Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Exploring Theravāda's connections to other paths - what can we learn from other traditions, religions and philosophies?
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Enlightenment0106
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by Enlightenment0106 »

Kim O'Hara wrote:
gavesako wrote:The directors say that when they approached the big movie-making companies in Hollywood, nobody was interested in financing such a strange film which did not fit the usual category of block-busters that bring a lot of profit to them. So the directors had to seek private funding in order to make the film (in Germany), which is already a recommendation I think.
As you say, bhante, Hollywood not being interested is a good sign. :smile:
Some good, worthwhile, interesting films do come out of Hollywood - The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/) was surprisingly subtle, for instance - but "big budget" equals "mass market" and "mass market" usually equals "dumbed down".

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Kim
Your right babe. All the highest grossing stuff are crap . CGI and other crap. But titanic was nice though
Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form--- Heart sutra
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gavesako
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

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Something about story-telling in Buddhist literature:
…the Ucchaṅga Jātaka tells the story of a woman who is asked to choose between saving her son, her husband and her brother, if two of the three were to be executed. She chooses to save her brother, on the grounds that "the two others were replaceable" (Malalasekera, q.v. Ucchaṅga). Let us be very clear: this was a story written primarily for the purposes of entertainment, and nobody in their right mind would surmise that the Buddha set down as a rule/principle that that you ought to save your siblings and let your spouse and husband die in such circumstances. Such an attribution to the Buddha (or even to "Buddhism" more generally) would be absurd; and such absurdities are now normal, partly because of the over-arching misunderstanding of what the structure of the canon is, and where we need to look for the answers to various types of questions.
http://a-bas-le-ciel.blogspot.com/2012/ ... .html.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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Kim OHara
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

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...such absurdities are now normal, partly because of the over-arching misunderstanding of what the structure of the canon is, and where we need to look for the answers to various types of questions.
I think that should be have been "such absurdities are now sadly normal" or something like that, :thinking: although the blogger wasn't quite so explicit.
It's not just a matter of not knowing the canon, though. It's also a matter of unthinking, uncritical, incurious acceptance of 'scripture' always being 'true.'
Most of us understand that the daily newspaper is 'true' in one way, Aesop's Fables or the Just So Stories are 'true' in another way, and the road rules are 'true' in yet another way. But many people seem not to think about which kind of 'true' anything religious might be - they just 'believe' every word, although how anyone can truly believe anything without understanding it, or even trying to understand it, baffles me.

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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

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BEYOND THE MATRIX
The Wachowskis travel to even more mind-bending realms.

“The rocket ship is falling apart,” Lana said afterward, shaking her head. “We’re sitting in this capsule, can’t get out, only one engine working—and we have to make it to the end.”
In the Wachowskis’ work, the forces of evil are often overwhelmingly powerful, inflicting misery on humans, who maintain their faith until they’re saved by an unexpected miracle. The story of the making of “Cloud Atlas” fits this narrative trajectory pretty well.

