Once upon a time at a computer software company, a QA engineer received a book from the guy in charge of the Help documentation. The book was small and covered in the most perfect brown paper known to mankind. Written on this brown paper (surely borrowed from one of Julie Andrews packages tied-up-in-string) was Meditations on the Book of Daniel by The Deep Friar.

A book on a religious topic, it was the perfect present for a soon to be seminary student. However, I quickly found that it was actually a book on Buddhism and the cinema. My friend had kindly offered a clever camouflage so that I could read about R-rated movies and eastern religion without raising eyebrows while at a strictly evangelical religious school.

The book’s concealed title was Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies by Dean Sluyter. Inside Cinema Nirvana I found a guy who could easily be accused of taking movies too seriously. Sluyter finds examples of Buddhism in everything from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to The Godfather to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. By using the word “find”, I don’t mean to imply that he is finding little treasure chests intentionally buried by directors and producers. Instead, he uses more of a Mr. Rogers…let’s pretend the trolley takes us to Buddha-land…style of finding his “enlightenment lessons”. As Sluyter says: He’s “deliberately skipped those [movies] where the spiritual content is too literal or obvious….Where’s the fun in finding what’s already spelled out?”.

And, it is fun being on the Cinema Nirvana trolley with Sluyter. It’s a little like taking a Spring Break road trip with Sluyter’s 15 movies…you’re having such a fun time, you don’t care that you are miles away from the intentions of the movie’s creators. In fact, the feeling is addicting; …and, since Sluyter doesn’t seem to care, my mind felt free to roadtrip to my own evangelical conclusions inspired by his words of Buddhist wisdom. My Sharpie Accent highlighter found itself being used a good bit more than its owner expected it to.

All the fun begins with Snow White:

As a role model, Snow White sucks. She’s an utterly passive fairly-tale heroine who climbs no beanstalks and slays no dragons. She has no talents but housecleaning and no interests beyond pining away for that Special Someone who will someday come and solve all her problems. Her shrill, girly voice attests to her empty-headed helplessness—she’s sisters-under-the-skin with the old politically incorrect Teen Talk Barbie that sighed, “Math is hard!” All she is is young and pretty, and not smart enough to understand that one day, like the Queen, she’ll be forty and washed up.

As you can see, Sluyter’s not taking anything too seriously. He’s a movie buff that wants to talk about movies. He wants to live inside of them, crawl into their crawlspaces and root around in the dark places. But, he knows the whole thing is a bit silly, after all they’re only movies. The book is a great picture of that irony…that paradox of the silly-seriousness that we love to pretend that we don’t take too seriously.

Sluyter does have a rough lesson plan for us in Cinema Nirvana. He uses each movie to speak to a general concept of Buddhism and while he’s on that path he points out other little thoughts that he sees along the way. Below is a list of what I took to be the major themes for the different movies. If you recognize the movies it’s not hard to guess as how he gets to some of his ideas.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – “a self-portrait of awareness itself…enlightenment”
The Big Sleep – “a guided tour of samsara”
Independence Day – “shunyata, emptiness, and why it’s the solution to all our problems”
The Graduate – “the bardo, or transitional state between death and rebirth”
Easy Rider – “explores a fleeting moment of opportunity not just in the life of the individual, but in the life of the nation”
Jaws – “the theory of anatta, ‘no-self’”
The Truman Show – “the journey of spiritual discovery”
Memento – “Waking up…enlightenment”
The Godfather – “God the Father”
Goldfinger – “Auric Goldfinger is greed…attachment”
Invasion of the Body Snatchers – “conformity, repression, and freedom”
Fistful of Dollars – “anatta, the state of no-self”
Jailhouse Rock – “Our jailhouse is samsara: ignorance, unenlightenment”
A Night at the Opera – “shunyata, emptiness”
Casablanca – “bodhichitta—utter commitment to the liberation of suffering fellow beings”

Sometimes I feel as though I can learn something easier if I just jump into it. It’s sort of like playing a board game. You can read the instructions several times and figure it out, but it’s sometimes easier to just jump in and play the game. Reading Cinema Nirvana is like jumping in and playing the game. Things aren’t spelled out chronologically like a “Buddhism for Dummies” book would be. Sluyter goes from here to there and skips around with his Buddhist ideas, yet after finishing the book I feel as though I have a much better grasp of how Buddhism is played out in the life of a Buddhist. The reason is that we’ve been given a form of stream-of-conscienceness for this Buddhist as he watches movies. We can see the concepts that show up in his mind more than others and sometimes he shows how these ideas influence his practical life.

As I said before, all the loose interpretation style and allegories give the book a unique flavor. It allowed me to appreciate the book in another capacity. For example, as Sluyter is telling me to look around at nature and appreciate every step because we’re all part of the same essence; I feel free to think that I should be thankful for each step as I observe nature because God made it. Elsewhere in the book I learned that: “In his dialogues with representatives of other faiths, the Dalai Lama is very liberal about acknowledging their commonality, but this is where he draws the line: ‘No creator God.’”. Yet, despite this specific contradiction, my thoughts in no way broke any of the unsaid rules of this book .

So, this evangelical reader felt triply blessed by Cinema Nirvana. 1) I received a good lesson on Buddhism, 2) I was able to read about movies from a guy head-over-heals in love with them, and 3) I was able to get some reminders of my own faith.

I suppose it all comes back around to that fancy brown paper I’m looking at. The brown paper dust-jacket in a way accidentally symbolizes what this book is all about. Cinema Nirvana takes what could be a rather dull topic, Buddhism; and, it covers it up with cinematic movie-moments and presents us with a pleasant treat. My brain wonders if it’s possible to do this more often. I wonder if it’s possible to stick to your guns in what you believe (religiously, politically…whatever) while still taking care of the presentation. I’m talking about slick presentation that begs people to think for themselves instead of slick presentation with merely manipulative intentions. What would this entail? Well, I’m not sure exactly… I think step one would be “Be nice”. Step two or three might be “Admit fallibility”. From there, we could add a step about movie discussion, and the next thing you know, you're having a nice talk over lunch at a Mexican restaurant and you’ve left the “Crossfire” news media banter behind. And, who know? Maybe some profitable discussion would follow.

So, I guess I’ll keep the brown “Meditations on the Book of Daniel” dust jacket that surrounds this book on movies and Buddhism. It seems fitting for a book that spends so much time re-wrapping our thoughts of movies in Buddhist- colored paper. But, maybe it can remind me of more than that. Hopefully, it can remind me of how pleasant it can be to have a nice conversation over lunch…possibly at a Mexican restaurant.

Recommended: Yes