Scorsese's Kundun As Catholic Encounter with the Dalai Lama And

Chapter 8 Scorsese’s Kundun as Catholic Encounter with the Dalai Lama and His Tibetan Dharma1

Kerry P.C. San Chirico

1 Introduction

It may seem odd to begin a chapter dedicated to Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997) with recourse to words about, not the Dalai Lama, but George Harri- son. Yet, in the 2011 Scorsese documentary of Harrison, Terry Gilliam reflects on what he considers to be the most significant animating force in Harrison’s life, one for whom Hindu meditative practices and devotion were more than a passing 60’s fancy:

I’ve always been intrigued by George’s quote spirituality, which is abso- lutely essential to him—you know, “Living in the Material World” [the title of a Harrison album]. So he was caught living in these two worlds—a very spiritual world and a very material world. And they’re both, I think, related in the sense that they’re both about finding the beauty in the real world, to make the world as beautiful as it can be. And that’s what I think he was doing in Friar Park. He created such exquisite beauty there, but there was nothing airy-fairy about it. It wasn’t about snapping his fingers and having somebody else do it for him. He had to do the work.

This bind of living in two worlds, of being “caught,” is a thread weaving through many of Scorsese’s films. Kundun, the biopic of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, plays upon this thread. We may term this two-world bind as the very struggle for salvation, or more properly when speaking of dharmic traditions,2 liberation. This struggle has long fascinated (even haunted) Martin Scorsese. This “doing the work” is nothing less than the hardscrabble life of

1 I would like to thank Tibetologists Joel Gruber and Gregory Hillis for their invaluable contri- butions to this essay. 2 Dharmic traditions are those born on the Indian subcontinent and include the concept of dharma, a word that can mean “duty,” “cosmic order,” “righteousness,” and, in contemporary Indian languages, “religion.”

172 San Chirico faith, variously construed, with diverse means of attainment, and often leading to the creation of something beautiful in the process. In the following essay we explore Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, a film repre- senting the life of the fourteenth Dalai Lama from his birth to his escape from Chinese-occupied Tibet at the age of twenty-three in 1959. The essay places Scorsese within a broader context of Western and Catholic encounters with the East generally, and with Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism specifically. We query the influence of Orientalism on the director and this work, released at the height of the Dalai Lama’s popularity. Finally, we note certain affinities or “sensibilities” between Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism, a common ground felicitous to produce this perceptive, sensitive, and ultimately tragic story. Throughout, we take for granted that, contrary to being a thematic outlier, the film is aligned with other films created before and after Kundun. These films are often implicitly religious in nature. Like the figures he examines, Scorsese is “doing the work” to make sense of this world for himself and his audience by attempting to create something beautiful, arguably, unto liberation. And we “read” Kundun as one Catholic’s rendering of the most famous Buddhist figure of the last three generations.

2 Religion as Worldview, Worlds in Film

In an essay exploring the life of a Buddhist leader by a director deeply influ- enced by Catholicism, there are diverse theoretical ways to investigate the living encounter of which Kundun is the consequence.3 In my estimation, a less fruitful path is the attempt to somehow discern the state of Scorsese’s religious commitment in terms of his fidelity to the Catholic catechism or to whether he was taking communion in a Catholic parish at the time of Kundun’s produc- tion (it is more than likely that he was not.) Then, having established his faith or lack thereof, one could assert that Scorsese’s is unworthy of being called a “Catholic filmmaker.” Alternatively, I argue Scorsese maintains a broadly Cath- olic “worldview.” Worldviews help us to see, they help us to think, to interpret. They prepare one to encounter and engage with an environment. Negatively, worldviews can also prevent us from seeing, they can obscure our vision. This is important in inter-religious encounters because humans take in new ideas and experiences through older ones. In terms of Kundun, there were certain ideas, ideals, and practices that Scorsese was well prepared to see due to his

3 There are, of course, limitations to the ocular metaphor. See Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 13–20.