Even though I’ve been a Buddhist practitioner for years, I don’t stop to look at trees or smell flowers. I’m a city boy. I bolt from Point A to Point B. My boyfriend Julius isn’t Buddhist, but he does garden a lot.
It used to grate on my every nerve how, on our way to any given Point B, Julius would stop to stick his nose in a rosebush or finger the stem of a tulip. About a month ago, we were walking through our Brooklyn neighborhood when he came to a halt at a plot of African Violets. He turned to me and said, "You should take up gardening." When I asked why, he said, "Most flowers are alive only to be beautiful. They die so quickly too. We should appreciate them while they’re here." Ever since that day, I’ve been a lot less annoyed whenever Julius holds me up at a garden, though I have yet to put on a sunhat or pick up a hoe.
I kept that occasion in mind when watching John Bush’s DVD trilogy, Journey Into Buddhism. If you’re patient enough to sit through all four-and-a-half hours of this documentary, I urge you to prick your ears up at the end of Part One, Dharma River, where Bush quotes Buddha’s Dhammapada:
Though one should live a thousand years without comprehending how all things rise and pass away, yet better indeed is a single day’s life of one who does comprehend how all things rise and pass away.
This one line from an Ancient Indian scripture presages the fate of all the historic temples and cultures portrayed in Bush’s documentary, along with the fate of all beings. It also underscores how precious this evanescence makes those temples, cultures and beings.
The Dharma River portion of the trilogy shows how Buddhist temples and traditions have risen and passed away for centuries along the Mekong River, which runs from the Tibetan Plateau through Southwest China, Burma, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia, and Vietnam. One of the film’s premiere destinations is the Wha Phra Kaew temple of the Grand Palace of Bangkok, which houses the Emerald Buddha (43 B.C.). Monks and visitors continuously chant the Heart Sutra to this jade statue that haloes a room whose walls contain illustrations of ancient Hindu epics, which Buddhism would later appropriate as a didactic tool. Traveling up to the Thai city of Chiang Mai, home to over 300 Buddhist temples, Bush’s documentary begins to weave in details of how the historical Buddha’s life and teachings infuse the iconographies of these South-East Asian edifices.
Bush then brings us to pilgrimage sites like the Paku caves in China, which house more than 4,000 Buddhist figures that centuries of devotees have deposited as offerings. They are left undusted to symbolize how all life is subject to decay. Later, Bush gives an account of the nation of Lao, which has an orphanage for over 1,000 statues of Buddha, each with a halting mudra (hand gesture) instructing us to "stop fighting." Tragically, over two million tons of bombs fell on Lao during the Vietnam War, rendering it a prey to a xenophobic regime that kept pilgrims at bay. Recovering from that reign of terror, the people of Lao now have a new appreciation for the Lotus flowers (a principal Buddhist symbol) growing indomitably from the mud and trouble of the Mekong River.
Bush then takes us to Burma, the mainstay of Theravada Buddhism. Even though the historical Buddha lived to be 80, the Burmese always represent him as an androgynous young man, liberated from the constraints of age and gender. He often has an open flame above his head to represent the burning away of desire and ill will. (All this in a police state that has Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest for leading nonviolent protests in support of democracy.) Pagan was once the crown city of Burma with over 4,000 temples and stupas, more than all the cathedrals in Europe. Centuries of endless temple construction devastated Pagan, however, as all the trees in its forests ended up burning under the kings’ kilms. The land became waterless and barren and the people had to abandon the city - a cautionary tale for today.
The lovely Sharon Stone, who is herself a Buddhist, narrates Part Two, Prajna Eartha. Prajna means "wisdom" in Sanskrit. It also refers to the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha. This segment explores the lost civilization of the Angkor in Cambodia, which left behind Angkor Wat, the world’s largest temple. In the 3rd Century, both Hinduism and Buddhism bled into the land’s animist culture. As reflected in its temples and lore, Angkor society was sometimes Hindu, sometimes Buddhist, sometimes both. The Angkors fell in the 14th Century, only to have their ruins discovered by French archaeologists in the 19th Century. Then, in the 20th Century, over 100,000 Cambodians were killed in the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge took power and killed millions more, especially monks and nuns. Today, millions of Cambodian youth have joined monastic orders. But almost no monks or nuns from the generation before them managed to survive genocide in the Killing Fields.
The final part of the trilogy, Vajra Sky Over Tibet, brings us into Central Tibet, where Buddhism merged with the indigenous Bon religion, typified by animism, shamanism, divination, and cults of the dead. Even with its government in exile, headed by the Dalai Lama, some shrines of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism have managed to survive the wrath of Chinese communism. Only in recent history has this tradition’s magic and mysteries, via the Dalai Lama and Chogyam Trunga Rinpoche, made it out of the arid Tibetan landscape and into pockets of modern western cultures. Here, Bush gives us a rare look at how a historically peaceful culture has used shocking warrior imagery to embolden both its spirit and spiritual practice under threat of demise.
Like any good meditation retreat, John Bush’s Journey Into Buddhism will test your patience. It doesn’t cater to our collective ADD; the four and a half hours don’t whiz by. The camerawork is often home-video shaky and the locales are largely unfamiliar to the untrained Western eye. But, given the right amount of focus and attention, you’ll find the trilogy’s gifts to be manifold. This film demonstrates that civilizations may fade or get trampled like flowers, but the lotus of indestructible truth will continue to bloom out of the mud and trouble of history.
