Have you seen a movie lately (say in the last five years!) that made you think: Why, there’s a good Buddhist lesson there! If so, what was the movie and what was the lesson?
I am not a movie person, and have not seen any recent movies. That being said, the movie that most moved me is a classic 1950 movie called “Rashomon.” It has the Buddhist lesson of “Right Views.”
Of course, this is a classic Akira Kurosawa movie starring a young Toshio Mifune and all that. In this movie, there are four versions of an event, a person’s death, a Samurai warrior.
The lesson is that we don’t really know what happened, but each person has their own version of what happened. So, we are left to wonder who is telling the truth or if any of them are telling the truth or only their version.
This is a reminder that we have to be careful in judging others, and to question our own selfish motives. “Right Views” means things are what they are though we don’t all see them the same, and we have to realize how difficult it is to determine what really happened.
Gassho (with palms together),
Rev. Ron