Little Buddha (1993)

Little Buddha tells its story from two directions at once, and the structure is the point rather than a stylistic flourish. In Seattle, a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks led by Lama Norbu arrives at the door of an ordinary American family to say that their nine-year-old son, Jesse, may be the reincarnation of Lama Norbu's own late teacher, one of three child candidates under consideration. To explain what reincarnation means and why it matters, Lama Norbu tells Jesse the story of Siddhartha, the sheltered prince who left his palace, encountered old age, sickness and death for the first time, and eventually found enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree, a story Bertolucci stages as its own full historical narrative running alongside the present-day search.

Bertolucci, a director whose earlier reputation rested on political and sexually frank filmmaking, treated the Buddhist material as something to be gotten right rather than merely evoked. Three practicing Tibetan teachers took part in the production directly: Khyongla Rato Rinpoche appears on screen as the monastery's abbot, and Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche served as a consultant with authority over every ritual gesture and item of ceremonial detail the film depicted, down to how a search party actually tests a candidate child against a predecessor's possessions.

The two stories never fully merge into one, and that is deliberate. Jesse's own uncertainty about what is happening to him, and his parents' skepticism, sit beside Siddhartha's far more assured, legendary path to insight, letting a modern audience enter the tradition's claims through the more relatable of the two doors before the film asks anything harder of them.

Little Buddha and Kundun, Martin Scorsese's 1997 film about the childhood of the 14th Dalai Lama, dramatize the same underlying practice, a search party testing a child against a predecessor's possessions to confirm a reincarnation, within four years of each other, and the contrast between how each film handles it is instructive. Kundun is grounded in one specific, documented history: Tenzin Gyatso, found in 1937, enthroned, educated, and eventually driven into exile by the Chinese occupation of Tibet, all real events involving a real, still-living subject.

Little Buddha invents its central case. Jesse Conrad is a fictional Seattle boy, one of three candidate children under consideration rather than history's one confirmed reincarnation, and the film uses that invented, still-undecided search as a frame for something Kundun does not attempt: a full retelling of Siddhartha Gautama's own life and enlightenment, staged as an internal story told to explain the search's stakes to a skeptical American child and, through him, to a general audience with no prior exposure to the tradition at all.

The two approaches serve different purposes. Kundun asks to be trusted as history and answers to the historical record accordingly, including the political consequences that record carried for its own studio in China. Little Buddha asks to be trusted as an honest composite, openly fictional at the level of its plot while claiming accuracy at the level of ritual and doctrine, a claim its Tibetan Buddhist consultants were brought in specifically to hold it to.