Siddhartha is aware of what is real, of what is not.  He recalls different incarnations of his spirit.  He understands cause and effect.  Siddhartha, then, is called the Buddha, the awakened one.  (He has transcended to bliss—he has come, gone, and come again—transformed: Sugata; Tathagata.) 

The complexities and contradictions of human existence and experiences challenge philosophy and politics.  The legacy of Buddha, of what Buddhism has become, is not all bliss, not all perfect: “Buddhist monks don’t just sit there and meditate all day.  A lot of them don’t do any meditation at all.  They’re studying texts, doing administrative work, raising funds and performing rituals for the lay people, with a particular emphasis on funerals,” said Paul Harrison, a Stanford University professor of religious studies and the editor of Setting Out on the Great Way: Essays on Early Mahayana Buddhism (Equinox Publishing, 2018), talking to Alex Shashkevich, of the Stanford News Service, for the Stanford Report (August 20th, 2018).  Professor Harrison said, “I try to show my students that Buddhism is not so nice and fluffy as they might think.  Buddhism has a dark side, which, for example, we’ve been seeing in Myanmar with the recent persecution of the Rohingya people there.”

In Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, Jesse, Raju, and Gita visit the monastery, the monks’ home.  The monks work on a sand mandala—begun when Lama Norbu left, it is now almost complete.  Norbu says that the three candidates show similar signs of possible reincarnation.  An oracle consultation is sought.  Norbu calls each candidate his teacher.  He recognizes the separate manifestations of body, speech, and mind.  He encourages compassion and the sharing of knowledge.  Time passes: the cycle of life and death continues.  In time, each candidate is given some of Lama Norbu’s ashes after his death and cremation for dispersal.  Jesse and family—with his mother pregnant—are, finally, in full color in the United States; and Jesse and family pour Lama Norbu’s ashes onto a bowl set upon the water.

Submitted June 2024

Volume 29, Issue 1-2 / February 2025 Film Reviews   bernardo bertolucci   buddha   conrad brooks   eastern religion   siddhartha