How does a Buddhist reconcile the nastier parts of The Princess Bride, the fencing and torture, the poison and vengeance? Never mind the comedy—how can a Buddhist embrace all that violence? Inigo Montoya has spent most of his life, since the age of eleven, hunting down his father’s killer, the Six-Fingered Man. In the process, he’s become a master swordsman, learning every known technique of fencing, with both hands. In order to avenge his father’s death, he must help his new friend Westley dispatch his own main foe, the power-mad and greedy Prince Humperdinck, who stands in the way of Westley’s loving reunion with Buttercup. But before that, Westley must free his new friends from the mentally abusive grasp of Vizzini, the deluded Sicilian who fancies himself a genius. (Despite his arrogant delusions, Vizzini is right about one thing: land wars in Asia do take a lot out of you.) There is little in this story that can be directly considered peaceful.
The fantasy plot of The Princess Bride is a humorous collision of revenge narrative and romantic fairy tale, which means it includes bad guys, violence, and, yes, death: the deaths of two bad guys, along with the humiliation of a third. What, if anything, could possibly be Buddhist about revenge? So many modern scripts are driven by simplistic quests, with cookie-cutter plots regurgitating the troubling idea of “an eye for an eye.” By any standard, revenge is a confused act because it does not heal the initial wrong it seeks to resolve; it only perpetuates the cycle of violence. It’s simple math: vengeance does not equalize the wrongdoing; instead, it doubles it. As they trudge along, revenge narratives become anticlimactic, like a deflating balloon, because there’s simply no reason to care. You know how this will end, almost every time. It’s not clear whether such narratives could contain insight from a Buddhist perspective. At last, the spiritual usefulness of such a story depends on what you mean by “enemy,” and what it means to defeat one.
At the very least, The Princess Bride produces something that many unaware revenge tales fail to achieve: evildoers who are also funny. Villains imbued with humor, rather than terror, tend to remind us less and less of someone “out there” and more and more of ourselves. A funny bad guy makes a more inviting mirror for observing our own obstacles and shortcomings. When we start to examine the nature of villains, it leads to an often clichéd spiritual question: Are there really bad guys “out there,” or are enemies just a projection of our own inner obstacles, of those rough states of mind we haven’t learned to deal with yet?
Often, in the pursuit of humility, classic spiritual teachings focus attention on internalized enemies. Following an ethos of introspection, these arguments assure us that all our ideas of good and evil are nothing but a projection of our own consciousnesses. Enemies, they suggest, are merely reflections of those things we don’t like about ourselves. “Look within. Only look within. Just keep looking within. The world is not coming toward you. It is coming from you. You can only work on yourself. Don’t worry so much about what others might do.” This statement comes from belief in a sort of radical accountability, and proposes that the individual mind is entirely responsible for its own experience of reality.
Meditation’s primary purpose is indeed to look within, offering tools that help us observe how we have disempowered ourselves by externalizing the causes of happiness. We often move through life putting our joy in the hands of others. This wish puts tremendous pressure on the external world to give us what we want. But the world will only occasionally deliver on our desires. On the other hand, we think our happiness is impeded because external enemies are standing in the way: “Those crazy people over there are stopping me from getting work, or creative recognition, or true love.”
This argument for personal responsibility contains great truth, but its context is incomplete. Just look around you: Of course there are bad guys in the outer world! Anybody who has ever had a demeaning boss, or survived a manipulative relationship, or lived in a country ruled by an unelected tyrant, can tell you that our obstacles are not only internal, although our experience of them is certainly personal. Our world is full of oppression, and it’s just not equal; some people hold more power and privilege in making it so. How cruel and damaging would it be to tell a slave that all he has to do is look within, without holding slave masters and the system of slavery accountable for their horrific deeds?
The Shambhala tradition refers to internal obstacles—hang-ups like jealousy, obsession, pride, self-doubt—as “enemies.” This surprising wording allows us to create a needed link between inner demons and outer bad guys. Meanwhile, practitioners refer to ourselves as “warriors” on a path toward conquering confusion, both within ourselves and in the world. Warriors and enemies—embedded in the Buddhist vocabulary is its own sort of fantasy narrative, a twist of language that lets you call upon the same feeling of courage embedded in heroic myths.