Mitchell’s book is not a simple read, with its interlocking stories and a multitude of characters, distributed across centuries and continents. Each story line has a different central character: Adam Ewing, a young American who sails home after a visit to an island in the South Pacific, in the mid-nineteenth century; Robert Frobisher, a feckless but talented Englishman, who becomes the amanuensis to a genius composer in Flanders, in the nineteen-thirties; Luisa Rey, a gossip-rag journalist who rakes the muck of the energy industry in nineteen-seventies California; Timothy Cavendish, a vanity-press publisher who finds himself held captive in a nursing home in present-day England; Sonmi~451, a genetically modified clone who gains her humanity in a futuristic Korea, ravaged by consumerism; and Zachry, a Pacific Islander who struggles to survive in the even more distant future, after “the Fall,” which seems to have endangered the planet and eradicated much of humankind. These characters are connected by an intricate network of leitmotifs—a comet–shaped birthmark crops up frequently, for instance—and by their ability to somehow escape the fate that has been prepared for them. The book’s dizzying plot twists are infused with lush linguistic imagination. For the Zachry sections, Mitchell constructed post-apocalyptic mutations of the English language, which effectively force readers to translate as they go.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012 ... fact_hemon" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Mitchell told Hemon that even as he was composing the novel, he viewed it as essentially “unfilmable.” The Wachowskis struggled over how to portray the scale of the book’s ideas, and they eventually resolved to unify the distinct plot lines by having actors play transmigrating souls. Several New Yorker writers have written pieces on Mitchell and his virtuosic work over the last decade. In 2006, Daniel Zalewski wrote about the complex eclecticism of the author’s earlier novels. In his review, Zalewski compares the way separate narratives in “Cloud Atlas” are spliced together to the precise work of a film editor:
The Mitchell method reached a height of virtuosity in the entertainingly kinetic “Cloud Atlas,” in which six archly distinct narratives—each set in its own place and era, and each mimicking a different genre, from the nautical adventure to the conspiracy thriller—are spliced together, as if by a twitchy film editor. Five of the stories cut off, at a moment of high drama, like an old projector snapping the celluloid right in the middle of the big shoot-out; they resume, with equal abruptness, in the book’s second half. As the novel progresses, strange connections emerge: the text of the first chapter is discovered on a bookshelf in the second; the hero of the third section hears a bewitching recording of chamber music, the “Cloud Atlas Sextet,” which was composed by the protagonist of the second. Mitchell’s early books are elaborate games—Calvino-style curios, swollen to five hundred pages—and they are written in playful pastiche, with sly imitations of writers as various as Daniel Defoe, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick.
Mitchell’s early works, writes Zalewski, are “divided, with almost fetishistic care, into sections that resemble the movements of a musical composition.” Indeed, as Hemon notes, the biggest challenge for the Wachowskis and their collaborator, the German director Tom Tykwer, was parsing the novel’s convoluted structure.
“ ‘Cloud Atlas’ is a twenty-first century novel,” Lana [Wachowski] said. “It represents a midpoint between the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.” As she spoke, she was screwing and unscrewing two halves of some imaginary thing—its future and its past—in her hands. If the movie worked, she continued, it would allow the filmmakers to “reconnect to that feeling we had when we were younger, when we saw films that were complex and mysterious and ambiguous.”
Central to Mitchell’s novel, Hemon writes, is the idea of eternal recurrence.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/b ... ndant.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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gavesako
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

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It’s not often that any fiction writer, much less a foreign one, ends up being chased down a Shanghai street by a gaggle of fans. Yet that’s just what happened British author David Mitchell on a recent afternoon in the city as local admirers battled to have him autograph copies of his novel “Cloud Atlas.”

One particularly determined man even blocked Mr. Mitchell’s path and, slapping a life-size portrait of the writer on the hood of a parked car, shouted in English: “Sign! Sign!”

A startled Mr. Mitchell sheepishly obliged, leaning over the car to scrawl his name in black marker across his own forehead.

“This has never happened before,” Mr. Mitchell said, picking up the pace again in attempt to keep ahead of the crowd. “I have no idea why the book is so popular. If you find out can you let me know?” he added before disappearing down Nanjing Road.

“Cloud Atlas,” first published in English eight years ago and recently translated into Chinese, is an intricate weaving of several separate stories that take place across time and place.

Now, in China, too, social media is fanning the flames of the “Cloud Atlas” craze, helping Mr. Mitchell’s feed on Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging website rack up 35,000 followers in its first week.

Why is the book so popular in China?

According to one fan, 32-year old designer Li Wei Gang, the appeal of “Cloud Atlas” lies in its melding of contemporary British literature with themes that resonate in China.

“The younger generation in China wants to understand better what young British people are seeking, what they care about, what they read,” says Li. “Then there is a kind of spirit of transmigration in the book, which is an Asian thing that is also in accordance with what Chinese believe.”

Hong Kong writer Xu Xi suggests the popularity of the book could simply come down to the economics of publishing.

“These days, what gets chosen for translation is so heavily dictated by the marketplace as opposed to by literary translators or scholars,” she said.

“This is especially true for fiction because a lot of the romance and crime fiction gets translated, whereas a winner of a good literary prize might not if the book is not commercially successful in its original language.”

A lot of contemporary books are “popular” in China simply because the market doesn’t have access to the real range of what constitutes contemporary literature in English, Ms. Xu says.

