Mind Mirror:
Buddha at the Movies

Looking back, the most popular art form the twentieth century bequeathed to posterity was � movies! Nothing goes around the world like a ticket to the movies. This holds for TV, too, also speaking the universal language of cinema but on a much reduced scale. As mystic movie maven and filmmaker Stephen Simon says, "Movies are the most electrifying communications medium ever devised and the natural conduit for inspiring ourselves to look into the eternal issues of who we are and why we are here." So, of course, this has its Buddhist lights, and we can break that down two ways: film itself as Buddhist, and Buddhist films.

Now Playing: Film as Buddhist

Whatever's playing, I always enjoy the hush that settles in when the lights dim before the show. The sheer act of gathering together with fellow villagers for some storytelling around a campfire (the flickering lights and shadows on a movie screen) has primal roots, deep within the sacred. And film can, in and of itself, provide an apt model for our mundane consciousness; conscious of something�but what? Illusion, quite often. Plato once described the unexamined life in terms akin to sitting in a theater never aware of the projection booth where the images come from; instead, we take what we're seeing for reality. So it is, the Buddha shows, with the projections of our own minds, which we take as the reality of our experience.

There's a visual metaphor in Buddha's motto: "Come and see!" Vipassana: clear seeing into the nature of things. Burmese vipassana master Sayadaw U Pandita notes that when we watch a movie, the process can be like insight meditation. Each has four phases:

1.     1. Appearance of object
2.     2. Directing of attention
3.     3.  Close observation
4.     4. Understanding

In insight meditation, 1) we focus attention on our belly, say, which leads to 2) appearance of rising and falling of the abdomen, followed by 3) noting the process and our feelings, then 4) discovering special characteristics and how they actually behave, not how we think they do.

Watching a movie, 1) we focus attention on the screen, which leads to 2) appearance of characters and scenes, followed by 3) making out what's happening by observing carefully, then 4) discovering the plot and appreciating the movie.

-=[ to be continued ]=-