Perhaps our biggest challenge today is recognizing that evil isn’t a description of a person but of a repeated behavior, habitual actions rising from confusion. More than a few reality-challenged, compassion-deficient men like Vizzini, Count Rugen, and Humperdinck have risen to political power in the decades since this movie came into the world. The results of their empowerment have not been nearly as funny as the events in the film. When a war against Guilder is plotted upon a totally made-up premise, it’s quite funny. When a war against Iraq is plotted upon a totally made-up premise, it’s not funny at all.
In the world of storytelling, a comedic bad guy momentarily takes the edge off our need to solve all the ills of the world we inhabit. A funny villain gives us a gentle mirror for looking within, at the bad guys inside.
The Enemies Within
OFTEN, A SENSE OF HUMOR is exactly what gives us the bravery required for self-examination. In order to spot the internal bad guys, we need to witness them as characters, to give them voices and personas that embody afflicted states of mind. In this way, comedic bad guys serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, they offer some cathartic pleasure, a needed oasis from which to assess the “real” bad guys who inhabit the world in which we live. On the other hand, comedy reflects back to us our own inner enemies. For me, it is important to have a list of favorite fictional “bad guys,” such as the three in The Princess Bride. Their vices give me the space to label my own confusion without vilifying myself. We are each Humperdinck every time our greed gets the best of us; we are each Vizzini every time we pretend to know something we simply don’t; and we are each the Six-Fingered Man, Rugen, every time we take just a bit too much sordid pleasure in another being’s suffering.
The point is not to destroy your enemies; that would be like crushing your own organs in an attempt to cure a disease. Instead, you work to see how the enemy inside (such as greed) can be acknowledged, observed, and gradually disarmed. Maybe you can even transform the enemy’s energy into a new kind of ally, the way that the self-enriching focus of greed can turn into the collective-enriching focus of generosity, the way hatred can reveal patience, the way anxiety can become courage.
If you choose good friends who can help you spot your own inner enemies, you might gain the insight necessary to confront and disarm the bad guys you meet in real life. If I understand my own self-centered reactions, for example, I might gain insight into dealing with a narcissistic or grandiose boss. If I understand my tendency to fill up silent spaces, a need to perform during social events, then I can develop empathy for a friend who just won’t stop talking. If I understand my own need to be validated, I might gain insight into someone else’s arrogance and entitlement.
This movie isn’t explicitly a Buddhist story. But if there is any theme in The Princess Bride that dovetails perfectly with Buddhist teachings, it’s that of the three bad guys: Vizzini, Count Rugen, and Prince Humperdinck. The three villains in this movie map beautifully onto the three core “enemies” that classic Buddhism repeatedly addresses: delusion, hatred, and greed.1 Vizzini is the embodiment of delusion (also translated as ignorance), Rugen represents hatred (also called aggression), and Humperdinck is the epitome of greed (also called grasping or passion).
Delusion (or Ignorance): The Vizzini Disease
MAYBE YOU’VE REALIZED BY NOW that it’s impossible to know everything. Living in an era when Google is not just a noun but one of our most popular verbs, we see the universe as stocked with facts that each of us does not know, overflowing with phenomena we cannot directly perceive. Every day, we set sail upon a vast ocean of question marks, and we each experience countless opportunities to feel really stupid about all the things we don’t know, yet upon which we depend for survival. For example, I consider myself a relatively knowledgeable eater, yet today for lunch I ate a salad containing several ingredients I couldn’t recognize. I ingested them anyway, somehow trusting that they wouldn’t kill me. How smart is that?
My meditation practice has granted me a fascination with the scope of facts that remain unknown to my mind. I spend a fair amount of time ruminating on the things I may never learn: Thibault’s and Capoferro’s methods of fencing, how to play the banjo, or what a kiss feels like from my wife’s perspective, to name just a few. Thankfully, enlightenment isn’t really about knowing everything. It’s not as if studying Buddhism will make you a great game show contestant. If you want knowledge, you can always use Google, but wisdom doesn’t come from search engines.
