[Buddha-l] Life of Buddha by Tezuka
Jim Peavler
jmp at peavler.org
Tue Mar 4 15:54:15 MST 2008
We on Buddha-hex entertained a short-lived discussion of the Tezuka
Buddha series (8 vols in all, and each takes a while to digest
properly). I love the work and said so at the time (to the
consternation of some of our minions). I even bought the set for the
library at the Albuquerque Zen Center. I may be the only person there
who has read them so far.
But -- however inaccurate the depiction of Buddhist doctrine may be
at times, or how much someone disapproves of the depiction of this or
that character from Buddha's life -- one leaves the series with a
deeper feel for mediaeval (or pre-iaeval) India, the caste system,
and what Buddha meant when he said that all beings suffer.
On Mar 4, 2008, at 3:18 PM, Franz Metcalf wrote:
> 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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>>
>>
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>
> ===========================================
> Franz Metcalf, PhD. 323.467.3267 http://mind2mind.net
> Buddhist Author, Teacher, Scholar, Husband, Dad, Beginner
>
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Jim Peavler
jmp at peavler.org
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