[Buddha-l] Life of Buddha by Tezuka

[Franz Metcalf]

Joanna et al.,

Thanks for the reminder of Tezuka's series. I have the first two  
volumes and I enjoyed them a great deal. I'm not a comics reader, but,  
as Duffy says, Tezuka brings you into that world with ease. Back at  
the height of my flickering fame, I had some back-and-forth with  
Vertical, the publishers (though the series is now published by  
HarperCollins), and even blurbed the books. I really did enjoy them.  
Now I reckon I'll have to get the rest of the series. Perhaps I'll  
read them to my daughter (though there's plenty of violence).

Great countercultural jibes from Duffy, too.

Franz

On Mar 4, 2008, at 1:19 PM, jkirk wrote:

>
> 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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===========================================
Franz Metcalf, PhD.  323.467.3267  http://mind2mind.net
Buddhist Author, Teacher, Scholar, Husband, Dad, Beginner