[Buddha-l] Life of Buddha by Tezuka

[jkirk]

X-posting this lovely reminiscence, with author's permission. Next move--see
how many vols of Tezuka's Life of Buddha are on the shelves at nearby B&N.
Joanna K.
=====================================================


I drop in on temples when I am looking for the Vietnamese books of an area.
Often they sell contemporary literature.  More than once I have walked away
with an armload of Buddhist outreach texts the monk who has dealt with me
thinks I should take back with me wherever I came from.

Every time I have been studying Buddha longer than the monk in question.
I think it was my uncle the Myrmansk sailor, the one who isn't sure the
whole gay thing has been such a good idea for men who like sex with men, who
left a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones at the house when I was child.

Those stories are like the Jesus of Mark, the one who says all the odd
lifelike things, and indeed the Paul Reps classic includes a few approving
nods from the bhikku for "the lilies of the field" and so forth.  I went on
to settle on Dharma Bums as my favorite Kerouac, and to get to know Gary
Snyder, the "Japhy Ryder" Zen adept of that novel.

I have intense and complex feelings about another American roshi, Peter
Matthiessen, who went to my college twenty years before me and really was
what I am routinely accused of being, a clandestine serving CIA operations
officer who used international literary modernism as a cover.  His books
gave me pleasure, his life gave me trouble.

One of Snyder's heroes, and mine, liked to point out that the specific
individuals who planned the bombing of Pearl Harbor were advanced Zen
Buddhists.  Kenneth Rexroth would deliver these bon mots in the Bay Area,
where they were cute.

Richard Pryor, working nearby in Oakland, more insightfully observed that
whoever planned that attack had evidently never been out of California to
the rest of America, where there are white men who frighten the white men.
My relatives in Maryland and Michigan were never very clear on why we fought
Hitler and Stalin, but they understand that we stopped bombing Japan just
because we ran out of bombs.

Rexroth spoke to that point when he would go on to say that Zen is Buddhism
for white people.  It is a lot like Mark.  You can learn a great deal of
what there is to learn from reading.  And you won't have a clue when your
Asian mother-in-law hits 65 and starts spending all day at the temple.

If you didn't grow up with it, how do you pick up the abundance of legend
and practice that abounds around Buddhism, the way the Church Fathers and
Augustine and the calendar of the Saints and the Inferno and Paradise Lost
and Fox's Martyrs seep in around the lived experience of Christianity in
Europe and the United States?

Anyone who had just read Mark would miss nearly everything in a Renaissance
painting or a chapel in Las Vegas.  He could go read those texts I just
listed, but he might miss the take-away, what the Christians who have never
heard of those books know from them.  There's an equivalent list for
Buddhism that would also fail.

Osamu Tezuka addressed himself to this problem.  He was the grand old man of
manga in Japan, where his crowning work was an eight-volume life of Buddha,
now translated into English and knocking out everyone who reads comics.

The only point of this ditty is to encourage you to go read them.  I did,
this week, convalescent on the couch, and now I have learned and can
remember all the players, all the stories, that have been so opaque and
fleeting to me.

Tezuka inserts himself in the narrative about one panel a book, a
sympathetic character if you like Saigon 54-75 writers, with a beret, making
silly jokes.  He's an Asian guy who sat down to figure it all out, like one
of those incredibly erudite and plainspoken essays on philosophy and world
literature that appear in Vietnamese diaspora literary magazines.

So, I'm saying, if your Vietnamese studies require you to get a grip on
Buddhism, and you like Vietnamese writers, you would do well to give
Tezuka's Buddha a try.

If you find it difficult to read comics, don't be ashamed, they have
conventions like anything else.  You can learn them.  Scott McCloud's
astonishing Understanding Comics lays them out clearly. Tezuka's work is
built of exactly the conventions McCloud describes, especially the dilation
and contraction of time and space through agreed symbols and the way panels
work together on a page.

Another convention at play in Tezuka's Buddha is the one familiar worldwide
through the Belgian Tintin.  The character himself is especially cartoonish,
drawn in outline, while the backgrounds are detailed realism. The effect on
the reader is to identify with Tintin and look at what he's seeing.

In Tezuka, the Buddha is like that while he's young, but as he grows old he
become more like a realist drawing of a statue in the background of a Tintin
comic.  You go from identification with this other self to contemplation of
him.

In my favorite Asian Studies book on buddhism, Liberating Intimacy, Peter
Hershock argues that much of the Buddhist tradition has lost the social
virtuosity of the Buddha, a Freud-like point that gaining some distance on
desire allows free play of the personality in the world.

That's a Zen idea, and one that animates Tezuka's tale both in the drawing
as I describe it and in the wonderful sense of bustling life in India, like
Kim and the lama on the trunk road before Kipling's plot kicks in. Tezuka is
an intellectual.  But he's written a life of Buddha that helps people like
us grasp the wilder side of his religion.

Dan Duffy
Editor, Viet Nam Literature Project
URL www.vietnamlit.org



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