Buddhism in the Cinema: Seven

Buddhism in the Cinema: Seven Years in Tibet

Buddhism, and perhaps all spiritual movements, presents a challenge for filmmakers: filmmaking is an exterior art, and achieving Buddhist Enlightenment requires internal changes within the psyche of the individual. Brad Pitt's Hollywood magnum opus and celebration of Buddhism entitled Seven Years in Tibet chronicles the struggle of the Austrian mountain explorer Heinrich Harrer, and his near fatal accident climbing the Himalayans. Pitt focuses on the relationship between the Tibetan community Harrer encountered and the explorer to show Harrer's spiritual and moral growth. Harrer strove to scale one of the Himalayan's most difficult peaks, that of the Nanga Parbat. His failed expedition caused him to stumble into Tibet, where Harrer and his men met the Dalai Lama. Harrer was changed forever, as a result of sharing his own culture with that of a very ancient civilization.

Buddhism preaches the unity of all humanity, and despite the deep divide between the cultures of Harrer the explorer and the Lama, the two connect. The Dalai Lama was a fourteen-year-old boy revered as a god at the time of Harrer's 1939 venture and curious about a modern world from which he had so long been isolated. The two of them learn from one another on screen: Harrer teaches the boy about the modern world outside Tibet, including films. He establishes a connection with the young man that seems deeper even than the one he established with his pregnant wife before leaving. The Lama discovers a sense of humanity with Harrer not apparent before to viewers, in stark contrast to Harrer's cold relationships with his fellow climbers and his family in Austria.

Before meeting the Lama, Harrer was only focused on achieving concrete, linear objectives, like climbing mountains. He regarded politics as an irritant to his goals of climbing, despite the fact that World War II was immanent upon the eve of his departure from his homeland. Being forced to rely upon the capricious, harsh natural world of Tibet and then being nearly overcome by its power changed Harrer in unexpected ways. He was forced to abandon his old attitude of divide and conquer to life.

Although the Lama is thought to be the reincarnation of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, Harrer's own life also paralleled that of the historical Buddha. Like Siddhartha, he came from a wealthy and privileged, although not a particularly spiritual, background. The Buddha also left his pregnant wife to seek enlightenment and liberation from the afflictions of sickness, old age, and death. Harrer uses mountain climbing as a way to feel alive, and cheat, if only briefly, these inevitable elements intrinsic to human existence. His climbing expedition suffered frostbite, several near-escapes from death, and had to eat raw horseflesh just to stay alive. Like the Buddha, Harrer failed to find salvation in pushing his body to extremes. The Buddha used asceticism to ravage his body, fasting and meditating, until a young peasant girl gave the starving Buddha a bowl of rice. Then, the Buddha achieved Enlightenment, realizing the impermanence of human existence, and the falseness of a notion of fixed selfhood. Harrer achieved a kind of Enlightenment after experiencing the generosity of the Tibetan community where the Dalai Lama dwelled.

The film shows how the Austrian Harrer was effectively stripped of his secure sense of national identity after he was nearly conquered by the avalanche and met the Dali Lama. Once Harrer cared little for politics, and the politics he did advocate was divisive, hateful, and nationalistic. Harrer escaped from a POW camp run by the British, who found him after his accident, but by the end of the film he bears the British no resentment: he no longer identifies as part of any nation by at the film's conclusion. Like Buddhism is an international religion, so is Harrer's new, complex and more generous sense of identity. The Buddha was born in India, but founded a worldwide religion, and incarnations of the Buddha have been present everywhere, including, Tibetans believe, on their own soil. Harrer similarly shares an international identity.

Harrier learned how need to respect all sentient beings transcends the confines of the human species: When Harrer builds the Lama a movie theater, according to the boy's request, the boy worries about the worms being disturbed in the process: in a past life, the worm could have been Harrer's mother, the boy says. When comparing Harrer's Nazi past, and the crimes against humanity of World War II, this caution about hurting a worm seems both touching and surreal. However, Buddhism stresses the need to show respect on both a micro and macro level, to all sentient beings, and not simply to acknowledge compassion in the abstract. Also, if the Nazis had been able to see the face of humanity, of their own mothers, in the eyes of the victims, the mass atrocities that occurred during World War II could have never taken place.