Word: tibet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...listen closely, you can hear the spinning of the dharma in the multiplexes. In two of the most anticipated Hollywood movies of the season, the talk is of worms and nothingness. About halfway through Seven Years in Tibet, which will open Wednesday to considerable hoopla, Brad Pitt is trying to construct a building. But there is a problem. His workers will not dig a foundation, because they don't want to kill any worms. Why? As Pitt's character is informed: "In a past life, this humble worm could have been your mother." Meanwhile, in Martin Scorsese's Kundun, scheduled...
...which the world of American entertainment became fascinated with Buddhism. Neither Seven Years nor Kundun is overtly about the faith. The first recounts the story of Pitt's character, Heinrich Harrer, a superstar mountain climber and Nazi poster boy who is humanized while tutoring the preteen Dalai Lama in Tibet in the 1940s and '50s. The second tells the remarkable tale of the Dalai Lama more or less through his own eyes, from his recognition as reincarnated Buddha of compassion at age two until his escape to India at 24. Each film's strongest statement is on China's brutal...
...Adam Yauch, 33, singer for the punk-rap group the Beastie Boys. Not only has Yauch guided his famously irreverent band into songs like Bodhisattva Oath; he is also primary architect of two Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits that became instant touchstones for a Gen X phenomenon quickly dubbed Tibet Chic. Like the new movies, the concerts' first concern was political but they too opened with that signature chanting, and Yauch, a convert, made sure spiritual seekers could find low-key "monastery tents" on the concert grounds...
...most colorful of the three major Buddhist branches, however, was Vajrayana, the "Diamond Vehicle" adopted in Tibet in the 7th century. Instead of attaining complete enlightenment gradually, Tibetan monks claimed to do so in a single lifetime, an approach compared by Rick Fields, author of the American Buddhist history How the Swans Came to the Lake, to climbing the sheerest face of a Himalayan cliff: demanding and perilous. Unwilling to limit themselves to the standard tools--chanting and meditative breath-control techniques--the Vajrayana Buddhists employ an eclectic mix that includes religious visualizations, philosophical debate, ritual, yoga and the energies...
...this amazing play upon our need for emotion is really to the movie's credit. In retrospect, though Seven Years in Tibet seems at first to proceed slowly and aimlessly, it is this gradual start that makes the closing catharsis so compelling and skillful--a quick change fulfilling, not hollow...