Exploring Consciousness Films

 

Words of My Perfect Teacher

 

A fascinating glimpse of an eminent and irreverent Lama: Dzongsar  Khyentse Rinpoche

 

 

A film by Lesley Ann Patten. Produced by Ziji Film with the National Film Board of Canada.

Featuring also Bernardo Bertolucci, Gesar Mukpo (son of Chögyam Trungpa) and Steven Seagal.

Filmed in Bhutan, the UK, USA and Germany. 2005.

Title music by Sting.

 

 

Sunday 31 May at 6.15pm

At Labia on Orange

Book with Labia at 021 424 5927

Ticket  R40 includes a glass of wine or fruit juice after the screening

Running time  103 minutes 

 

From the World Cup in Germany to the remote Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, three students are on a quest they hope will lead to wisdom. The catch is . . . the teacher. Soccer obsessed, charismatic filmmaker, and citizen of the world, Khyentse Norbu may be one of the world’s most eminent Tibetan Buddhist teachers, but it’s a job description he slyly seems to reject at every turn.

 

Unofficial news titbit: Dzongsar Khyentse may be visiting South Africa during the World Cup 2010!

 

No obsession, no fear, no inhibition . . . what more enlightenment do you want? – Dzongsar Khyentse, from the film.

Warm and funny . . . beautifully shot and beautifully pieced together. – Halifax Daily News

 

 

Forthcoming on Sunday 14 June at Labia on Orange at 6.15pm

The Cup – a film by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche

World Cup soccer fever in a remote Himalayan monastery. 

“A wonderful and delightful comedy” inspired by a true story.

 

Forthcoming on Sunday 28 June at Labia on Orange at 6.15pm

Peace is Every Step

Meditation in action: The Life and Work of Thich Nhat Hanh

 

 

 

Exploring Consciousness regularly screens new films on the last Sunday of every month at the

Labia on Orange in Cape Town in cooperation with Renaissance magazine – www.renaissancemagazine.co.za

We also screen in Johannesburg at Sage Healing Centre and Zenatude. Please write to us with your name and city to be on our mailing lists: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

 

Exploring Consciousness

Thought-provoking films featuring humanity's spiritual search

from ancient wisdom traditions to the latest interfaith - scientific investigations.

www.exploringconsciousness.org.za

 

Interesting Review

 

   *****  Portrait of an ordinary guru

By ShriDurga  (Japan)    

 

This is a film about a Buddhist guru and his western followers, a Canadian engineer, an English fortuneteller, and an American filmmaker (the same who made this movie). What you'll find at the end of nearly two hours with this group is that the guru is the most normal person among them. 

 

This is especially remarkable for a man who in his native Bhutan is revered as a god and who, if he let it go to his head, could lord it over his western students, who being in need of someone to tell them how to manage their lives have already given over to him much of their own intellectual and emotional independence. 

 

The guru, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche (aka Khyentse Norbu), is in Europe and North America one of the best known teachers of Vajrayana Buddhism, the form practised in the Himalayan countries of Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, and north India. He is believed to be the reincarnation of a famous teacher and comes from a family with a long line of famous teachers. It is not his pedigree, though, that has earned him notoriety, but his films. He began his movie career working as an assistant on Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha (1993), before going on to make The Cup (2000), and Travellers & Magicians (2003). 

 

Khyentse Norbu finds himself, though, somewhat reluctantly stuck with the job of guru. "I hate my profession," he laments. "So much hypocrisy, pretense, so much cultural hang ups. I wish I'm just an ordinary person." So, ordinary is how he acts, to the great consternation of his students. He cooks his own meals, he drinks, he goes to football games, he shows up late, or not at all. 

 

Shot in the early years of the new millennia, filmmaker Lesley Ann Patten introduces us to Khyentse Norbu while in residence in London, following him to the World Cup in Germany, the United States immediately following the attacks on the New York Twin Towers, and finally to Bhutan where we see the guru in his greatest splendor, attended by throngs of devoted worshipers. Along the way, Patten makes a detour to Los Angles to explore the guru phenomenon with two unlikely subjects, Gesar Mukpo, a recognized reincarnation and son of one of the first Tibetan gurus to teach in the west (Chögyam Trungpa), and action-movie star Steven Segal, also a recognized reincarnation (of more dubious distinction). Mukpo would rather play basketball than guru and gives Patten a quick course in recognizing bogus claims to enlightenment. A good teacher, he says, invites challenges to his authority; it shows the student is growing. Segal notes that the thousands that have challenged him did so only because of their vapidity. 

 

The film concludes with the guru going into a three month meditation retreat and the students returning to their homes in Europe and North America. Director Patten got enough material to complete her film, a remarkably fresh portrait of a modern Buddhist teacher, and everyone seemed to have enjoyed their time in Bhutan. None of the students, though, declare their independence or seem to have come away wiser or more capable of managing their lives.