But the structure of China’s publishing industry likely isn’t the only explanation, she adds.

“It’s a very ‘constructed’ book which spans a ponderously long period of time, through a series of happy—or not so happy—coincidences or reversals of fortunes, ending on an apocalyptic note. This is how life might feel for a Chinese living in China today who reflects on her country’s recent and older history,” she says, noting the seemingly constant stream of stories about polluted rivers, tainted food, corruption and other problems flowing out of the country.

“Apocalypse is a satisfying revenge for life in ‘these here times’ of the muddled Middle Kingdom,” she says.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012 ... -shanghai/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


-- it seems to be a true loka-dhamma book :reading:
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

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KelsiJayne
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by KelsiJayne »

For those interested in the book, the movie, and the Buddhist implications - including themes of reincarnation and interdependence - there is a new short documentary that discusses CLOUD ATLAS, including the insights of Buddhist author and teacher Ethan Nichtern. Please watch and tell us what you think! Do you think the book's themes are specific to Buddhist beliefs?

Here is the video: http://youtu.be/1lq3ee6gWcc
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gavesako
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

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Some good quotes from the book showing its flavour:

“What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”

“One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.”

“... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.”

“The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”

“Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

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gavesako
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

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Someone who saw the film wrote about it:

the movie is typical in that it teaches us that there is suffering, which is blatantly obvious from start to finish, but neglects the cause, the end, and the path. good guys kill bad guys and love conquers all.
it teaches us about kamma, and rebirth, but not how to break the cycle. in fact, it does the opposite. all the characters fall in love and can't wait to be reunited after death.
i do like that it showed humans being born on both earth and in other galaxies over time, that the kilesas will be cause for our destruction, and that we can become better people. i was even reminded of the Aganna Sutta, which i believe was referenced a lot.
the Mara character had a great role and so did the character overcoming him. i also enjoyed seeing the skills, and realizations, each character develops in each life continue on into future rebirths
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

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Rotten Tomatoes summarises critics' views thus:
Cloud Atlas
63%
The Wachowskis have never been short on ambition; they've been blowing minds (or trying to) ever since The Matrix put them on the map. Now they're back with Cloud Atlas, and critics are divided -- some say it's an awe-inspiring work of visual and emotional daring, while others say it's muddled, pretentious, and overlong. It's a series of interconnected vignettes that follows a variety of characters (played by, among others, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Jim Broadbent) across centuries, as seemingly small actions and events have monumental repercussions. The pundits agree that Cloud Atlas is a singular film, but while some are thrilled by its monumental scope and big ideas, others say it's too undisciplined and disjointed to realize its outsized aims.
More from the site: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/cloud_atlas_2012/

After reading all that, I may see it if it comes my way but I won't put it on my 'must see' list.

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Ben
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by Ben »

I have to agree with you, Kim.
To be honest, I am more excited by Argo.
kind regards,

Ben
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

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* The Wachowskis explain how Cloud Atlas unplugs people from the Matrix *

