Contemporary Buddhism An Interdisciplinary Journal

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Buddhism and Film—Inter-Relation and Interpenetration: Reflections on an Emerging Research Field

Almut-Barbara Renger

To cite this article: Almut-Barbara Renger (2014) Buddhism and Film—Inter-Relation and Interpenetration: Reflections on an Emerging Research Field, Contemporary Buddhism, 15:1, 1-27, DOI: 10.1080/14639947.2014.897834

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2014.897834

Published online: 06 May 2014.

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Download by: [117.102.49.93] Date: 12 December 2015, At: 09:42 INTRODUCTION

BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER- RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION: REFLECTIONS ON AN EMERGING RESEARCH FIELD

Almut-Barbara Renger

This article provides an introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled ‘Buddhism and Film’. Since the silent movie The Light of Asia,a1925 German- Indian co-production released in the USA in 1928, increasing numbers of films have been produced across the globe that are related in some way to Buddhism. In the specific conditions of the modern period and an increasingly globalised world a new field of research gradually formed, which has continued to develop to the present day. The present special issue is devoted to this research field. The introduction will sketch its contours and give as examples particular films, especially (but not exclusively) dramas and documentaries on Tibetan Buddhism and Zen. I cannot provide here the detail and nuance which the complexity of this field truly demands, but will rather offer an introduction by picking out certain select aspects and points of view for discussion. The following eight articles of the special issue will provide more detail. The volume takes account of the topic’s complexity by including contributions from various academic disciplines (theology, religious studies and cultural anthropology; literary, film and media studies) as well as from filmmakers themselves. Its goal is to make clear how rewarding it is to study this steadily expanding field, and to encourage more in-depth

Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 interdisciplinary studies that will be able to explore the complex reciprocal relationship of Buddhism and film.

Since it first arose on the Indian subcontinent, Buddhism has developed an extraordinary range of forms in the course of its history and dissemination, and into the present day it continues to undergo numerous cultural transformations. It has adapted itself to each new culture in which it has been received and has thus taken on many different interpretations and forms: Sri Lankan, Burmese, Thai,

Contemporary Buddhism, 2014 Vol. 15, No. 1, 1–27, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2014.897834 q 2014 Taylor & Francis 2 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Tibetan, Mongolian and finally also European, American and other so-called ‘Western’ forms. By now various different forms are present side by side, above all in larger cities both in Asia and in Europe, as well as the USA, Australia and New Zealand. This has produced any number of tensions between the traditions, but also all kinds of cooperation and in turn also many new cultural developments. As happened in the past when it transferred into new areas, Buddhism has changed not only styles and methods but, with changes in media, also forms of expression and modes of representation—not least in the arts, which have always been screens for the projections of the cultures that Buddhism reached. In the twentieth century Buddhism moved into the art form that is expressed in the production of moving pictures: film. Gradually, ever more films have been produced that are in some way related to Buddhism and so a new research field came into being in the specific conditions of modernity and the contemporary world: Buddhism and film.

1. The research field: Contours and perspectives The interpenetration of moving pictures and Buddhist teachings has a long prehistory. In both the history and the present-day practice of Buddhism there has been a close connection between images, narratives and teachings. Although the earliest phase of Buddhist art was aniconic, in the course of the centuries many different works of art have been created with all kinds of figural representation and symbols for Buddha and dharma (e.g., Bodhi Tree, lotus, dharmachakra, etc.), and, from around the first century AD, also portraits of Gautama Buddha himself. Through the dissemination of Buddhism in the countries of Central, East and Southeast Asia, and complex reciprocal influences with various Asian cultures, a rich and complex system of iconography and symbolism came into being, with characteristic representations of physical poses and hand gestures (mudra¯). Many pictorial media—e.g., sculptures, reliefs and paintings—show episodes from the life of Buddha and are used for religious and moral education by illustrating dharma and making basic themes of Buddhism visible in everyday situations. Not Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 least through contact with Western cultures (see below), Buddhist pictorial art has also adopted modern forms of expression. Since the twentieth century, not only Western but also Asian artists have increasingly taken up motifs from Buddhist iconography and have combined them in part with Western forms of artistic expression, in part with further developments of Asian regional styles. It remains to be seen whether the development of Buddhist art from initial resistance to depiction through to richly abundant representation will be repeated in the history of film. Much points in that direction at present. A growing number of filmmakers are transferring traditional elements of Buddhist iconography and formal language into their own chosen contexts and so are opening up new approaches to and perspectives on Buddhism. Even depictions of the historical Buddha have been growing in Asian film (see below, section 3), though previously BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 3

motion pictures showing the Buddha in human form were often banned, particularly in Buddhist parts of South Asia (Dwyer 2006, 28). Sri Lanka, for example, was one of the states in which the epic silent film The Light of Asia (1925) was not allowed to be screened, but the epic drama Siddhartha the Buddha (2013; original title Sri Siddhartha Gauthama) directed by Chandran Rutnam and Saman Weeraman and others, was produced and in early 2013 premiered there. The field of Buddhism and film as it appears today is characterised by numerous inter-relations and interpenetrations. It emerged from the complex interplay between the so-called ‘East’ and the so-called ‘West’, and between the pluriform nature of a religion characterised by great cultural and ethnic diversity and a medium that is art form, mass medium and economic factor all in one. The increased transfer of culture and knowledge at a global level, to which, among other things, colonialism and new communication technologies contributed, has meant that, alongside the expansion of Western culture into large parts of the world, there has also been an adoption of the bodies of knowledge of so-called ‘Eastern’ cultures in the West, for which the term ‘the Easternisation of the West’ has been coined (Campbell 2007). Admittedly, some of the teachings and practices adopted had already undergone a process of ‘Westernisation’ before they were accepted in the West. The international Buddhist film festivals of the twenty-first century, which are held around the world (e.g., in Los Angeles, Washington DC and San Francisco; Mexico City; Amsterdam and London; Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok) and show films from many countries (including international co-productions), offer lively testimony of this interpene- tration of cultures and of the interplay of Buddhism and film. The works presented there include non-scripted shorts in the sphere of documentary, and drama films aiming for major box-office success, but also television show episodes and many other, often experimental, productions from the sphere of visual media. The film festivals make clear the cultural and ethnic diversity of Buddhism and show that many different Buddhist notions and images have found their way into many different societies around the globe, and particularly into the collective consciousness of Western cultures. As in the sphere of literature, the cinematic reception of Buddhism covers a Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 very broad spectrum. Beginning with the silent movie, it comprises many different genres and encompasses in diverse ways instruction and entertainment, and both fly-on-the-wall documentary realism and the illusionistic creative potentials of special effects. In some cases films merely allude to Buddhism or it is an incidental element; in others it is an explicit theme and Buddhist characters, teachings and practices, sites and institutions are documented or provide the setting for the events of the film’s story. Sometimes Buddhist themes are presented expressis verbis as norms and values, sometimes they are implicit in action and dialogue, in visual sequences and musical accompaniment. Some films (or their directors) intentionally communicate Buddhist messages, in others these are (sometimes to the surprise of the filmmakers) interpreted into the film, in which case the reception of Buddhism occurs on the part of the viewer. This phenomenon may 4 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

arise due to the experience of film: for example, this experience may raise existential questions to which Buddhism offers an answer, or (on the basis of stereotypical sequences of activities involving gestures, words, and objects) may be perceived as a ritual and provoke a religious experience, which the viewer then interprets as Buddhist. Scholarly work on the relation of Buddhism and film is itself a witness to this double form of the reception of Buddhism through both the act of production on the part of the filmmaker and the act of reception on the part of the viewer. The Journal of Religion and Film is an example. On the one hand, the articles of this online journal concern films that explicitly deal with ideas, characters or settings that are typically associated with Buddhism. For example, it published Mullen’s (1998) highly regarded article on Tibetan Buddhism in American popular film, which examines the moment of orientalist commercialisation, and the important paper by the scholar of Southeast Asian Buddhism, McDaniel (2010), on the emotional lives of Buddhist monks as they are depicted in modern Thai film. On the other hand, the journal also addresses films that exhibit analogies to Buddhist concepts or, in the view of the writers, resonate with Buddhism. Among these is the box-office hit The Matrix (1999), the well-known science-fiction action film directed by the Wachowskis, based on the idea, which has repeatedly been classed as Buddhist in interpretations of the film, that the objective reality that we perceive is ultimately a product of our intellect, an illusion (Ford 2000; Flannery- Dailey and Wagner 2001; Baker 2006). Other examples are films with high-profile casts such as David Fincher’s drama Fight Club (1999), an adaptation of the 1996 novel of the same name (Reed 2007); the philosophical comedy film I Heart Huckabees (2004), directed by David O. Russell (Ng 2010); and the 2006 comedy- drama-fantasy film Stranger than Fiction, directed by Marc Forster (Hutchinson 2009). Wolfgang Iser and many other exponents of reception aesthetics have presented the engagement between text and reader as the most important point of reference for the constitution of meaning in the act of reading (Iser 1978). With an eye to the question of what makes a film Buddhist, it is a highly interesting challenge to examine the question raised by reader-response criticism, in the films named above and others, such as those cited by John Whalen-Bridge in his Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 contribution to this issue, and to ask to what extent the intellectual and emotional perception of these films as Buddhist is already part of their design or, on the other hand, arises only in the process of reception. The present special issue aims to elicit a more precise assessment of the field of Buddhism and film through larger-scale interdisciplinary studies than can be presented here. By providing different disciplinary perspectives on the issues mentioned above, the special issue offers a picture of the topic’s complexity, with the goal of inspiring cross-disciplinary discussions and contributing to the study of this constantly growing field, with its abundance of inter-relations and interpenetrations. It must be stressed that this introduction makes no claim to offer a complete overview of the field, neither of the cinematic works nor the secondary sources on these works. Instead, some examples are drawn by way of BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 5

