Cloud Atlas - The best film about Buddhism. Ever.

Shortly after seeing Cloud Atlas, I became somewhat of a spokesperson for the film. When I was home for thanksgiving, I think I told at least twenty people that they needed to go see the movie.

The most common response (I should have seen this one coming): “Yeah? What’s it about?”

Me: “Ummm….well, its like this story, or rather, a bunch of stories, where each actor/actress plays like 5 different characters in 5 different times and 5 different places.”

“OK…so what’s it about?”

Me: “It’s about how, like, everything is connected.”

This was more or less the best response I could muster. It’s a hard film to explain to someone who hasn’t seen it.

In spite of my inability to articulate why I liked the film so much or even what it was about, my enthusiasm invoked a curious response from my brother: “Sounds like Buddhism.”

He was right. The Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas is a film about Buddhism. And it was quite possibly the best Buddhism-inspired film of all time (although I’m not sure how much that says in and of itself).

It has everything: The Wachowskis directing another masterpiece, a futuristic dystopia reminiscent of Brave New World, and Tom Hanks in a post-apocalyptic world where Lord of the Rings effectively meets a Cormac Mcarthy novel.

At one point, Zachry (Tom Hanks in the post-apocalyptic world) makes a comment that I think better encapsulates the central ideas of Buddhism than any other one sentence I’ve heard (I’m probably going to be a bit off with these quotes): “The forces of life begin long before we are born and continue long after we die.” This gets right at the notion of dependently originating life, death, and a lack of self. We live and we die. But there is still this idea of an eternal self (atman) in Buddhism, and this quote maintains this idea of some eternal force despite our lack of permanence.

I think the most profound parallel of Cloud Atlas to Buddhism comes when we think about the Four Noble Truths. As the Four Truths teach us, and as the film demonstrates, life is fraught with suffering. But this suffering can ultimately be ended, and nirvana can be realized.

Midway through writing this post, I had somewhat of an epiphany regarding nirvana in Cloud Atlas: Sonmi-451 achieves nirvana at the end of the film. After she reveals to the world that the clones like her are all killed and fed to the other clones, she is sentenced to death. Of course, she knew when she did it that her death was impending. But it didn’t matter. When asked what would happen if nobody believed her, she replied, simply: “somebody already does”. Sonmi-451 was completely content and at peace when she died. If that’s not nirvana, what is?