AVC: Do you think of Cloud Atlas as being about literal reincarnation? Is it more about the commonality of human experience, or the eternal-recursion concept?
Andy Wachowski says the film is “equal parts spiritual and secular.” Lana adds: “Again, we don’t want to delimit interpretation, and we don’t want to say, ‘We are making this to mean this.’ What we find is that the most interesting art is open to a spectrum of interpretation. We love that in the book, you can have a very secular understanding of something like reincarnation. We have the José Saramago line in there, which says the nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, which go on apportioning themselves throughout all time. This is a very secular understanding of karma. But there are also other things… my brother this week had the sweetest line ever, where he was like, ‘Of course I believe in reincarnation—look at my sister.’ We, in our own lives, reincarnate as well. We have new lives. I’m sure there are people in your life who would see this version of you, as opposed to 20 years ago, and would say, ‘Wow, you’ve changed.’”
AVC: Your films all touch on themes of fascism, oppression, and abuse of power. Is there a reason that dynamic attracts you? Is it more that these are just good traditional story seeds?
Power is something artists have been writing about since The Iliad. Okay, power is a part of the human experience. You see power dynamics trying to be understood in The Iliad, and you see them in The Master. It’s still the same excavation of power. Foucault gave us insight into power in the postmodern world, and now we understand it in a different way than Homer did, but power will be a subject in the human story, I think, as long as we’re human. [Laughs.] And so when we first read David Mitchell’s book, I thought it was an unbelievable examination of incredibly varied perspectives, and also the relationship between the responsibility we have to people we have power over, and the responsibility we have to the people who have power over us. Are we meant to just accept their conventional construct of whatever they imagine the world to be? Or are we obliged in some way to struggle against it? In the reverse, what is the obligation of the person whose life we have power over? Are they obliged to struggle against that conventional relationship? This is stuff of good stories.
There’s really complex ideas in the [Matrix] trilogy. [Laughs.] We think in some ways, it’s the most experimental, complicated trilogy ever made. And it’s frustrating to see people try to will that to not be true. But we know it’s true. And in the same way, people will try to will Cloud Atlas to be rejected. They will call it messy, or complicated, or undecided whether it’s trying to say something New Agey-profound or not. And we’re wrestling with the same things that Dickens and Hugo and David Mitchell and Herman Melville were wrestling with. We’re wrestling with those same ideas, and we’re just trying to do it in a more exciting context than conventionally you are allowed to.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-wach ... peo,87900/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


At times, karma and reincarnation may seem like a vicious cycle that never lets us off the wheel of Samsara. Why do we continue to be reborn? What is being asked of our minds? Our consciousness? Our souls? Or whatever one may call the everpresent energy that travels with us after death. For some people, the concept of repeating lifetimes of suffering, love, pain, and circumstances seems overwhelming and/or repulsive! However, in the book turned movie Cloud Atlas, Dan Mitchell's ability to create characters that represent both the details of a life as well as the overarching impact of a life on others is exquisite and daunting! One theme that runs throughout the movie is the cause and effect of master and slave or master and servant in many variations.

On the other hand, the materialists will have a hard time understanding the message of the film:
As a biologist intrigued by Buddhism, and who is exploring the parallels and convergences between this modern and largely Western science and that ancient and largely Eastern “wisdom tradition,” I find myself increasingly convinced that Kipling was wrong: The twain have met, and for the most part, they get along swimmingly.

Nonetheless, I and many other Buddhist sympathizers part company with traditional Buddhist beliefs when it comes to the doctrine of reincarnation. As we shall see, there is a very limited respect in which reincarnation can in fact be interpreted as consistent with modern biological science, but definitely not in the conventional sense of Buddhism or Hinduism; that is, in which individuals (as opposed to their constituent molecules) are somehow reconstituted, complete with their characteristic personalities, either dragging along or buoyed by their prior actions—i.e., their “karma.” For those of us interested in reconciling Buddhism with science in general and biology in particular, reincarnation remains a troublesome outlier.

Nonetheless, a kind of bottom-line, bare-bones reincarnation does take place in the literal recycling of atoms and molecules, fundamental to the biological (and Buddhist) acknowledgment that “individuals” do not have intrinsic existence, separated and distinct from the rest of the world. But this is a far cry from the more traditional understanding of reincarnation, East and West, whereby not just atoms and molecules but some—typically unspecified—aspect of an individual is reborn into a different body, yet mystically still constituting an ineffable, nonmaterial component derived from his or her prior life (rather, lives): a soul.

It is unthinkable for traditional Buddhists, and indeed for most followers of the Abrahamic Big Three, to deny the existence of souls. But it is equally unthinkable, I assert, for any scientist to accept the existence of something that is immaterial, eternal, immeasurable, and also complexly and indelibly associated with each of us, distinct from one another. When I die, my carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and so forth will be recycled into other creatures, other components of this planet and the universe (and ditto for you) … But I cannot accept the fairy tale that I, like some sparkly Tinkerbell, will in any meaningful holistic sense be reborn, reincarnated, inserted, or in any way incorporated into a new, temporary body, and not only that, but that the outcome—the precise kind of body “I” will next inhabit—is a direct (karmic) consequence of how well or poorly I have lived my life.

