BUDDHA
By Osamu Tezuka
The eight volume masterpiece was my first incursion into Tezuka territory. It seemed appropriate as a first choice since Buddhism made a place in my heart after reading Herman Hesse’s Siddartha many years ago.
Having the Buddha lived roughly 2500 years ago any account of those times the sense of time and place will eventually feel to some as mythical while more real to others. If humans find it so difficult to agree in the present, then the past is a certain heap of trouble. The Gautama Buddha knew this of course. He spoke of the patterns that afflict humanity and the impermanence of things and knew that time took its toll on all things and that even his teachings and their recollection would change. Thus he aimed at the heart of things. He aimed not at making his teachings craved in stone but rather to awaken others to the simple and yet profoundly revelatory truths he shared and searched. He knew that it was the heart of his teachings, the living, the experiencing, the becoming them that truly mattered. Not their shape in the written word.
And this, I find, was precisely one of the many things that Tezuka aimed at and achieved with this book.
Even though the life of the Gautama Buddha is filled with myth and fantastic occurrences, I found Tezuka’s semi-biographical account of the enlightened master to be a very toned down one. Much like Hesse’s in fact. Both focused more on the man and his message to all living things than on the super powers and magical journeys he is said to have underwent. They made Buddha human. Like all of us. Which not only is how he was (at least for part of his life) but (and this is my own take on the matter) what he intended to be and to show others. That no one is bound by none other than themselves. Thus, the key to one’s freedom must lie within oneself.
Tezuka shows us the man and, being himself a master of sequential art, takes us deeply into the core of the Buddha’s message, being unflinching in its portrayal and testing it to the extreme in subtly but powerfully woven drama.
And here we can confirm affinities between Tezuka and Buddha. Even though the dramas can be incredibly moving, there is always a sense of peacefulness arising from their resolution. As one plunges deeper into it, one begins to see clearly beyond and hint at the vastness below. As if drowning in the ocean one became aware of its true extension and, with an eerie but comforting sort of non-attachment, saw our role in the play of consciousness.
Buddha is truly a journey of love. But of love, not for knowledge, not for faith, not even for enlightenment. For me, the true journey is one of deep love over all things living.
And if of Buddha it is said that he was “a doctor of the soul”, what better craftsman to fuse vision and meaning than Tezuka, himself a doctor, so concerned in uplifting the lives of others?
Another aspect of the story that I loved to see (and that surprised me, to be honest) was the fact that the Buddha continues to learn and to evolve after his enlightenment. And that brings him even closer to us. This is something that you will rarely read or hear about in the sutras. If at all. Buddhists usually speak of the Buddha as if, after his enlightenment he was complete and thus nothing else was to be known or understood. And here lies another crux. How much is this perspective real for all of us with no direct experience of such matters as full enlightenment? Did one such as he continue to learn new things and expand his teachings? My answer is, Does it really matter? What matters is how the yes is perhaps more useful to us than the no.
But I digress.
The point is, Buddha is an incredibly moving story. Well written, complex and simple at the same time without ever losing clarity on the great themes that the Buddha himself will embody and resolve throughout his life. It's a story about compassion. A very important (and much needed) word to me.
While reading it it is easy to think about people like Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies) or Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away…).There’s this deep concern and care about life, human existence and the burdens it sometimes carries. And after the truth has been seen and seamlessly integrated into our lives, fear no longer has a hold on us. The light no longer stays at the end of the tunnel. Rather it fills it as we move onwards.
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