Be warned: Thai film: "The Life of Buddha"

Several days ago, I saw the "major motion picture" titled _The Life of
Buddha_ --a Thai-made cartoon, that will doubtless define many of the
assumptions about the historical Buddha for some time to come (at
least within Thailand, if not beyond, as English-translation DVDs are
available).

Precisely because the film is regarded as an attempt to portray the
historical Buddha, its wildly unhistorical character is difficult to
behold without a wince.

Textual scholars will immediately recognize the events as hastily
cobbled together from Ashvaghosa and the Lalitavastra --viz.,
non-Pali, non-Theravada, Sanskrit sources (now considered "Mahayana").

Thus, while the source material selected is fundamentally alien to the
tradition of Buddhism in Thailand, the film-makers have attempted to
impose "Thai" elements in a manner both artless and anachronistic.

Perhaps the most striking example: they depict Devadatta reading Pali
from a manuscript written in Khom (classical Cambodian) orthography!
Here is ancient Cambodia written into ancient India (with the ocean
and the passage of over a thousand years that separates the two simply
smeared).  Perhaps more disturbing: the Buddha's followers are
depicted as exclusively male, with no female monastics of any kind
--apparently just to avoid Thai discomfort on this issue (currently it
is illegal for female renunciates to beg with bowl in Thailand, and
charges are pressed on this from time to time, to keep the women "in
their place" in the modern Thai notion of Buddhism --notwithstanding
what the historical Buddha taught, or that he had female renunciates
as disciples, etc.).

A long cataloge of such historical errors could be provided --and,
presumably, somebody in a department of cultural studies will do so
eventually.

As with many modern attempts to re-tell the life of the Buddha (even
in contemporary Sri Lanka), the main defects of the narrative are:
   (1) the focus is almost exclusively on "magical" events surrounding
the birth, childhood, and death of the Buddha --viz., omitting the
actual philosophy and adult life that made the historical figure worth
remembering in the first place,
   (2) instead of philosophic debate, the Buddha is simply depicted
traversing the countryside of India to perform banal miracles (e.g.,
fighting a magic snake, making it rain indoors, etc.) to "win" the
"faith" of converts --and this is both fundamentally boring to behold,
and wildly extraneous to any reason (secular or religious) for
respecting the historical Buddha or his teaching,
   (3) there is neither any interest in the social/historical reality
that the Buddha spoke to (in India of his time), nor is there any
interest in the social/historical reality that the audience now
inhabits, and that the content of the film might address.

Under heading #3, we could note that a Sri Lankan (or mainland Indian)
film along the same lines would at least mention the existence of the
caste system, and the Buddha's critique thereof; but not so for the
Thais.  It would also be easy to imagine some other film-maker having
an interest in issues that vitiate modern Thailand, such as
alcoholism, drug-addiction, prostitution, etc. --but this is purely
"cloud-cuckoo-land" filmmaking.

The film is garbage; however, the monks and laypeople that now step
forward in praise of it (as an accurate depiction of the historical
Buddha) do us a great favor in discrediting themselves.

The same may well be said of the craze for "Jatukam" amulets in
Thailand; it is as if the most corrupt had devised these as a means of
having the worst elements of Thai monasticism identify themselves, at
the same time convincing all the dunces to wear a sign around their
necks in public to declare their own gullibility.

The saddening question is this: will there ever be an interest in the
historical material that the Pali suttas hold, such as might challenge
the widespread assumptions built up from half-remembered legends of
Ashavghosa, the Lalitavastra, and Jataka fables ("Wet-san-don", etc.)?

In Thailand, the answer is "no".  The Buddha they believe in shaved
his head, and yet maintained a full head of hair.  He evidently never
said, wrote, or recited anything of philosophic significance, and is
instead an object of worship simply on account of his (supposed) royal
blood and conjurer's tricks.

So far as the dramatist's art is concerned, I here recall
Schopenhauer's comment on Dante's epic poems: the first (inferno) had
a great deal of dramatic interest, the second (purgatory) less so, and
then the last (paradise) was an utter bore, as it simply floated from
one cloud to the next, with no suffering or conflict to provide
dramatic interest.  So too, here, the film-makers never considered
that it might be an aesthetic mistake to delete suffering --not only
because the Buddha's philosophy is (in some sense) "about" suffering,
but also because drama (_per se_) requires suffering to satisfy the
requirements of the stage.  If we turn ancient India into paradise,
and put a halo around all of the characters' heads, all that remains
is for a bunch of figures to float around, making resounding
declarations in echoing voices --viz., there is, strictly speaking, no
plot.

But ancient India was no such paradise, and the other parties the
Buddha debated with (and preached) to provided much more than just
mute astonishment before a haloed spectacle --they provided real
opposition based on their own religious and philosophical views, and,
moreover, they confronted him with real problems based on their own
experience.

There was (and is) "a point" and "a plot" to the Pali canon; and it's
a shame that both the film-makers, and so much of the Thai audience,
simply miss the point.

E.M.