“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies,” we are told by a futuristic, grammar-challenged shaman in Mitchell’s bold, time-bending-book, “an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul.” I don’t believe this for a moment, and I bet that deep in your heart (notice, I didn’t write “your soul”!), I bet you don’t either. Nor should you. We all know that many “things” that are immaterial nonetheless exist: love, beauty, hate, suffering, fear, hope, etc. But the existence of a soul—mine, yours, that of the Buddha or Charles Darwin—is an extraordinary and altogether different assertion. As Carl Sagan emphasized, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and such evidence is wholly lacking.

“The” Buddhist attitude toward reincarnation is diverse and—I must add, at the risk of seeming unkind—muddled. Buddhism typically maintains an account of the soul’s rebirth that differs from the prevailing Hindu view, which posits a pervasive, worldwide, irreversible, and permanent atman. By contrast, the Buddhist perspective involves anatman, the explicit absence of any concrete “self.” Add to this the fact that according to Buddhist thinking, anitya (impermanence) is also universal, and the notion of a distinct and unchanging self that is transmitted from a dead or dying body into a new one is simply not tenable. Instead, the Buddha described a process analogous to a sequence in which successive candles are lit by the flame of a preceding one; as a result, the flames are causally linked, forming a continuing stream, but they are not identical.

Nonetheless, many Buddhists claim, for example, that especially enlightened practitioners can remember their “past lives,” and they quote various Buddhist texts (sutras) to buttress their position. But as far as I’m concerned, sutra-slinging warrants no more intellectual or scientific respect than does bible-beating.

On the other hand, I am rather partial to the notion that we “birth our future” by what we do, just as from a strictly evolutionary perspective, our present—the genetic makeup that (albeit temporarily) helps give rise to our “selves”—was birthed by what our ancestors did or didn’t do. Call it a kind of reincarnation if you must. I prefer to celebrate it as natural selection.

No one swims outside the gene pool. What each of us identifies as “our self” is only a temporary collection of genes drawn from a much vaster, shared genome, destined to dissolve back into that gargantuan, universal melting pot, and whose physical substance is shared with all matter, nonliving as well as living. Think of an eddy in a stream, not really existing independently, all by itself, but rather a temporary arrangement of “passing-through stuff,” given a name for the time being, and sometimes called “bison” or “oak tree”—or “person.” This is not news to the modern biologist, nor to the practicing Buddhist, two seemingly distinct perspectives that originate very differently yet coalesce remarkably in outlook and insight.

Just don’t confuse myth-making and poetry, à la Cloud Atlas, with scientific fact.

David Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. His most recent book is Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2012).
http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation ... oud-atlas/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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Kim OHara
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by Kim OHara »

Thanks, bhante.
I still haven't seen the movie, and may not, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in it.
Similarly the fact that David Barash rejects the literal truth of reincarnation doesn't mean that he misses the message of the film which, as the interview makes clear, is not *about* reincarnation but *uses* the idea of reincarnation to link and cros-fertilise stories about social relations.

:namaste:
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gavesako
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by gavesako »

Some more perspectives here:

This is an extensive inside look of "Cloud Atlas" featuring interviews with Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and a round-table discussion with the Directors and some behind the scenes footage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o75FEJUXVtA" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

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Javi
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by Javi »

Hello Bhante

I have read the novel Cloud Atlas, but have not yet seen the movie. IMO the book is alright, it is an interconnected series of stories, and though they are tied together by the theme of possible reincarnation or rebirth, it is not really the main theme of the book. It is barely mentioned by name or widely discussed by any of the characters in any extensive way. We just get mentions of the birth mark and some characters' thoughts about the matter, but nothing substantial. In fact, I would say that rebirth is surely not a major theme of the novel at all, it is if anything, something which ties the various stories together (and I think it's not really that effective because the stories and characters are all very different). Again the movie might be different, I don't know, but I doubt that it will have made rebirth into anything but a tangential feature of the movie. Other than that, I don't really see anything in the movie that really makes it 'Buddhist', sure it is an exposition of violence and suffering, but many movies are about violence and suffering.

Looks like a fun movie though. :alien:
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Re: Cloud Atlas - epic film about karma and reincarnation

Post by alan »

Loved the book. I've read all his works.
Don't see anything about Kamma and reincarnation in Cloud Atlas, though.
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