introduction from the many possible films and complexes of issues that define the field. More detail can be found in the contributions to the volume itself; an overview of the films screened at Buddhist film festivals in the period 2003–11 is provided by the article mentioned above, ‘What is a “Buddhist Film”?’ by Whalen- Bridge. An advance recommendation can also be given for the volume Buddhism and American Film, another book-length collection on Buddhism and film, being edited at the State University of New York Press by Whalen-Bridge together with Gary Storhoff (publication is planned for 2014). Above all, the relevant surveys that have appeared in recent years must also be gratefully recommended here. These include, to name only three, chapter 4 on ‘Buddhism’ in Bakker’s (2009) book The Challenge of the Silver Screen, Cho’s (2009) chapter on Buddhism in John Lyden’s Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, and Michele Marie Desmarais’s (2009) contribution, ‘Buddhism and Film’, to The Continuum Companion to Religion and Film. The pioneering work of the authors of these articles has played a substantial part in ensuring that the field of Buddhism and film, so long neglected by scholarship, is being successively explored ever more deeply, opening up new views of how we engage with Buddhism. In the following I shall pick out some select aspects and moments in this research field. I first offer a rough sketch of the rise and boom in feature films on Zen and in particular on Tibetan Buddhism since the 1990s (section 2). I then turn to the stages in its history since the 1920s and to documentary film (section 3). In this I retrace the path of my own familiarisation with the field, first in seminars with students and then in the context of an international study group which I founded with scholars from different disciplines. This path led to preparing and conducting a workshop on the topic (section 4) and has ultimately resulted in this publication with its contributions from both scholars and filmmakers (section 5).

2. The late twentieth and early twenty-first century: A boom in films on Zen and Tibetan Buddhism The background to the special issue was the two-day international workshop ‘Buddhism and Film’ on 2–3 June 2011, the organisation of which was Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 carried out in the context of the international study group ‘Cultural Transformations of Buddhism’ at Freie Universita¨t Berlin, and a series of exploratory seminars on the reception of Buddhism, which I have taught since 2005. The participants in them were, from 2005 to 2008, students at the Institute for General and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and, since 2009, students at the Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion at Freie Universita¨t Berlin. The seminars were concerned primarily with the recent appearance of Buddhism in the West, and both with real forms of Buddhist organisation in societies and with Buddhism’s reception in various media in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the circumstances that gave rise to this development (Prebish and Baumann 2002). The scholarly study of Buddhism 6 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

and translations of Buddhist texts since the nineteenth century, visits and immigration by Buddhists from Asia, the interest of the protest movement of the 1960s in Buddhist teachings and practices, and the foundation of monasteries, monastic communities and lay groups, among other influences, have had the result that today Western culture can hardly be imagined without Buddhism. As is shown by the constant appearance of Buddhist themes and elements in philosophy, literature and the arts, Buddhism is understood as an aesthetic and intellectual challenge. In addition, with its plurality of schools and traditions, teachings and possible practices, Buddhism counts as a religious alternative and/ or supplement to Christian religion and is linked with psychology and complementary medicine, palliative care and hospice work and with various other areas of charitable assistance. In my first seminar, in 2005, in which I explored the question of the relation between Buddhism and film with students of Comparative Literature and Theatre, Film and Media Studies, it became very clear to me that documentary, advertising and dramatic films reflect this breadth of reception and that film stands in a complex reciprocal relation to Buddhism: both devise images of the world which they project onto the world, and through these images they exert an influence on each other. One goal of the seminars on the reception of Buddhism which I taught in the following years was to explore the complexity of this reciprocal influence. In them we worked above all with films that were well known internationally, such as have been produced in growing numbers since the 1990s. It is clear from their varied reception and high-profile media presence that the rise and boom in Buddhist-themed films of the past 25 years has been just as determined by the general increase in interest in Buddhism as vice versa; and that Buddhism’s broad appeal is linked to film’s broad appeal, to the extent that the former has an influence on how film deals with Buddhism while the latter contributes to the social dynamism of Buddhism’s reception and increases familiarity with it. Film’s role as a mass medium makes it a channel through which Buddhist ideas, points of view and attitudes, drawn from various traditions and interpretations, enter modern culture. At the same time, film’s images have an influence on Buddhism itself. This reciprocal relationship is especially evident in popular culture, especially Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 that of Western culture, but also of the emerging global mainstream of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Film has played a key part in the fact that Buddhist figures (both real and fictional), values and behaviour patterns, cliche´s and stereotypes, but also the exploration of visual spaces of perception and experience drawn from Buddhist traditions, have advanced to become permanent features of this popular culture, features which are themselves regularly cited by Buddhists. The film industry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has paid special attention to Zen and, above all, Tibetan Buddhism. Evidence of this from the area of drama films is given by two pictures about fabled founders of Buddhist schools: Neten Chokling’s Bhutanese film Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint (2006) and Zen (2009), a film about Do¯gen Zenji, directed by Banmei BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 7

Takahashi. Chokling, who is himself regarded as a reincarnation, first came into contact with the film business through Bernardo Bertolucci’s drama Little Buddha (1993) and acted in Khyentse Rinpoche’s films The Cup (1999) and Travellers and Magicians (2003) (see below). With the fantasy epic Milarepa he himself tried out directing (his country has practically no film tradition—Chokling’s debut is only the third dramatic film production in the Himalayan state). The film’s subject is the life of Tibet’s eleventh-century yogi and poet, whose magical prowess was legendary. The eponymous Milarepa is regarded as a pupil of Marpa and the founder of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. The film shows how he developed from a destructive dark magician into a peaceful representative of Buddhist wisdom, who learned to be guided not by anger and disappointment but by sympathy and forgiveness. Banmei Takahashi’s Zen is a biography of the thirteenth-century monk Do¯gen, who founded the So¯to¯ school of Zen in Japan after travelling to China. Presented as a drama, the film recounts how Do¯gen on his journeys with the teacher Juching learns the ways of Zen Buddhism, until finally, after some years, he achieves enlightenment and returns to Japan with his experiences. It is at first hard for him to establish his new and uniquely true doctrine of Buddhism in Japan, but his patience and wisdom and the help of the aristocrat Yoshishige Hatano result in him ultimately being able to build his Buddhist temple of eternal peace (Eihei-ji) in Echizen, from where his influence radiates. Both forms of Buddhism, both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, have undergone continuous growth in the West in recent decades and have a large number of followers. The post-war ‘Zen boom’ of the 1950s and 1960s, which was to a substantial degree shaped by the unorthodox Zen interpretation of the Japanese scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki (‘Suzuki Zen’) were followed by years of growing interest in Tibetan Buddhism, prompted by the so-called Sino-Tibetan conflict and international visits by senior Tibetan dignitaries. The presence of Tibetan Buddhism as a theme of film, which was prompted by this growth in interest, had a substantial effect on the formation of cultural awareness of Buddhism beyond a purely Buddhist audience and also gave it an economic significance, because the production of professional films generally Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 involves substantial technical effort and financial expenditure. This double role is made immediately obvious in films by internationally renowned filmmakers with a high-profile cast, which have a major media presence—especially the Western mainstream films about Tibet and the public figure of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, who has been a focus of worldwide attention since his foundation of the Tibetan Government in Exile in 1959 and who has over the years been stylized as one of the highest authorities, alongside the Pope, in moral and religious questions. Award-winning dramatic films by famous directors have responded to the process through which this focus has formed, while at the same time contributing to it. They include Bertolucci’s 1993 film Little Buddha (mentioned above) with Keanu Reeves in the role of Prince Siddhartha. It interweaves the story of the historical Buddha with the tale of how a group of 8 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

