Movies Abroad: The Zen Commandments

Around the clock and throughout the year, every 16 hours the Japanese movie industry completes a feature. Full of samurai swords, gangster gunfire, even Japanese cowboys short in the saddle, the movies are fed to the most ravenous audiences in the world. Some theaters actually book quadruple features. Although the country has been in a cecilbedelirium ever since it first saw The Ten Commandments, about the only type of film not made inJapan has been the religious epic. On location near Kyoto, the Daiei Motion Picture Co. is taking care of that—with The Life of Buddha, a 70-mm. Eastern variation on The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Daiei, a serious company that also made Gate of Hell, Ugetsu, and Rashomon, is trying to do something more than ring the box-office gong. Scores of Buddhist monks and scholars have been hired to guide Director Kenji Misumi through the life of the young Indian prince who, in the 6th century B.C., turned away from worldly pleasure to seek enlightenment of the soul. The advisers are trying to keep the sex in balance with the substance, the taste with the tasty; and Buddha himself —played by 23-year-old Rising Son Kojiro Hongo—will only appear in the flesh during the first segment of the film. After that, he becomes a ray of light, a murmur of thunder. The script even avoids mentioning the birth of the Enlightened One’s child, but otherwise spares nothing: the cartoon bevies of sensual maidens who surround the young prince, the rape of his wife by his malevolent cousin Devadatta, the visions of seminude sorceresses who tempt him to turn from the way of the spirit. There are also human sacrifices, torture, man-trampling elephants, death plunges, demons, ghosts and imps. Beyond that, the film will have sets appeal too: towering Brahman temples, 900-ft. wooden bridges, a stupendous, four-armed 84-ft. statue of the god Indra.

Buddha’s general adviser is Hideo Kimura, professor of Primitive Indian culture at the Buddhist Ryukoku University. Objectively summing up his work, the professor said last week: “I think it is a good picture, and it will not offend devout Buddhists. As for the mass of Japanese people, they are not devout enough to be offended.” They just like movies.