Knowledge is a very helpful thing. If knowledge leads to greater awareness about how to be kind, or how to create work that benefits people, or how to avoid suffering, then it is immensely useful. But knowledge pales in comparison to the importance of wisdom. Wisdom is much more encompassing; it’s an open and clear attitude toward the process of learning itself. Wisdom develops from a curious (rather than presumptuous) attitude toward the process of gaining insight into how reality works. Knowledge is about knowing a thing, but wisdom is about knowing the nature of things. Knowledge tells you how something works; wisdom lets you see clearly the larger context in which it works, especially the context of impermanence and interdependence. I have often seen one Buddhist word for wisdom, prajna, translated by Zen teachers as “before knowing,” which refers to the curiosity necessary to discover any truth. Wisdom is what offers you the groundedness to avoid being overwhelmed by any question life may throw at you.
When you don’t know the answer to a question, you have only two choices: you can be either curious or defensive. Ignorance is what happens when you take the latter approach. You become insecure, clinging increasingly to whatever you think you know. In Buddhism, ignorance is a more active and destructive form of confusion than just experiencing a moment of not knowing. With ignorance, you literally ignore your own uncertainty, because not knowing the answer is too scary to admit. Ignorance does not come from any lack of knowledge. It comes from the blind assumption of knowledge.
Few characters are a better embodiment of this core obstacle than the Sicilian Vizzini. Anything that remains outside the reach of Vizzini’s assumptions is famously rendered “inconceivable.” A modern-day Vizzini would be the person who insists that if it snowed today somewhere on earth, that proves that climate change does not exist. Vizzini has no interest in learning anything new. He is especially not interested in receiving feedback from his hired mercenaries, the friends who, despite all his abuses, are still only trying to help him.
Given the academic and social value we place on the acquisition of information, our culture makes it very difficult for us to feel safe about not knowing facts. We’ve all had our Vizzini moments. Sometimes our moments of delusion are very subtle. A few years back, a good friend pointed out a little Vizzini tendency of mine. If someone asked me if I’d heard of a musician or artist they were into, I would sometimes blindly say “yeah,” even if I wasn’t completely sure I knew the artist being mentioned. Maybe I did this to avoid looking like a social outcast, to feel included, up to date. When my friend playfully pointed out that I couldn’t possibly have heard all these bands, I realized my habit was an unconscious defense against looking stupid. And, just like most defense mechanisms, it had the opposite of its intended effect. It didn’t make me smarter to claim to know something I didn’t. Claiming to know wasn’t a flat-out lie, which was part of my internal Vizzini justification. I thought I might have heard of the artists in question. And yet, my “yeah” answers didn’t do anyone any good. Even if I thought I knew whom my friend was talking about, it would’ve been much wiser to say, “I don’t think so. Tell me about them.” That way, even if I heard information I already had, at least there was a chance of expanding my horizons. If I claimed to already know, my friend wouldn’t say more, and I would have no chance of learning something new. If I claimed to know, I could only look stupid; yet if I claimed not to know, strangely, I could only get smarter.
Vizzini’s insecurity about his own knowledge is a bit more aggressive, and the consequences for him are far more severe. Anytime his assertions are threatened, he starts yelling, claiming stupidity or madness on the part of the questioner. He reminds me of many an Internet troll, sans Internet. Fezzik and Inigo could not be gentler in pointing out their boss’s confusion, but it’s all for naught. Vizzini is every delusional boss who can’t empower his employees to succeed, every bad teacher who forgets that a mentor can and should also learn from his students. When you have no curiosity about your uncertainty, you fall victim to your inner Vizzini, and you will always end up swallowing poison.
Vizzini’s unwillingness to face uncertainty is exactly what gets him killed.2 His death happens when he falls headfirst into the clearest conceptual trap of all Buddhist philosophy. In his arrogance, he views the world through the false lens of either/or. He agrees to a game of wits with the Man in Black, but his views can accommodate only two mutually exclusive possibilities. The deadly iocane powder is either in one cup or the other. How could anything else be possible? I already know everything I need to know. There are only two choices in this world. Black or white. Right or wrong. This cup or that one. He can’t imagine possibilities that exist outside the dualistic frame on which he fixates. Once the Man in Black locks Vizzini into the either/or, he is able to defeat him by introducing a new possibility lying cleverly outside the binary. Maybe, just maybe, both cups are poisoned. Maybe I’ve developed an immunity to the poison we are both about to drink. Did you ever think of that, little Vizzini in my head? Maybe, instead of shouting, “Inconceivable!” or whispering, “I know that already,” we could each get a little more curious, ask a few more questions, and consider a few more possibilities outside the frames we are caught within, before the things we are so sure we know end up causing harm.