monks searches for the reincarnation of a lama and finds an American boy, Jesse, as the manifestation of his mind and two other, Nepalese children, Raju and Gita, as separate manifestations of his body (Raju) and his speech (Gita). Bertolucci’s drama is a typical example of a film with transnational intentions, which draws out aspects of cultural transfer and the confrontation, parallelism and engagement between cultures. It prompted a wave of Tibet films. These included Martin Scorsese’s epic biographical film Kundun (1997), which traces the flight of the 14th Dalai Lama to India, and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet (1997) starring Brad Pitt, which is based on Heinrich Harrer’s book of the same name about his residence in Tibet between 1944 and 1951. The film shows, among other things, how Harrer, in real life an Austrian mountaineer (and—glossed over in the film—a former Nazi Party member), is invited to an audience with the young 14th Dalai Lama, becomes friends with him and, at his request, informs him of everything that he knows about the world beyond Tibet. The political dimension of the film is evident, among other things, from the fact that it won the 1997 Political Film Society Award for Peace, awarded by the Political Film Society, headquartered in Hollywood, while Annaud was given a life- long ban from entering China for his film. Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet are both films that show the enormous impact of Hollywood on the Sino-Tibetan conflict, a topic that has recently been reflected in an interdisciplinary study devoted specially to this issue, Hollywood’s Representations of the Sino-Tibetan Conflict (Daccache and Valeriano 2012). In contrast to these works, films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that take Zen Buddhism as their reference point have received far less global attention—not least because they have no political dimension like that of the films about the Sino-Tibetan conflict. However, they do include some internationally famous drama films which in other respects achieve what the Tibet films also do: they offer the chance to immerse oneself in a foreign world and they satisfy the need for entertainment. Often they do this, like many films with a reference to Buddhism, by telling of human life as a journey and of the difficulty of finding a place in the world, thus varying a basic anthropological theme. They offer representations of stages in the journey of life and so of self-realisation, the Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 search for experience and the process of maturing. Life appears as a spiritual journey, during which the protagonists experience an individual transformation process in which the viewer can participate. The motif of the spiritual journey enjoys great popularity in and around the field of Buddhism, because, among other things, Buddhism’s foundational narrative is Siddhartha Gautama’s journey to ‘enlightenment’. In addition—and this too has an appeal to the public that transcends individual cultures—the narrated events are often played out between worldly life and the monastic life. This sets up a tension, full of contrasts, which flourishes in the history of religion in general and in the history of Buddhism in particular. In the present day it is specially topical, because in Western countries lay people now play a key role in bearing traditions that were once monastic; this is especially true of Zen in its popularisation by figures like Suzuki, who himself has BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 9

been the subject of a documentary by the director Michael Goldberg, A ZEN LIFE— D.T. Suzuki (2006). In the German-speaking world, a prominent example of the combination of these two themes—human life as a journey and the contrast between monastery and the world in dramatic films referring to Zen Buddhism—is the road movie Enlightenment Guaranteed (1999; original title Erleuchtung garantiert) by the director Doris Do¨rrie. It tells the story of two estranged brothers, Uwe and Gustav, who, both suffering a mid-life crisis, fly from Germany to Japan. They plan to visit the So¯ji-ji Monastery in Monzen, near Tokyo, but lose the way and all of their belongings. Finally they reach the monastery, where they each in their own way find themselves. Two other internationally famous and award-winning examples are from South Korea. One of these is Bae Yong-kyun’s film Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East (1989; original title Dalmaga dongjogeuro gan kkadalgeun) which is largely about two Zen koans: ‘What is my original face before my mother and father were conceived?’ and ‘(In death) where does the master of my being go?’ The film follows the lives of three Buddhist monks, who live in a remote monastery in the mountains surrounded by forest: an orphan boy, an elderly master and a young novice who has left the city to embark on the path to enlightenment and in the course of the film returns to the city. Another example from South Korea is Kim Ki-duk’s independent film Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring (2004; original title Bom, Yeorum, Gaeul, Gyeowool ... Geurigo Bom) about a master- student relationship in a Buddhist monastery floating on a lake in a pristine forest. The master is a Korean Buddhist monk, his student is a novice who grows from being a child to a young man and is torn between the passions of life and the contemplative silence of the island monastery. In the summer of his life he follows his passion for a girl and leaves his master, as an adult he returns, embittered and driven by jealousy and hate. The winter of his life becomes a time of purification, in which age gives way to youth. In spring, finally, he himself is taken as master by an orphan who has been entrusted to him.

3. From The Light of Asia to the 1970s and beyond: Beginnings

Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 and continuations Film’s engagement with Buddhist themes, which underwent a boom at the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century, did not begin in the late twentieth century. And it is certainly not only dramatic film productions that have taken an interest in Buddhism, but also, to a significant degree, documentary film- making. These two aspects—first, the history of working out Buddhist themes in film and, second, the inter-relation of Buddhism and film in documentary films too—were addressed from 2010 onwards in a number of meetings of the above- mentioned study group ‘Cultural Transformations of Buddhism’ founded at Freie Universita¨t Berlin. The group arose out of the seminar ‘Buddhist Reception in Philosophy, Literature and Film’ (summer semester 2009, Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion, Freie Universita¨t Berlin) and focuses on analysing adaptation, 10 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

transformation and innovative processes in different forms of Buddhism in the past and present. The study of films up to the end of the 1970s was a first focus of the group’s work. The first examples of the introduction of Buddhist content into film are from the period before talking pictures revolutionised the cinema at the end of the 1920s. They include the silent movie Lord Buddha (1923; original title Buddhadev) by the Indian filmmaker Dadasaheb Phalke (sadly lost) and the drama film mentioned at the start of section 1 above, The Light of Asia (1925; original title Die Leuchte Asiens/ Prem Sanyas), released in the USA in 1928. This was a German- Indian co-production by Franz Osten and Himansu Rai, which, on the basis of the book of the same name by Sir Edwin Arnold, told the life of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. It is not by chance that the film adaptation was a success, especially in the West. Arnold’s orientalist epic, which was published by the Theosophical Society in 1879 with the subtitle Or, The Great Renunciation; Being the Life and Teaching of Gautama, was one of the first successful attempts to popularise Buddhism for a Western readership. It went through 61 editions in England, as well as eight editions in America, with almost a million sales, and it was translated into many languages. The fact that the story of Buddha is told in a way that appealed to Victorian taste smoothed the way for the reception of Buddhism in the English-speaking world and brought to the attention of subsequent artists and producers around the world, including in the film industry, the fact that adapting Buddhist themes to contemporary public taste would significantly improve sales prospects. The life of Siddhartha Gautama was successfully told again after the Second World War, usually linked to core notions that are shared by all Buddhist schools, such as the four noble truths, the three jewels and the doctrines of karma and samsara. The transition from silent to talking films made possible a previously unknown multidimensionality in the adaptation of Buddhist themes, plots and motifs: Buddhist figures acquired vocal-physical presence as in the theatre and acted to musical accompaniment as in the opera. In this, directors and filmmakers took account of sociocultural developments and of the aesthetics of film to the extent that their works were often at the time nominated for prizes. In India in the Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 mid-1950s Gotama the Buddha (1957), directed by Rajban Khanna, was made; it is a documentary full of views of natural environments, archaeological sites, reliefs and paintings, accompanied by a voiceover relating the story of the Buddha, alternating with the sound of short fragments of Indian music. It was released by the government of India in 1957 as part of the celebrations of the 2500th anniversary of the Buddha’s birth and received the National Film Award for Best Non-Feature Film in the form of President’s Gold Medal for the Best Documentary (made in the country in 1956). In East Asia, too, the life story of the Buddha was taken up. In Japan at the start of the 1950s there appeared Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Dedication of the Great Buddha (1952; original title Daibutsu kaigen). This feature film was not reckoned among its director’s great successes, but it was nonetheless nominated at the Cannes Film Festival of 1953. Another approach to this subject BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 11

