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Archives:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/goa-net/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Goanet2003/
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BETWEEN BREATHS OPEN AIR FILM PROJECTION AND DINNER:
Message: Tuesday 21st, January 2003 Sea Food Buffet at 7.00pm to 8.30pm
advance booking advisable. Followed by an Open Air Film Projection:
"LITTLE BUDDHA" directed by Bernardo Bertolucci at 8.30pm sharp.
For more information Call: (0832) 2275733 or Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For HOW-TO-GE-THERE-MAP Visit website: www.pranaline.com.
Bernardo Bertolucci on the film and his relationship to Buddhism: " I AM
NOT A BUDDHIST, but my relationship with Buddhism goes back a long way.
When I was twenty-one years old, the great Italian writer Elsa Morante
gave me a book to read on the life of the yogi Milarepa, and I was deeply
impressed because behind the religious line of the story I experienced the
presence of a great poet. In fact I felt more involved with the poet than
the mystic. And the Buddhist experience has kept coming back to me in an
intermittent way ever since. In 1982 in Hollywood a friend invited me to a
Tibetan Buddhist ceremony being held at his house in Brentwood, of all
places, and I found myself sitting on the floor among a group of Tibetan
lamas mixed with Los Angelenos. They were chanting parts of The Tibetan
Book of the Dead. I received an Initiation called Padmasambhava, named
after the saint who first spread Buddhism in Tibet. The Tibetans were
smiling, and that moment was contagious: I too was smiling, not just for
the afternoon, but throughout the days that followed.
As you may imagine from this early experience, I couldn't and didn't want
to make a movie about the life of the Buddha. What fascinated me was the
challenge of confronting our presented times with the thought of a man who
lived twenty-five hundred years ago. That's why the story of my film
Little Buddha takes place today, and why out of the whole life of the
Buddha I chose to show only a few episodes, which the Tibetan lama who is
searching for the reincarnation of his teacher narrates to the American
boy-just as a grandfather would tell a fairy tale to his grandchild.
At the beginning the film was full of lessons of Vajrayana Buddhism, but
after months of shifting through my original material in the cutting room,
what I hope remains in the movie is much more directly my desire to
communicate to an audience the emotions that overwhelmed me when I first
discovered Buddhism. For example, the very strong feeling I had on meeting
an old Tibetan lama in Katmandu sitting in front of him without the
comfort of a common language. For in that moment there was an incredible
sense of communion, an emotional understanding and communication which
goes beyond duality. Looking at him was like looking into a mirror where I
would see my face "morphing" into his face-there was no longer a teacher
or a student but only one being.
Toward the end of my movie, the character of Lama Norbu recites the
beginning of the Heart Sutra: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." what
does this mean? Perhaps by the time I understand it, I won't need to
understand it. The emotion is what matters. Not everyone can understand
rationally, but almost everyone can understand through their emotions. And
so I offer this foreword to Entering the Stream as an expression of my
great respect for the teachings, and of my gratitude for the joy and the
liberation that every Tibetan who collaborated on the film left in my heart.