A true genius has a very different aura, a kind of thoughtful curiosity, attuned to the topic at hand but free from assumption. Wisdom makes your eyes wide. You ask lots of questions. Have you noticed that during a news interview, the person asking the question is almost always the one who holds the most power in the exchange? A wise person doesn’t always tip their hand by telling you their views immediately, unless directly requested to do so.
This curiosity in the face of uncertainty doesn’t mean you should pretend not to know things you definitely do know. When asked to describe your previous work experience at a job interview, I don’t recommend responding with “That’s a great question. What is my experience?” But if you develop confidence in your own curiosity, then your willingness to not know becomes a sword of clear perception. The only way to realize what you want to say is to start by knowing that you have no idea what you’re talking about. The only way to figure out what to do is to realize you have no idea what you’re doing. The only way to gain wisdom is to become curious about that recurring question mark. Good friendship is the arena that allows us to develop trust in the uncertainty that lies in the space before knowing. Friends remind us that it’s okay not to know everything, and that is how to develop the wisdom to defeat the Vizzini within.
Hatred (or Aggression): The Six-Fingered Man
COUNT RUGEN, THE SIX-FINGERED MAN, has never met a torture device he didn’t love. The Count is willing to slaughter a man who spent a year crafting a sword for him, and in front of the man’s eleven-year-old son, no less. He will siphon a year from your life using a magical torture apparatus, a contraption that makes waterboarding look like sipping lemonade, and then he will be callous enough to ask how the experience felt, like a waiter asking if you’ve enjoyed your meal. Count Rugen represents the next of the three core enemies: hatred (or aggression).
This level of intended cruelty, in thought, speech, and action, certainly exists in our world. Where does it come from? In Buddhist terms, hatred comes from an inability to make room for the inevitable experience of anger. Hatred is a hardened resentment toward one’s own pain and suffering. Hatred always operates on this skewed logic: I feel awful, and you should, too.
Anger only becomes a problem when we don’t know how to work with the inherent sadness of not getting what we want. Irritation is an integral part of moment-by-moment experience, and if we don’t make room for pain and disappointment, hatred starts to grow. As a habitual pattern, hatred convinces us that the best response to pain is to spread the damage. In extreme karmic cases, like the Count’s, hatred becomes so engrained and habitual that it turns pleasurable, which is when hatred becomes cruelty. For most people, our experience of aggression is internally uncomfortable, but for a true bad guy like the Six-Fingered Man, torturing others has become his performance art. When you meditate during times of conflict and resentment, your mind might seem like an internal torture chamber, a space so full of self-aggressive thoughts that you start to take solace in the negativity. You might even miss the hateful thoughts when they disappear for a moment, and then go looking for a new problem so you have something to resent again. When we can’t meet anger directly, we overidentify with the object that triggered the emotion, needing to eliminate the perceived source so as not to feel the uncomfortable feeling it brings up.
Sometimes our internal pits of despair turn us into rage-aholics. I often teach meditation during rush hour in Manhattan. As such, the class’s mindfulness practice is frequently set against loud background noise: a cacophony of car horns and sirens, a parade of slow-moving commuters who might, possibly, be misdirecting their anger, ever so slightly. When someone chooses to honk their horn while stuck in traffic, more often than not their time in commute is not reduced. A car horn helps you avoid accidents, yes, but it usually doesn’t get you home any quicker. I joke that in an enlightened society, car horns would work a bit differently. When someone pressed their horn, a voice would softly declare to everyone on the street, apologetically, “Sooooorrrrrrrry. I’m having a really hard time.”