that won a wide reception was Kenji Misumi’s drama film Buddha (1961; original title Shaka) screened in panorama format and released in the United States as a shorter version in 1963 and again, cut slightly further, in 1967. In Korea, too, a drama film on the Buddha was produced under the direction of Il-ho Jang. It was released under the title Seokgamoni (1964), the Korean translation of the Sanskrit S´a¯kyamuni. A number of biographical treatments followed, which have increased in quantity since the turn of the twentieth to twenty-first century. These include, to mention only three—very different—recent examples: The Legend of Buddha (2004), an Indian animated film directed by Shamboo Falke; the Thai docu- narrative film The Life of Buddha or simply The Buddha (2007; original title Prawat Phra Phuttajao), also an animated feature film, directed by Kritsaman Wattananarong; and the anime film Tezuka Osamu no Buddha—Akai Sabaku yo! Utsukushiku (2011), an adaptation of the manga Buddha (1972–1983) by Osamu Tezuka which has been translated into many languages, adapted to film by the director Kozo Morishita (a second film is planned to be released in 2014). Documentary films in the West, too, have repeatedly treated the life of the historical Buddha. The documentary is now firmly established in the film distribution lists, even though films in this genre are generally addressed to a limited target group. Among the better known examples, because they were produced for and broadcast by major broadcasters, are: from the series Die großen Erlo¨ser (The Great Saviours), the documentary Buddha—Der Weg zur Erleuch- tung (1998), a TV production of the German television broadcaster ZDF, directed by Bernd Liebner and Elke Schmitz; Martin Meissonnier’s Arte France TV documentary Life of Buddha (original title La vie de Bouddha)(2001); and The Buddha (2010), a documentary for the American broadcast television network PBS by award-winning filmmaker David Grubin and narrated by Richard Gere. As well as films of this kind, which are primarily about the founder of the religion himself, in recent decades there has also been a growing number of documentary films whose subject is Buddhist figures of the three main traditions and particular practices. As in the case of the dramatic film, it is thanks to the celebrity of the 14th Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 Dalai Lama that a large number of documentaries about Tibetan Buddhism have been produced. In the mid-1960s Arnaud Desjardins made his film The Message of the Tibetans (1966; original title Le Message des Tibe´tains), which appeared in two parts—Buddhism (First part) (original title Le Bouddhisme) and Tantrism (Second part) (original title Le Tantrisme). This two-part documentary, like, in the following years, Richard Kohn’s Destroyer of Illusion—Lord of the Dance (1986) and The Saltmen of Tibet (1997; original title Die Salzma¨nner von Tibet), documents practices and rites, and the 14th Dalai Lama and other teachers of Tibetan Buddhism and Tantra speak in the film. From the abundance of other examples we may pick out Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy (1979) by Graham Coleman. It was followed in the German-speaking world by the high-profile ‘Buddhist Trilogy’ The Old Ladakh—Tibet—Living Buddha by the German documentary filmmaker and author 12 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

Clemens Kuby (original title Das alte Ladakh, 1986; Tibet—Widerstand des Geistes, 1988; Living Buddha, 1994) and Werner Herzog’s observation of the Kalachakra initiation in Wheel of Time (2003; original title Rad der Zeit), which shows sections of the conduct of the ritual both in Bodh Gaya and in the Austrian city of Graz, with the 14th Dalai Lama presiding. In the USA there appeared The Yogis of Tibet (2002), a film by Jeffrey M. Pill, which also features the Dalai Lama and others. The documentary follows the lives and traditional practices of so-called yogis in Tibet, who have spent their lives in rigorous training in order to gain the ability to exert control over their bodies and minds. The film makes the claim, expressed in a ca. minute-long opening sequence with superimposed text, that it is contributing ‘to help preserve for posterity their vanishing culture’. Like the Dalai Lama, other heads of schools and lineages of Tibetan Buddhism have received portraits in film. From the large number of films that have been produced, we can only mention a few select works—as must be done throughout this introduction—such as Mark Elliott’s depiction of the life and death of Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa of the Karma Kagyu lineage in The Lion’s Roar (1985). After that, a series of other portraits of Tibetan masters were produced. One of the better known is Neten Chokling’s film Brilliant Moon (2010), a portrait of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, from 1987 to 1991 supreme head of the Nyingma school, whose life is narrated in the film by, among others, Richard Gere and Lou Reed, themselves idols of popular culture. An interface with dramatic film has been formed by Khyentse Norbu, who, recognised under the title Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche as the main incarnation of the Tibetan Khyentse lineage, was given a biographical portrait in film and is himself active as a film director. His biographical portrait is given by Lesley Ann Patten in Words of My Perfect Teacher (2003), a film that, with an allusion to the famous book of the same title by Patrul Rinpoche, addresses the challenges of the teacher-student relationship in Tibetan Buddhism. At the time when Patten made her documentary, Norbu had already not only served as an adviser to the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci in his Italian-French- British dramatic film Little Buddha, but had also made his own film debut with The Cup (1999; original title Pho¨rpa), the first Bhutanese dramatic film. Four Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 years later came Norbu’s Bhutanese Dzongkha-language film Travellers and Magicians (2003;originaltitleChang hup the gi tril nung) which weaves parallel, fable-like tales about two men who seek to escape their mundane lives. Leading figures of Zen Buddhism and its practices have also repeatedly been the subject of documentaries. As is the case with Tibetan Buddhism, the goal of many of these films is to communicate and promote certain notions and doctrines in an appealing way, often through portraits of teachers. An early example of a documentary on Zen is the film Zen (1971) by Arnaud Desjardins, which he released in two parts, on the pattern of his Tibet documentary: Zen: Ici et Maintenant (first part) and Zen: Partout et Toujours (second part). Since then there have been many shorter and longer documentaries. An example of the varieties of BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 13

Zen popularised in the West is How to Cook Your Life (2007), a documentary by the German director Doris Do¨rrie about the American Zen teacher Edward Espe Brown, who shows in his cooking courses how, in his view, Buddha can be discovered in simple kitchen tasks like washing rice or kneading dough and to this end passes on wise sayings which, it is claimed, have their roots in the tradition of the Zen master Do¯gen. One of the documentaries that have caught the most attention among those filmed recently in Asia is Amongst White Clouds (2005), a visit by American director Edward A. Burger to Chinese Buddhist hermits in the Zhongnan Mountains. The documentary has drawn special interest because until now Japan has been the focus of Western interest in Zen (Chinese: Ch’an), but it is gradually becoming known that, after the events of the Cultural Revolution, there has now been a meditation revival also in China. Since the 1980s monasteries and temples have increasingly been rebuilt and Buddhism is again being disseminated among the people. Burger is currently working on a planned 25- film series of short documentaries on Buddhism in China, entitled ‘Dreaming Buddhas Project’, including Alms (2012), a documentary about the role of food in Ch’an monastic life, and Vows (2013), which tells the story of monastic discipline in Chinese Buddhism. It is yet to be seen how the films will be received, or whether they will, for example, lead in the West to a run on Chinese ‘Ch’an masters’ and meditation retreats in China and what role the Sino-Tibetan conflict will play in this. Next to the Dalai Lama, a particularly high-profile contemporary master of Buddhist teaching is the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, author and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who represents an ‘engaged Buddhism’ and holds retreats and lectures around the world. Like the Dalai Lama, he too became known for political reasons, namely for the fact that in the 1960s he spoke out for peace in Vietnam and for help for the ‘Boat People’ and in 1973 had to go into exile in France. A whole series of documentaries about his activity and teaching are currently available. Examples are the two films Peace Is Every Step: Meditation in Action (1998)byGaetanoKazuoMaida,a documentation of, according to the film’s subtitle, The Life and Work of Thich Nhat Hanh, narrated by Sir Ben Kingsley, and Steps of Mindfulness: A Journey with Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 Thich Nhat Hanh (1998; original title Schritte der Achtsamkeit. Eine Reise mit Thich Nhat Hanh) by Thomas Lu¨ chinger. In the latter, this Swiss documentary-maker accompanies Thich Nhat Hanh and a group of young monks and nuns on a pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya, the place of origin of Buddhism in India. Throughout the film there are messages of peace inviting the viewer to join a spiritual journey in meditation. As these and other films with and about this Vietnamese monk show paradigmatically, the focus of many films about Buddhism, alongside famous teachers, is especially the practice of meditation. The reason for this is that, through Asian reform movements, particularly those that call for a return to zazen or Vipassana meditation, a rhetoric and ideology of experience and enlightenment has formed, and in the West Buddhism is today widely understood as a religion of 14 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

meditation (Sharf 1995). Since the end of the nineteenth century meditation techniques have been rediscovered in Asia after the West developed an interest in it. It has become a commonplace to talk of the ‘experience’ of ‘enlightenment’ through Buddhist meditation, as was supposedly at the centre of Buddhist monastic practice since time immemorial but which is said to be accessible also to lay people who practice the appropriate exercises. A decisive role in the dissemination of the meditation topos was played by famous Buddhists like the Japanese lay Buddhist Suzuki, mentioned above, whose publications have decisively shaped both the image of Zen in the West and the cliche´ of Buddhism as meditative and based on and aiming for experiences. It was, above all, members of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and 1960s like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, who among other things were protesting against Christian bourgeois attitudes and American consumerism and who yearned for a Zen experience that could be transformed into a new aesthetic, who got something out of ‘Suzuki Zen’, which aimed for direct experience of an expanded consciousness. An especially important role was played by Alan Watts, who lectured extensively on the philosophy and psychology of religion and of Zen Buddhism in particular, leaving and inspiring a vast range of books, audio and video works. The cliche´s promoted in those years find their echo in present-day popular culture inter alia in the fact that the historical Buddha has become a global icon in meditation position, which stands for the pursuit of tranquillity, rejection of materialism and the search for inner peace, and that meditation is regarded as the main practice in Buddhism. The complex doctrinal systems from which Buddhist meditation techniques have been detached in the course of the Western popularisation of meditation, and practices like the cult of ancestors and relics, prayer, asceticism and pilgrimage, which are far more common among Buddhists, tend to be almost entirely obscured. This development has contributed to the fact that even in Asia, and above all in Japan, from where Suzuki disseminated his Zen, as a consequence of the influence exerted by the Western popularisation, some temples and centres specially set up for the purpose (above all in large cities like Tokyo and Kyoto) offer meditation seminars in which zazen is practised, though this is not one of the practices conducted in most Japanese Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 temples. The Zen Mind (2006) by Jon Braeley documents this development and attests to the widespread belief that the true, the original, the ancient Zen can be explored in contemporary Japan. The influence of Western developments back on Asia itself is not mentioned once in the film. As hinted in the subtitle A Zen Journey across Japan, the viewers are taken to places in which Zen is practised, to newly founded retreat centres, which are frequented above all by Japanese laypersons and foreign visitors, and to temples and monasteries of Japan that appear to be venerable guardians of ancient tradition. In this way the viewer is to learn, through interviews and demonstrations, about the daily lives of practitioners and the ways in which zazen (sitting meditation) and kinhin (walking meditation) are practised. A similar attempt is made for North America by Adam Ko¯ Shin Tebbe with his BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 15

documentary Zen in America, which is currently in progress (http://zeninamerica. com, accessed December 1, 2013). Through accounts and insights from teachers, practitioners and scholars of Zen today the film aims to examine the history and practices of Zen in North America. This documentary, too, is pursuing educational goals, in that it offers an introduction to practices and institutions. The aim is to show how Zen Buddhism is being expressed in modern culture. It remains to be seen whether the film will perpetuate dominant popular myths or deconstruct traditional narratives and reveal the transformations and inventions in the history of Zen in America, which have repeatedly been pointed out in research (Sharf 1995; McMahan 2002). Another form of meditation that has been taken up by the genre of documentary is the Vipassana method, which, after the samatha method, is considered to be one of the oldest forms of bha¯vana¯ (‘development’, ‘cultivating’, ‘producing’ in the sense of ‘calling into existence’), which is mentioned in early Pali texts and is traced back to a commentary on the discourses of the historical Buddha transmitted in the Pali canon. It is designed to lead to the development of insight (Pali vipassana¯) into the Three Characteristics of All Existence— impermanence (anicca), suffering or insufficiency (dukkha)andnon-self (anatta¯)—and so to help overcome suffering (dukkha) or to achieve in life the release of nirvana. The method has become well known since the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Burma and Thailand and the Burmese practice has been popularised since the 1970s by the Indian Satya Narayan Goenka in Asia, Europe and the USA. It was at first marginalised by the popularity that Zen developed in the 1950s and 1960s, but since then it has become much better known and more popular. One reason for this is that in the modern Vipassana movement the practice has been linked with psychology, medicine and areas of charitable assistance, for example programmes in penal institutions. In the mid-1970s a Vipassana meditation programme was offered for the first time in a number of Indian prisons, which is today conducted also in the USA and many other countries. It is the subject of the film Doing Time, Doing Vipassana (1997) by the two Israeli film-makers Eilona Ariel and Ayelet Menahemi, which won a number of awards. The film is about employing Vipassana as a rehabilitation method and its Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 impact on foreign and Indian prisoners. Interviews with prison officers and inmates show how the practice led to an improvement in the conditions and atmosphere within Tihar gaol west of New Delhi in India. Taking their cue from this Israeli independent documentary film project are two documentaries about the introduction of Vipassana meditation in US prisons. Changing from Inside (USA 1998) tells the story of the introduction of Vipassana courses into the North Rehabilitation Facility (N.R.F.) of the King County jail in Seattle, Washington. The Dhamma Brothers (USA 2007)documentsaprison meditation programme at Donaldson Correctional Facility near Bessemer, Alabama. Like Doing Time, Doing Vipassana both films use the example of the prisoners to describe what Vipassana is and what its effects can be for an individual. 16 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

4. The workshop ‘Buddhism and Film’ in 2011: Potentials and desiderata The fact that many of the films mentioned above, both documentaries and dramas, are marked by stereotypes and misunderstandings about Buddhism led at the end of 2010 to the plan by the international study group to conduct a workshop on Buddhism and film. Work on the topic in the previous years had shown that the growing global prominence of Buddhism, as has been reflected for some decades now in cinema and television, was accompanied by the reproduction of cliche´s and stereotypes. These maintain that Buddhism is not concerned with belief but with ‘experience’ and discovery; that Buddhism stands for non-violence and peaceableness; and that its practise, which is transmitted by famous authorities, consists primarily in silent meditation (Freiberger and Kleine 2011, 461–482). Exceptions which run counter to these notions are rare. One such is Luc Schaedler’s low-budget documentary Angry Monk (2006), a film about the life story of the Tibetan monk Gendun Choephel, who in 1934 turned away from the monastic life and set out into modernity. Schaedler, whose own engagement with the reception of Buddhism in film has been extensive (Schaedler 2002), attempts with his road movie to debunk myths of pre-China Tibet as a Shangri-La of contemplation, spiritual growth and enlightenment, as is suggested by film titles like Spirit of Tibet: Journey to Enlightenment (1998) of the French Buddhist monk Mathieu Ricard. Angry Monk instead reveals a culture that is marked by the same contradictions, cruelties and power struggles that make up any other society. Schaedler’s film, in which Buddhism is for once shown from a quite different side, points to potentials and desiderata in research on Buddhism and film. More and more movies are being released that perpetuate the misunderstandings mentioned above about Buddhism and which in no way contribute to a more precise understanding of this pluralistic religion. In general, a consequence of these stereotyped representations is that standardised images and preconceived ideas and notions of Buddhism are neither challenged nor reflected upon. Instead they are consistently reproduced. Particularly in films made by people from the

Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 Western world, Buddhism is used as a screen onto which can be projected Western criticism of its own culture, or alternative conceptions of religion and spirituality, or suppressed dreams, hopes and desires. Buddhist teachings and bodies of knowledge are here made subject to the rules of entertainment and are usually presented in a way designed to appeal to the public, with the goal of reaching the widest possible target groups. Sometimes it is the communication of Buddhist history, doctrines and practices that is foregrounded, sometimes it is variety and distraction, enjoyment and fun. Beginning from this observation, the objective of the international workshop in Berlin was to explore the cultural self-conceptions and self- understandings as well as the aesthetic and hermeneutic patterns upon which movies with Buddhist themes are based. A further aim was to reveal tensions BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 17

between Eastern traditions on the one hand and Western modernism and postmodernism on the other (‘Colonising the Other’): between the interior and the exterior view of Buddhism; between self-perception and perception through others; and between fiction and reality. To this end, we included information about the producers, directors and actors and analysed distinct genres with regard to their differences and similarities in the way they represent Buddhist matters. Additional attention was focused on select examples of how symbolic values of Buddhism and the pictorial language of cinema are related, and how religious and political resources as well as financial and material forces and currents relate to each other during the production and reception of the movies. In the papers and subsequent discussion the following three complexes of questions were discussed in particular, which had been formulated as desiderata for research in two calls for papers for the workshop:

. Which standardised images of Buddhism were re-shaped in movies with Buddhist themes in recent decades? Upon which historical developments and cultural parameters and discourses are these images based? . In what ways do Buddhist art and Asian movies provide models of imagery for Western film productions? How do Asian and Western understandings of Buddhism fuse with each other in cinematic depictions? And what cultural mistranslations of Asian beliefs into dominant Western terms and notions can be diagnosed? Which Buddhisms appear in film? . What kind of cultural self-perceptions are produced or selected in films on Buddhisms? Are these self-perceptions related to specific genres? Which cinematic techniques (perspective and motion of the camera, takes, montage, colour, music, sound, etc.) and codes (symbols, language, gesture, mimicry, etc.) are used? During the workshop, it was mostly films made by Western filmmakers that were discussed, so during the closing round table discussion Asian films became a focus. Much discussion was given to the thesis of Luc Schaedler, viz. that Asian films are often a medium for self-reflection by the people and cultures in which Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 they are made (or at least those that are represented); and that one of a number of recurring motifs in this self-reflection is the tension (mentioned above in section 2) between the poles of the monastery and the world (Schaedler 2002). This is a tension between monastic and lay Buddhism, between asceticism and worldly existence, life in an order and everyday life in society, around which, for example, Pan Nalin’s international co-production Samsara (2002) insistently circles. It is also, for example, the subject of the film that became the highest-grossing foreign- language film in American history: Ang Lee’s wuxia blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000; original title Wo hu Cang long), which was unmistakably influenced by the Taiwanese wuxia drama film A Touch of Zen (1971; original title Hsia nu) by the director King Hu, which won an award at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. 18 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