Now, does anyone (other than maybe Count Rugen) excitedly think, as they honk their horn, “I’m about to screw with the sympathetic nervous systems of everyone in a two-block radius!” Probably not. But as we become more habituated to our own cruel thoughts in reaction to discomfort, we begin to lose track of whether those thoughts, and the choices we make when we react to them, actually resolve the pain we’re experiencing, or just spread that pain to others. Anger always has something to teach us about sadness, about grief, and about injustice. All these truths need to be addressed. Cruelty, however, attempts a trick that will always backfire: to get rid of a painful feeling that has already happened.
In The Princess Bride, Inigo ends up killing the Six-Fingered Man. It’s the only time in the movie that a good guy kills a bad guy. Is violent revenge really how a warrior of compassion is meant to defeat the enemy who embodies hatred? Probably not. So is Inigo’s fight against Count Rugen too violent to be considered a Buddhist act? Perhaps. Although, to be fair, it does at least stop a villain, a power-mad man addicted to torture, from causing any more harm. After all, there are multiple Buddhist stories of enlightened masters using violence without hesitation to stop a tyrant who couldn’t otherwise be stopped. But by the end of The Princess Bride, it is also possible that Inigo has recognized that he made a mistake. He does not express regret for his action, but rather the way he chose to view his purpose in life.
Mandy Patinkin was generous enough to speak with me at length about this project, and about the compassionate essay “The Real Politics in The Princess Bride,” which he wrote for Time magazine in response to Sen. Ted Cruz’s odd and forceful love of the movie. As Patinkin wrote, “Inigo Montoya spent his life trying to avenge the murder of his father. He found the six-fingered man, and he killed him. But he realized that that did not bring his father back. It didn’t do any good. Inigo realized that he might have made a different choice to do something else with his life.”3
What is it that Inigo decides to do, having spent his life seeking revenge only to be left empty-handed after the deed is done? Possibly, the finale hints, he decides to become the next Dread Pirate Roberts, which, as we will see, is this story’s goofy version of a lineage of warriors.4 Even if we make a mistake, even if hatred gets the better of us, we can always recover, reset, and begin again. Let’s hope Inigo made a nonviolent choice for his future.
Patinkin has certainly taken a compassionate approach in his own life. It turns out that he is now a committed meditation practitioner—twenty minutes each day. That’s right: Inigo Montoya meditates every day. No pressure, though.
Humperdinck’s Greed (or Passion or Grasping)
PRINCE TRUMPERDINCK … ER, HUMPERDINCK IS driven by his hunter’s ambition to recapture Buttercup and frame Guilder for her murder so he can take over the rival nation, expanding his domain. His is a classic case of greed, the last of the three core enemies in Buddhist psychology. We can also refer to greed variously as passion, grasping, craving, or even obsession. In Buddhism, greed is a consumptive force, the bloated product of an ancient insecurity. The anxiety that fuels greed comes from fear that the world won’t provide you with what you need. Greed comes from an engrained sense of being undernourished or unseen. Within its grasp, you overestimate the resources needed to confirm that you belong, and underestimate the positive qualities you already possess. You go on the hunt, you gobble up physical territory, you even try to consume spiritual accomplishments. For Humperdinck, greed’s vanity knows no bounds, because no one is ever paying enough attention to him. He wants Buttercup all to himself. Of course, it could be argued that, just like Rugen, his true emotional hang-up is aggression, because he plans to kill Buttercup on their wedding night in order to start a war with Guilder. What he really wants, though, is more land, which is the fairy-tale version of growing your “brand.” From beginning to end, greed is Humperdinck’s agenda, and vanity his weakness. At the movie’s climax, the mere notion that Westley might be strong enough to disfigure him makes him cower and surrender.
How do you work with the three core enemies of delusion, hatred, and greed? First, you develop a sense of humor, realizing that since before the dawn of civilization and regardless of culture, human beings have been susceptible to these traps, and about eighty-four thousand offshoots of confused beliefs and accompanying behaviors. The next step is to form a sincere aspiration not to further empower the enemies who represent these poisonous traits, either internally or externally.
Meditation and reflection can help you work with these obstacles. A teacher, mentor, or therapist can help you spot these bad guys in your own experience. But it is your close friends, and how you relate to friendship as both a process and a practice, that can give you the support to overcome your enemies. Your best friends are there to practice alongside you as you storm the castle.