The contrast between the monastery and the world in Asian films lit up discussion at the round table through the example of the comedy film mentioned a number of times above, The Cup (1999), which was the subject of one of the papers given at the workshop. The film addresses the tension between religious tradition and cultural roots on the one hand and the achievements and demands of modern society on the other in a playful way. It is based on a true story that takes place in the summer of 1998 in a Buddhist monastery in northern India at the time when in France the 1998 football World Cup was taking place. It narrates how Tibetan monks bring disorder to the monastery because they absolutely insist on seeing the final of the World Cup. We are thus given a picture of the world of the Buddhist monastery in the Tibetan exile far from all myths of enlightenment and, in part, in very profane and hence amusing images. The monks do not appear as spiritualised beings but as absolutely normal people. Examples of the expression of this tension between monastery and worldly life, and the questions about identity that go with it, are found throughout the whole history of film, and the films in question have often won multiple awards. A famous Japanese example, which gives voice to the horrors of the Second World War, was cited in the discussion at the round table: Kon Ichikawa’s anti-war film The Burmese Harp (1956; original title Biruma no tategoto, i.e., Harp of Burma). It was nominated for an Oscar in 1957 in the category of Best Foreign Language Film and in the same year won the Mainichi Film Award for Best Film Score, and the San Giorgio Prize of the Venice Film Festival, awarded to artistic works considered especially important for the progress of civilisation. The black-and-white film based on the novel of the same name by Takeyama Michio tells the story of a Japanese company of soldiers at the end of the Second World War in Burma, a member of which, Mizushima, is shot and wounded. Mizushima survives his serious injuries because a Burmese monk takes him in and nurses him back to health. When he has recovered, he steals the monk’s robe and aims to go back to his military company, but on the way, as the local Burmese people provide for him in his monk’s robe, he undergoes a spiritual transformation. On his journey he repeatedly sees the unburied bodies of Japanese soldiers. Appropriating the Buddhist ethos, Mizushima decides not to return to his company and to Japan, but instead to Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 lay to rest the bodies of the fallen soldiers. One of the best known Indian dramatic films that traces the tension between tradition and heritage on the one side and modernity and social change on the other is Satyajit Ray’s film Pratidwandi (1970; Bengali: pratidbandbı¯; in translation The Adversary) of 1970, which in that year was awarded the National Film Award for Second Best Feature Film. It was based on the novel Pratidwandi by Sunil Gangopadhyay and is the first film in Ray’s Kolkata trilogy, which revolves around the theme of well-educated youths in the city of Kolkata (it was followed by Seemabaddha, 1971, and Jana Aranya, 1975). The protagonist is the young Siddhartha, who breaks off his studies in medicine on account of the unexpected death of his father and instead, like the historical Siddhartha Gautama, sets off on the search for work and the meaning of life. This protagonist is the radical BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 19

opposite of the Siddhartha who is put on screen in Conrad Rooks’ US film Siddhartha (1972), based on the story Siddhartha (1922) written by Hermann Hesse with an orientalist outlook. In Rooks’ film Siddhartha instructs his childhood friend Govinda at the end about the true nature of things: whoever is constantly searching is simply obsessed with his supposed goal and neglects his life in the present. An example from South Korea is the film Come Come Come Upward (1989; original title Aje Aje Bara Aje) directed by Im Kwon-taek, which won a number of awards. The film examines the differing lives of two young women, one in a Buddhist temple following the traditional ascetic path, while the other opens herself to life. Through the life story of the latter woman, the film develops a description of South Korean society at a time of cultural and political change. It shows how the 16-year-old Soon Nyo, after living with her unhappy mother and being unjustly expelled from school, enters a monastery but soon comes into conflict with the community. While she is devoting herself to religious exercises in the monastery, an unstable young man catches her attention and because she takes him in she is expelled from the monastic community. She now begins a worldly life again, but she has a harsh fate. Years later, now twice widowed, she returns to the monastery and learns from her understanding abbess the path to a life that is ascetic but turned towards the world.

5. The articles in this special issue This focus that ultimately arose out of the discussion showed that it would be highly desirable to include in a publication of the results of the workshop not only discussions of Western films but also contributions on films made by Asian directors. It also seemed a very good idea to give a platform to filmmakers themselves. The result was a selection of papers on recent developments in the sphere of links between Buddhism and film, which take account of processes of adaptation, transformation and innovation at both specific local and transcultural and transnational levels. The special issue investigates films from Western cinema, many of which continue the long history of romanticising the Orient, decontextualising Asian religious practices, and of the dominance of discourses Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 of the modern self, but also films from Asian cultures that address the roots of these cultures and questions of finding or stabilising identities. In addition the transnationality of film is studied, as well as the effects this has in turn had on Buddhism across regional and national, ethnic and cultural borders. The first paper in the special issue, ‘Space Buddhism: The Adoption of Buddhist Motifs in Star Wars’ by Christian Feichtinger is in the area of Buddhist- inspired cinema of the West. The article begins with a short account of the extraordinary success of the American epic space-opera franchise Star Wars, which is centred on the film series created by George Lucas. Citing its different forms of reception, including books, television series, computer and video games and comic books, Feichtinger establishes that the films amount to a real social phenomenon. One of the extraordinary characteristics of these films is, so 20 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

Feichtinger claims, that not only are all the episodes linked to each other, but through certain symbols reference is repeatedly made to other films, books, comics or TV series; this applies also to the mythical aspect of Star Wars, which has received much attention. Thus the mythic accounts in the films are based on books about mythology rather than actual research on myth by the director George Lucas. Feichtinger identifies this approach not least in relation to the use of Buddhist symbols and content in the films: Buddhist elements play a role here, but they are not specifically identified as Buddhist. Instead these symbols are used to create a ‘mystical’ atmosphere. By considering some examples, Feichtinger traces the Buddhist symbolism in the films (e.g., Zen meditation for the swordfights, Yoda as a Zen master). In his analysis of the Star Wars films, Feichtinger points out the appearance in the films of the five basic aspects of Buddhism: mindfulness, sympathy, the mutual interdependence of all things, letting go and illusions of the senses. Nonetheless, he does not see Star Wars as a ‘Buddhist film’: on the contrary the viewer encounters here a kind of ‘patchwork spirituality’, with the help of which Lucas creates a mythical alternative world. This conclusion is followed by the question ‘What is a “Buddhist Film”?’ by John Whalen-Bridge, who takes the year 1989 as the demarcation line for the start of the boom in films referring to Buddhist themes, that being the year in which the 14th Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize. In his reflections Whalen-Bridge pursues the question of which aspects make a film a ‘Buddhist film’. He first explains that on this issue there is no consensus opinion. One reason is, in his view, the difficult fact that most films that make Buddhism their theme are produced primarily for a Western public and so an attempt must be made to strike a balance between the exoticism of Buddhism and the fact that only a very small proportion of the Western population are actually Buddhists. As a starting point for his query Whalen-Bridge invokes the Buddhist Film Foundation (BFF), which jointly organises annual Buddhist film festivals in a number of countries. However, here too, he concludes, there are no unambiguous criteria for a Buddhist film. The problem, as he sees it, is that in many cases Buddhist themes are interpreted into films even though there was no such intention on the part of the film’s producers (so-called ‘draftees’). To illuminate the category of ‘Buddhist film’ better, Whalen- Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 Bridge draws on Aristotle and George Orwell and with their help looks for formal criteria that could be found in a film’s own representation, the material’s potential message and the film’s purpose. In a further step he uses statistics to analyse the manner of the depiction or the genre used by so-called Buddhist films. He comes to the conclusion that the documentary film is predominant here and his explanation for this is, inter alia, the fact that documentaries appeal best to the niche of Buddhists and ‘nightstand Buddhists’, but also that relations between Hollywood and China could play a role. Elisabetta Porcu, in her paper ‘Staging Zen Buddhism: Image Creation in Contemporary Films’, investigates the representation of Zen Buddhism in four contemporary films: Zen Noir (2004), a surrealist Buddhist murder mystery by independent filmmaker Marc Rosenbush from the USA; the documentary Zen & BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 21

Zero (2006) by the Austrian director Michael Gintho¨; the comedy-drama film Enlightenment Guaranteed (1999; original title Erleuchtung garantiert) by the German director Doris Do¨rrie and the biographical film drama Zen (2009) by the Japanese director Takahashi Banmei. The first three of these are cinematic representations from a ‘Western’ point of view, whereas the film Zen is a Japanese production. The main thesis of the paper is that in the Western films a picture of Zen Buddhism is given which is detached from its political, social and historical context and which follows a rather stereotyped outlook. Porcu treats each film in a separate section with, in the end, the following result: the three Western productions all exclusively show a form of Zen that is primarily a philosophy of life, an inner development and a chance to express different ways of living, whereas the Japanese production presents a historical narrative in which the life of a Zen master is presented. In all the productions Porcu sees the focus as being on the importance of zazen (except in Zen & Zero) and on the relationship between master and student. However, she finally concludes that all the films depict Zen Buddhism above all as an inner experience, a search for enlightenment, and that they show very few other aspects of Zen Buddhism. She sees this as an example of the still typical Western view of Zen Buddhism as it was brought to the West by a small circle of people over a century ago with the goal of disseminating Buddhism, but was adapted to the local way of life there. From the abundance of films about Zen, Andreas Becker picks out one. In his paper ‘“When you wash the rice, wash the rice.” About the Cinematic Representation of Cooking and Zen in Doris Do¨ rrie’s How to Cook your life (2007)’ he describes how Do¨ rrie in this film puts the activity of cooking into an aesthetic relation with Buddhist Zen philosophy. The film is presented primarily as a documentary about the chef Edward Espe Brown, who had already published some Zen cookbooks. Becker briefly sketches Brown’s background and at the same time introduces the concept of So¯to¯ Zen, a tradition in which the culinary arts have an important place, before he discusses Do¨ rrie’s depiction on film. He sees the fact that the use of symbols plays a major role not only in Zen but also throughout Japanese culture as being a suitable precondition for treating the topic in film. Thus, for Becker, Do¨ rrie has managed to deploy the Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 symbolism already present in the material in a highly individual way. This gives the film an additional subtext. The division of the film into different chapters, each marked off by a gong, is, for Becker, a humorous way to deal with the material to be filmed. The presentation of evident contradictions, the conflation of different perspectives and the portrayal of the undogmatic attitude of Brown himself is ascribed by Becker to Do¨ rrie’s sense of humour. In this way of transferring the material to film, Do¨ rrie has succeeded, so Becker claims, in showing how imperfect everyday life is. Becker sees the whole production as not commercially oriented, which allowed Do¨rrie some cinematic license, such as the presentation of incomplete film scenes. The article ends with the conclusion that this film stresses general cultural (and other) assumptions in order to question them. 22 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

The contribution ‘The Transnational Buddhism of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring’ by Francisca Cho is based on the 2003 South Korean film namedinthetitle,bythedirectorKimKi-duk. Chodescribesthefilm—anexample of the thematic contrast between monastery and the world—as the product of a new transnational Buddhism, which has, so Cho claims, arisen especially through the influence of ‘Western Buddhism’. She sees Spring as communicating a canonical Buddhism that is not limited to a single country or period. Proceeding with her argument Cho analyses scene by scene the story of a novice who, after many failures, is finally purified and himself takes on the role of master supervising anovice—andsothefilmstartsagainatthe beginning. Special attention is given to the patterns that lie behind the film’s images, such as the figure, used in the title, of eternal return. Cho also offers interpretations of the symbols that accompany the action, such as the animals as metaphors for the stages of the boy’s development. In her conclusions Cho argues that we should understand films like Spring as an expression of the fact that Buddhism can no longer be regarded as segregated, but rather as a single dynamic system. To treat the various traditions, especially ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ Buddhism, as conceptually different no longer makes sense, given their transnational networks and overlaps. The topic of transnationality is pursued in a different way in Dan Smyer Yu’s ‘Mapping Tibetan Landscape with Buddhism: Pema Tseden’s Transnational Cinema in China’. With his ‘ethnographic narrative’ Smyer Yu tries to provide an interpretation of Buddhism as a central motif in the films of the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden (aka Wanma Caiden). Pema Tseden, a former student at the Beijing Film Academy, is regarded in the film industry as a promising new Asian talent and his works have already won awards at festivals including the Brooklyn Film Festival, the Shanghai International Film Festival and the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Smyer Yu sees Tseden’s creative location, Beijing, as a transnational location of the film industry of China and Tseden’s creative craftsmanship as a site in which Tibetan and non-Tibetan elements come together. The information about Tseden’s work is drawn by Smyer Yu, who in addition to his research writing is himself an active filmmaker, from his longstanding relationship with the director as colleague and friend. He sees in Tseden’s cinematic Buddhism a reflection of modern Tibetan life, in Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 which Buddhism is both a narrative medium and a moral authority. Tseden uses this Buddhism as a ‘haptic medium’, with which inner, cultural and physical landscapes can be drawn. Thus, as Smyer Yu shows, inner attitudes and social interactions are translated into visual language through wide-angle shots of the Tibetan landscape, which are dotted with symbolic elements like birds and prayer flags. Always foregrounded in this are tensions between the older and younger generations, which can be transferred onto Tibet’s position between tradition and modernity. Smyer Yu’s article skilfully shows the links between cinematic language and cultural subtexts. As Smyer Yu has integrated Tseden’s positions into his own interpretation through their discussions together, he has, so to speak, built a bridge between film production and the experience of movie-going. This bridging makes him similar to Lina Verchery, a young film-maker and doctoral student in BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 23

Buddhist Studies at Harvard University. Verchery has written and directed, among other films, The Trap (2008; original title La Trappe). The film was produced and distributed by the National Film Board of Canada and Te´le´vision Radio-Canada and won as Best French-Canadian Short Film at the 2008 Festival International du Cine´ma Francophone en Acadie (FICFA). La Trappe explores the delicate connections that exist between Buddhist monastics and Acadian lobster fishermen in the small fishing village of Che´ticamp, Cape Breton, who, despite differences of language, culture and religion, share a belief in life as a cycle. The documentary short (19º¯minutes) was shown and discussed at the workshop ‘Buddhism and Film’ in Berlin. In her essay ‘Ethics of Inscrutability: Ontologies of Emptiness in Buddhist Film’, Verchery allows us to look over her shoulder,so to speak, in her role as both filmmaker and scholar. She describes various cinematic means of representing states of emptiness—‘ontologies of emptiness’—and she relates these to Buddhist notions of emptiness. This setting into relation is preceded by methodological reflections in which she raises the issues of the danger of essentialising and reductionism both in the concept of Buddhism and in the medium of film with the content ‘Buddhism’. After showing, through examples of films, including explicitly Buddhist ones, how emptiness can be represented by emptiness, by abundance and by self-reference, she opens up the set of problems raised by film, reality and knowledge. If film is not able to depict reality, she asks, what knowledge can we then draw from a film? Taking Levinas’ and Long’s criticism of the claim of total knowledge in Western intellectual history, she sets out the thesis that the medium of film prompts us, through its polysemy, to rethinkthisclaim.Filmhas,sheargues,aclaimofrealitytotheextentthatitisable to communicate to us an ambiguity that corresponds to our equally ambiguous world of experience. Verchery demands in conclusion that we should be aware in interpretations of the limits of the knowable and should not understand topoi like silence and emptiness as negative shadow sides but as fundamental components of human existence. Like Verchery, Mark Patrick McGuire links his expertise in the field of Buddhism with knowledge of film theory in his paper ‘Trading a Notebook for a Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 Camera. Toward a Theory of Collaborative, Ethnopoetic Filmmaking’. McGuire’s article is a kind of self-ethnography. It is a self-reflexive revelation of his own prior knowledge, thoughts and emotions before, during and after the filming of the feature documentary, produced by him in 2009 together with Jean-Marc Abela, Shugendo¯ Now (2010). The film is an experiential journey into the practices of Japanese mountain asceticism. In Shugendo¯ (‘The Way of Acquiring Power’), practitioners perform ritual actions from shamanism, ‘Shinto¯ ’, Daoism and Tantric Buddhism, seeking the experiential truth of the teachings during arduous climbs in sacred mountains. McGuire gives a short introduction to the practices of Shugendo¯ , before starting to set out his ethnographic ideals. He describes Clifford Geertz’s interpretative approach of ‘inscribing a present’ as having shown the way for his work and he characterises himself as a ‘vulnerable 24 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

observer’, who is bodily and emotionally entangled in his field. The field itself is in turn influenced by his presence, and in film this is true in a special way. It is therefore necessary to make this influence clear, and with it the work’s nature as a constructed composition. All these reflections lead McGuire to his idea of a collaborative, ethnopoetic film production in which the roles of observer and observed are no longer separate.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank first of all the authors who have contributed to this volume, and its peer reviewers, then also the participants in the seminars at Goethe Universita¨t Frankfurt and Freie Universita¨t Berlin. I am very grateful to the Center for International Cooperation of Freie Universita¨t Berlin, which generously co- funded the Workshop, to the study group ‘Cultural Transformations of Buddhism’, which links scholars from Europe, Asia and the USA and formed the organisational framework for the Workshop at Freie Universita¨t Berlin, and to the Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum, in the context of which I was able to present and discuss, in the 2011--2012 lecture series, theses on the inter-relation of Buddhism and film. I am grateful also to Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, the Editors of Contemporary Buddhism. Dr Skilton contacted me after reading the announcement of the 2011 Workshop ‘Buddhism and Film’, took up my invitation to Berlin and after the Workshop encouraged a collaboration that has resulted in the present special issue of the journal.

REFERENCES

Baker, Geoff. 2006. “Portraying the Quest for Buddhist Wisdom?: A Comparative Study of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Journal of Religion and Film 10 (1). http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol10no1/BakerQuest.htm Bakker, Freek L. 2009. The Challenge of the Silver Screen: An Analysis of the Cinematic Portraits of Jesus, Rama, Buddha and Muhammad, 133–187. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 Campbell, Colin. 2007. The Easternization of the West. A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Cho, Francisca. 2009. “Buddhism.” In Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, edited by John Lyden, 162–177. London: Routledge. Daccache, Jenny George, and Brandon Valeriano. 2012. Hollywood’s Representations of the Sino-Tibetan Conflict: Politics, Culture, and Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Desmarais, Michele Marie. 2009. “Buddhism and Film.” In The Continuum Companion to Religion and Film, edited by William L. Blizek, 148–156. London and New York: Continuum. Dwyer, Rachel. 2006. Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 25

Flannery-Dailey, Frances, and Rachel Wagner. 2001. “Wake up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix.” Journal of Religion and Film 5 (2). http://www.unomaha. edu/jrf/gnostic.htm Ford, James L. 2000. “Buddhism, Christianity, and The Matrix: The Dialectic of Myth- Making in Contemporary Cinema.” Journal of Religion and Film 4 (2). http://www. unomaha.edu/jrf/thematrix.htm Freiberger, Oliver, and Christoph Kleine. 2011. Buddhismus. Handbuch und kritische Einfu¨hrung [Buddhism. A Handbook and Critical Introduction]. Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hutchinson, Richard. 2009. “God and the Bodhisattva: A Buddhist Reading of Stranger Than Fiction.” Journal of Religion and Film 13 (1). http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/ vol13.no1/Bodhisattva.htm Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ng, Edwin. 2010. “The (Zen) Buddhist Heart of I k Huckabees.” Journal of Religion and Film 14 (1). http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Vol14no1/huckabees.html McDaniel, Justin. 2010. “The Emotional Lives of Buddhist Monks in Modern Thai Film.” Journal of Religion and Film 14 (2). http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Vol14no1/hu ckabees.html McMahan, David L. 2002. “Repacking Zen for the West.” In Westward Dharma. Buddhism beyond Asia, edited by Charles S. Prebish, and Martin Baumann, 218–229. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mullen, Eve L. 1998. “Orientalist Commercializations: Tibetan Buddhism in American Popular Film.” Journal of Religion and Film 2 (2). http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/ OrientalMullen.htm Prebish, Charles S., and Martin Baumann, eds. 2002. Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reed, Charley. 2007. “Fight Club: An Exploration of Buddhism.” Journal of Religion and Film 11 (2). http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol11no2/ReedFightClub.htm Schaedler, Luc. 2002. “Westliche Okkupation und o¨stliche Selbstreflexion. Buddhismus im Spielfilm” [Western Occupation and Eastern Self-reflection. Buddhism in Feature Film]. In Weltreligionen im Film. Christentum, Islam, Judentum, Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 Hinduismus, Buddhismus [World Religions in Film. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism], edited by Joachim Valentin, 211–224. Marburg: Schu¨ren Presseverlag. Sharf, Robert H. 1995. “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience.” Numen 42 (3): 228–283. Whalen-Bridge, John, and Gary Storhoff, eds. Forthcoming. Buddhism and American Film. New York: State University of New York Press.

FILMOGRAPHY

Aje Aje Bara Aje (Come Come Come Upward) (1989, dir. I. Kwon-taek). Alms (2012, dir. E.A. Burger). 26 ALMUT-BARBARA RENGER

Das alte Ladakh (The Old Ladakh) (1986, dir. C. Kuby). Amongst White Clouds (2005, dir. E.A. Burger). Angry Monk (2006, dir. L. Schaedler). Biruma no tategoto (The Burmese Harp) (1956, dir. K. Ichikawa). Bom, Yeorum, Gaeul, Gyeowool ... Geurigo Bom (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring) (2003, dir. K. Kim). Brilliant Moon (2010, dir. N. Chokling). Buddha: Der Weg zur Erleuchtung (1998, dirs. B. Liebner and E. Schmitz). The Buddha (2010, dir. D. Grubin). Buddhadev (Lord Buddha) (1923, dir. D. Phalke). Chang hup the gi tril nung (Travellers and Magicians) (2003, dir. K. Norbu). Changing from Inside (1998, dir. D. Donnenfield). Daibutsu kaigen (Dedication of the Great Buddha) (1952, dir. T. Kinugasa). Dalmaga dongjogeuro gan kkadalgeun (Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East) (1989, dir. Y. Bae). Destroyer of Illusion/Lord of the Dance (1986, dir. R. Kohn). The Dhamma Brothers (2007, dirs. J. Philips, A. Kukura, and A.M. Stein). Doing Time, Doing Vipassana (1997, dirs. E. Ariel and A. Menahemi). Erleuchtung garantiert (Enlightenment Guaranteed) (1999, dir. D. Do¨rrie). Fight Club (1999, dir. D. Fincher). Gotama the Buddha (1957, dir. R. Khanna). How to Cook Your Life (2007, dir. D. Do¨rrie). Hsia nu (A Touch of Zen) (1971, dir. K. Hu). I Heart Huckabees (2004, dir. D.O. Russell). Jana Aranya (1975, dir. S. Ray). Kundun (1997, dir. M. Scorsese). The Legend of Buddha (2004, dir. S. Falke). The Lion’s Roar (1985, dir. M. Elliott). Little Buddha (1993, dir. B. Bertolucci). Living Buddha (1994, dir. C. Kuby). The Matrix (1999, dirs. A. Wachowski and L. Wachowski). Le Message des Tibe´tains (The Message of the Tibetans) (1966, A. Desjardins). Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint (2006, dir. N. Chokling). Peace Is Every Step: Meditation in Action (1998, dir. G.K. Maida). Pho¨rpa (The Cup) (1999, dir. K. Norbu). Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970, dir. S. Ray). Prawat Phra Phuttajao (The Life of Buddha) (2007, dir. K. Wattananarong). Prem Sanyas (Die Leuchte Asiens) (1925, dirs. F. Osten and H. Rai). Rad der Zeit (Wheel of Time) (2003, dir. W. Herzog). Die Salzma¨nner von Tibet (The Saltmen of Tibet) (1997, dir. U. Koch). Samsara (2002, dir. P. Nalin). Schritte der Achtsamkeit. Eine Reise mit Thich Nhat Hanh (Steps of Mindfulness: A Journey with Thich Nhat Hanh) (1998, dir. T. Lu¨chinger). Seemabaddha (1971, dir. S. Ray). BUDDHISM AND FILM—INTER-RELATION AND INTERPENETRATION 27

Seokgamoni (Buddha) (1964, dir. I. Jang). Seven Years in Tibet (1997, dir. J.-J. Annaud). Shaka (Buddha) (1961, dir. K. Misumi). Shugendo¯ Now (2010, dir. J.-M. Abela). Siddhartha (1972, dir. C. Rooks). Spirit of Tibet: Journey to Enlightenment (1998, dir. M. Ricard). Sri Siddhartha Gauthama (Siddhartha the Buddha)(2013,dirs.C.RutnamandS.Weeraman). Star Wars series (1977–2005, dir. G. Lucas). Stranger than Fiction (2006, dir. M. Forster). Tezuka Osamu no Buddha: Akai Sabaku yo! Utsukushiku (Buddha: The Great Departure) (2011, dir. K. Morishita). Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy (1979, dir. G. Coleman). Tibet: Widerstand des Geistes (Tibet) (1988, dir. C. Kuby). La Trappe (The Trap) (2008, dir. L. Verchery). La vie de Bouddha (Life of Buddha) (2001, dir. M. Meissonnier). Vows (2013, dir. E.A. Burger). Wo hu Cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) (2000, dir. A. Lee). Words of My Perfect Teacher (2003, dir. L.A. Patten). The Yogis of Tibet (2002, dir. J.M. Pill). Zen (1971, dir. A. Desjardins). Zen (2009, dir. B. Takahashi). Zen and Zero (2006, dir. M. Gintho¨). Zen in America (forthcoming, dir. A. Ko¯ Shin Tebbe). A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki (2006, dir. M. Goldberg). The Zen Mind: A Zen Journey across Japan (2006, dir. J. Braeley). Zen Noir (2004, dir. Marc Rosenbush).

Almut-Barbara Renger is Professor of Ancient Religion and Culture and their Reception History at the Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion at the Freie Universita¨t Berlin. Her research and teaching focus on the reception of classical antiquity (particularly myth), cultural transformations of Buddhism, Downloaded by [117.102.49.93] at 09:42 12 December 2015 interrelations of religion and literature, history and critical theories of religion, and issues of social thought. She is editor of the journal Zeitschrift fu¨r Religions- und Geistesgeschichte and of the series Metaforms. Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity. Most recently, she published Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2013. Address: Freie Universita¨t Berlin, Department of History and Cultural Studies, Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion, Gosslerstr. 2–4, D-14195 Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected]