Fairy Tales, the Real World, and True Love
Hello. My name is Ethan Nichtern. The Six-Fingered Man was my father’s best friend. Prepare to read.
David Nichtern and Christopher Guest were born two weeks apart and grew up together in downtown New York City. Christopher was not yet a diabolical villain with an extraneous digit, nor one of the greatest comedic actors of his time. David was not yet a Buddhist, much less a Buddhist teacher. What they shared was an urban childhood and a love of making music (bluegrass, mostly, more or less the hip-hop of kids from the Village in the early 1960s). In their friendship, Chris was never the sadistic Count Rugen. Instead, he played a part more like Andre the Giant’s Fezzik, defending my father against playground bullies. I have heard many stories of their swashbuckling together like Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts, unsheathing guitars instead of swords. They moved through city adventures from west to east, from Waverly Place to Stuyvesant Town—having fun, storming castles, being kids.
Christopher’s role in The Princess Bride was the reason I was excited to see the movie when it was first released in the fall of 1987. I was nine years old. All I knew was that this man I had known all my life played a bad guy (a hilarious idea in itself) and that the movie was a kind of fairy tale, but not just any fairy tale. Even upon first viewing it, I knew the film was a parody. It felt like a sarcastic Xerox of the fairy-tale genre, as if a smart older kid were making fun of some cheesy story I’d already seen a thousand times.
I remember enjoying the movie that first time; it displaced my troubled mind into humor and fantasy during a particularly rough stretch of childhood, a yearlong span that included my parents’ difficult divorce, my grandparents’ double suicide, and, like a candle torched at both ends, the premature death of my parents’ Buddhist teacher, the man who exerted a central gravitational pull in the galaxy of their lives (and later mine), the brilliant and enigmatic Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
On top of all that trauma, there was the day-to-day chaos of fourth grade. My best friend had skipped forward a grade without me after third grade, leaving me to fend for myself. Fending for myself was a difficult task, because I had two surgeries that year to help with a mild case of cerebral palsy on my right side. Surgery left me outcast, in a cast, for a significant portion of the school year. My best friend skipping ahead and my gimp status together made me, objectively speaking, the second least popular kid in my class. Sadly, this popularity ranking happened at a hippy New York City school founded in the 1960s on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of an inclusive multicultural society. This wonderful school preached nothing but diversity and acceptance daily—a sign that even the best utopias hold popularity contests. Fortunately for me, I still had one friend at school that year. Unfortunately for both of us, his social spasms, angry demeanor, and prepubescent unibrow made him, also objectively speaking, the number one least popular kid in our class.
Our friendship was mostly circumstantial and far from ideal. But still, he was my friend, my only real friend that year—that is, until, like the worst Buddhist kid in the world, I told him we couldn’t hang out anymore, that he was dragging me down. His gruff demeanor crumbled as he started to cry. It was an awful move on my part, a classic case of the weak abandoning the weaker. Thirty years later, my choice still haunts me occasionally during sessions of compassion meditation.
Going to see The Princess Bride that first time was a great escape. In it were swashbuckling friends, ridiculous villains, and a valiant quest for the love of a lady with a very strange name. Most important, there was a grandfather using this wacky tale to comfort his grandson (almost exactly my age) on a sick day from school. Because I wanted to stay in bed and play Nintendo for most of fourth grade, I could easily relate. Much of the movie’s existential brilliance was lost on me, though. I was just looking to escape: escape my parents’ fighting, escape the indecipherable popularity contest at school, escape the truth of my suffering, and maybe escape this version of Earth altogether. I liked the movie’s goofy action. It was a story with just a few, but not too many, “kissing parts.”
Only much later, after many more viewings, did I learn that The Princess Bride was beloved by so many. When I say “beloved by so many,” I am talking about a pirate ship that slowly sailed far beyond cult status, anchoring itself now in the very heart of the American postmodern canon. Just ask your friends: an abnormally large percentage of humans between the ages of two and two hundred now revere, or at the very least respect, this movie. (The few people I’ve met who haven’t seen it often express knowing embarrassment at their cinematic omission.) At its mere mention, many people will pause and enter a visualization, an inner kingdom of bright nostalgia and appreciation. As far as anyone can tell, the film’s retroactive popularity was unforeseen. When the movie was released, the novel by William Goldman on which his faithfully adapted screenplay was based was not well known, at least not among us Gen Xers. The film grossed only $31 million in theaters that year, making it the forty-first most popular film at the box office in 1987.1
As I grew older, I kept returning to the movie again and again, across three decades of growing up, a process of maturation that now (in my late thirties, even after decades of studying and teaching Buddhism) may still just be getting under way. Many other people I know went through a similar process with The Princess Bride. As the movie aged, and as those of us who were the Grandson’s (Fred Savage’s) age grew up (or tried to), it caught on, and became enshrined as an irrefutable staple of Generation X culture. The mixology-obsessed cocktail bar down the block from my Brooklyn apartment serves a mezcal-based drink (though brandy would be more appropriate) called the Inigo Montoya. The glass even comes with a toothpick sword across the rim, exacting heroic revenge against a six-sectioned slice of orange. The bar is one of many establishments I’ve been to that reference the movie on their menus. In 2015 the statistical website FiveThirtyEight conducted a survey of the twenty-five most rewatchable movies of all time—ever. The Princess Bride was number six. Among a particularly large swath of the population, a population that shares a wounded optimism about our society’s ability to experience true love, and a rapier-quick sense of irony, the movie is surely number one. It is full of so many popular one-liners that whenever it is mentioned, people trip over themselves to choose which line to quote, hoping the person they are talking to doesn’t know the story quite as well as they do. More often than not, they are wrong.
The Princess Bride is a story that’s funny, sad, and poignant, a tale in which, after many sarcastic turns, true love wins the day. Twice. I sometimes quote the movie in my lectures on Buddhism. When discussing the human tendency to idealize and objectify romantic love, I’ll say something like “Whether you’re looking for Prince Charming or Princess Buttercup…” Generally, it turns out, more people in the audience get the reference to Princess Buttercup than to Prince Charming.
I estimate that I’ve seen The Princess Bride on average once per year since 1987—maybe thirty screenings. My estimate is quite conservative, so you don’t think I’m weird. While a few amnesiac years passed without any viewings, a few single days that were stormy both inside and out included multiple rewinds (or, later on, multiple clicks). I have watched it alone and with friends. I’ve watched it while single, and I’ve watched it on dates. I’ve watched it as a litmus test for compatibility with lovers, and I’ve watched it while grieving those who turned out not to be my Princess Buttercup. I’ve watched it while bored, and I’ve watched it while lamenting nothing but the grinding passage of time. I’ve watched it while missing my grandparents and fighting with my parents. And I’ve watched it when I didn’t want to meditate. In a not-too-distant future, I hope to watch it with my children and, perhaps, if they wish, as they wish, my grandchildren.
I am not going to say that the story of The Princess Bride taught me how to love—that would be ridiculous. Living a human life, one dotted with confusion and composed of intermittent periods of mindfulness and compassion, has taught me what I know about love. The purpose of this book is to pay respect to the cultural companionship we each must keep while trying to deepen our spiritual lives. It’s an homage to the stories that keep us feeling safe as we navigate the uncomfortable path of self-discovery.
All of us, I believe, have held on to pieces of pop culture as we’ve proceeded on our own spiritual journeys. My most consistent companion has been The Princess Bride. As for the movie’s relation to Buddhism—it may be correlation rather than causation, but here’s the truth: almost everything I know about relationships, I learned over the past thirty years of doing two things that seem to have very little to do with each other—loving The Princess Bride and practicing Buddhism.
No Such Thing as a Relationship Expert
THE OTHER THING YOU NEED to know about me, besides my loving a postmodern fairy tale, is this: I teach Buddhism, or “Awake-ism,” to use my own, more literal and accessible translation of the Sanskrit term. Another Sanskrit word, dharma, refers to any gathered body of teachings. This book is therefore the gathered teachings and experiences that have been useful to me while studying relationships and loving this movie. While the traditional teachings of Awake-ism focus on mindfulness in a personal and intimate manner, students of Buddhism find that the vast majority of what we deal with along the path of awakening has to do with our relationships. (Sometimes I think that if we didn’t have to deal with relationships, we would probably be enlightened already.) If you ask people why they are really interested in studying Buddhism, and you dig (not very) deeply, you will almost always find your way to a conversation about difficulties they have understanding themselves in relationship to other people and to the world. From this struggle arises the search for a “master,” the expert, or “guru,” whose blessings we wish to receive. We long to find a genuine hero of living well in relationships, an emotional healer like Miracle Max, or else a Man (or Lady) in Black who has mastered love, someone who can let the rest of us in on the secret before we commit any more of the classic blunders.
I have worked with thousands of people on the practice of meditation, and it turns out, after all, that nobody comes to meditation looking to find their breath. Nobody is looking for a mantra. Nobody is looking for a teacher, or an altar, or a shrine, or even a community to practice with—although all these things often prove helpful to what we are seeking. What folks always come looking for is a way to be more present, less stressed, and more effective in life. Occasionally a student wants to leave her whole life behind and immerse herself in a long, solitary retreat. But what is a retreat, anyway? A retreat just means you crave some time and space away from your claustrophobic human relationships.
So, it really is this simple: we get on the spiritual path because either we want tools for our relationships or we want to escape those relationships for a while. We want to escape relationships only because we think we lack the tools to deal with other people sanely. Regardless, relationships, and our struggles with them, are the crux of any spiritual path.
In one word, life is about interdependence. Life is a web of relationships, a cohort of people rubbing up against, and rubbing off on, one another. We each fumble through life for a brief series of moments, anchored only by our connection with our own minds, and our connection with other beings. Sometimes the web of human relationships around us feels grounding and supportive. Sometimes it feels like a sticky trap, a spiderweb.
Modern neuroscience demonstrates how social we human beings are. You only really know you are alive because you relate your own feelings and calibrate your own nervous system with those of other people: people called family, people called friends, people called colleagues. Then there’s the gargantuan question of romance—how to use tools like Tinder mindfully and Match.com compassionately, how to survive the inevitable heartbreaks. Maybe (if it’s your thing) you’re wondering how to find your Prince Charming or your Princess Buttercup, or how to stay present with your match after you’ve already found them, or after you’ve started raising new little princes and princesses together. What would life be without all these relationships? It wouldn’t be much at all—nothing that any human could recognize at least.
The “dharma” contained in The Princess Bride is all about relationships. The story offers a perfect canvas upon which to explore the three things that almost always take over the discussion when I teach Buddhism: the dharma of friendship, the dharma of romance, and the dharma of family. First, you have one of the best on-screen friendships ever: the circumstances that bring together the Spaniard Inigo Montoya, the giant Fezzik, and later Westley (aka Farmboy, aka the Man in Black, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts) on a quest for vengeance and love. Second, you have a tale of romance with more insight than any rom-com I’ve ever seen or been forced to sit through. Buttercup and Westley reunite and discover how their love can be realized despite the obstructing forces of a hilariously greedy, delusional, and war-mongering world. Third, and most important, you have the tender truth of family: the Grandfather and Grandson privately sharing this fairy tale in the “real” world, on a sick day in suburban Chicago.
You might seek guidance in other relationships, such as those in your career, creative practice, or social justice work. But if you become more mindful in your personal relationships, then the relationships with coworkers or creative partners, or any other members of society you can think of, will only flourish. After all, as many masters have noted, the hardest relationships to imbue with spiritual principles are usually the most intimate ones. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the modern founder of the Shambhala Buddhist tradition I study and teach, once said, “It’s possible that you could become enlightened everywhere except around your family.” In the Zen tradition, there is a saying: “If you want to know if a master is truly enlightened, ask their spouse.” We don’t have to get “enlightened” to benefit from our intimate relationships, but the message is clear: if you learn about mindfulness or empathy by working with those closest to you, then your relationship with everyone else will be illuminated. That is, if you can figure out family, romance, and friendship, you can handle just about anyone or anything. If you work on your own relationships wholeheartedly, that might grant you the insight necessary to change the world. Maybe you could even deal with a mean old politician—say, Texas senator Ted Cruz, who is, surprisingly, one of this movie’s biggest fans. (A former presidential candidate, Cruz does magnificent impressions of multiple characters in this movie, especially Billy Crystal’s Miracle Max. This fact might complicate our moral understanding of The Princess Bride. Of course, after Miracle Max’s heart is touched by love, he comes to believe in accessible health care for the poor. Ted Cruz … not so much. Cruz’s confusion about the political meaning of the movie led to Inigo Montoya himself, Mandy Patinkin, taking Cruz to task in a Time magazine op-ed.)2
I hold the title of a senior Buddhist teacher in a lineage with deep roots in Tibetan spiritual and psychological wisdom, and I’ve held this title since the age of thirty-two. People, therefore, look to me as an expert on life, requesting all kinds of advice on situations with which I sometimes have very little personal experience. It’s fascinating how often people want to be told what to do in relationships. We all want someone who knows what they are talking about to be our guide through the Fire Swamps of fear, pain, desire, and miscommunication. And there’s a lot of theoretical advice out there, opinions that suggest we treat human relationships as some kind of “game” to win, or some kind of karmic sweepstakes for which we only need to scratch off a lottery ticket or learn a few “secret” tricks of the trade.
From a Buddhist standpoint, there’s nothing to win in a relationship, just as there’s nothing to win in life—except, of course, the deep satisfaction that comes from appreciation, collaboration, and love. When all that fortune cookie wisdom and quasi-spiritual advice about how to “get what you want” fails, when we find ourselves struggling to communicate clearly or to connect fully with others, we get depressed and think, “I guess I’m just bad at relationships.” I’ve recognized some version of this thought crawling around in the not-so-friendly nooks of my own mind so many times that I’ve lost count.
Guess what: everyone is bad at relationships, at least when it comes to making mistakes. In my humble opinion, nobody is “great” at this dance of desire, love, and humanity. While I might be considered a relative authority on meditation or Buddhist psychology, I am definitely no master of relationships. And I don’t think anyone else is, either.
That’s right, nobody is a relationship expert. Let me be clear: Of course, certain professionals have extensive psychological training to help others with their relationships. I am not claiming that this training is in any way invalid. Seeking relationship guidance from a third party with the skills to help can be one of the smartest and most humbling things we ever do. But the only way to progress with relationships is to connect with our longing to know ourselves more deeply, and to extend that longing to knowing others as well. By definition, no single person can be an expert at relationships. Every relationship is a collaboration between (at least) two people, and an expert is one lone person. A relationship is a movement beyond oneself, a stretch outside the private domain of experience. The very act of relating to another human being is the act of relinquishing your expertise. So “relationship expert” is an oxymoron, and no one should pretend to be anything that has the word moron in it.
Buddhism, however, does offer tried-and-true wisdom on how to work with all the tricky, awkward, and painful states of mind that arise in relationships. It teaches us how prepare for the obstacles we face, especially those tough moments in which we are triggered by the difficulties of human interaction—all the pain, fear, and miscommunication we encounter. One of the most powerful aspects of Buddhist teaching, especially the teachings on compassion, is its ability to allow us to recognize when we are caught by habitual patterns. This recurrent triggering3 happens in an intensified way within the intimate relationships involved in close friendship, romance, and family life.
Even if your dharma practice is consistent and wholehearted, it won’t stop you from being triggered by desire or disappointment, or any other feeling on the vast palette of human emotions. Practice does not stop you from feeling, ever. If you are looking to stop feeling, good luck with that. From the standpoint of the Shambhala tradition, the whole problem we face is that we’ve learned all too well to grow numb to our feelings. This avoidance leads to a limited, cocooned experience of life, trapping us in a mostly dead state. All the practices that I know will probably lead you to feeling more. Mindfulness brings you slowly back to life from your distracted, cynical, stressed-out way of being. What contemplative practices can provide is the mental space to see the present moment in the context of awareness and love and, over time, to choose different reactions when you are triggered by karma, your habitual patterns and defense mechanisms.
Life is the opposite of theoretical, which is what makes it miraculous. After all the advice you might get about dating, you just have to show up to the date. After all the therapy you might receive to deal with your parents or your children, the therapist can’t live with these people for you. Nowadays, many of my friends are parents of young children. There are so many theories on parenting, so many of them published and popular and scattered on the bookshelves in the homes of people I love. These books contain complex theories, running the spectrum from attachment parenting to nonattachment parenting. But everyone I know who is a parent, after reading hundreds of books containing a few very helpful tips, says some version of what a close friend recently said: “Being a parent is so intuitive! It’s the most ungeneralizable experience of my whole life. The only way to do it is to do it!”
Intuitive could be a synonym for the new cultural catchword mindful. Mindfulness involves a set of defined meditation practices, yes. But more than that, mindfulness is a frame of reference for one’s life, a proclamation that the present moment is paramount. Our repeated return to now when we wander is the key to harmony and fulfillment in this or any other world. Mindfulness is about showing up and learning from that master known as direct experience. The only way to learn is to learn how to pay attention, and the only way to learn about relationships is to consciously make them our path. This requires the willingness to have no freaking clue what we are doing and to make tons of mistakes, often painful ones, with lessons absorbed over years, decades, and lifetimes. Sometimes Buddhism is referred to as a path of not knowing (also called “beginner’s mind”), but I like to think of it as the path of being willing to have no clue and still be curious. Here’s the most important question you could ask a teacher: “Tell me, oh master, how do I properly live life without having a clue how to relate to these people in front of me?” In the beginning, middle, and end, there is only one real answer to this question: “Just show up. And practice. A lot.”
The Best Spiritual Teachings Come from Personal Experience, Not Ancient Lists
SOME OF MY FAVORITE TEACHERS are philosophical masters. Deft, witty, and inconceivably ambidextrous with their material, they are the Dread Pirate Roberts of their given subject. Regardless of the field of study, it’s always awesome when the teacher knows history, context, and technique backward and forward. As a student, you always feel safer in the hands of a teacher who knows how to frame the topic. Yet no matter how smart a teacher may be, theoretical knowledge is not what we live for as students. What we live for, what we would cross oceans and scale cliffs to hear, are the personal stories of our teachers. Something amazing happens when a teacher leaves abstract philosophy or psychology behind for a moment and gets personal. Students lean in. They feel inspired by the sudden force of real humanity. It’s like a cool breeze of relatability flowing into a room stagnated by the stale air of concepts.
When my main teacher, Sakyong Mipham, takes a break from leading esoteric practices during an intensive Tantric meditation retreat and starts telling a story about a recent bedtime conversation with his wife or daughters, or when he shares a childhood memory of his late father, Chögyam Trungpa, a story that no one has heard before, a hush comes over the room. Suddenly, everyone feels like family, even when hundreds of people are present.
When the most famous author in my tradition, Pema Chödrön, starts discussing the anger and disappointment she felt upon discovering that her husband was cheating on her—she threw rocks at him—I feel much closer to her than when she is talking about abstract notions of suffering and emptiness. I want to know this woman. I want to know the woman who threw that rock at her husband and later became a Buddhist Jedi! Whenever I open up to my own students about my experiences, my mistakes, my clueless moments, that’s when true connection starts.
Some Western theorists have argued that total nondisclosure, a complete refusal to discuss one’s own human process, is the best way for any healer to help. In this way, patients/students have no escape from themselves, no chance to deflect from working with their own personal experiences. I see the purpose of not distracting students from a focus on their own minds, but I mostly disagree with this stance of nondisclosure, a defensive stance against the human “master’s” humanity being accidentally unmasked, their human awkwardness exposed. Sometimes, if you try too hard to be a mirror for someone else, you end up coming across like a brick wall. What we students thirst for, I believe, are guides who show us how to be ourselves by telling us how they managed to be themselves. That is true guidance. That is what a great master does.
In a very early dialogue on the teacher-student relationship, the Buddha said “a good friend, a good teacher, tells you his secrets, and he keeps yours.” What works best is transparency—not exhibitionism, but transparency. And transparency always requires some real vulnerability on the part of the teacher. There’s no other way.
One of the largest problems confronting modern students seeking a “spiritual” path is the need to idealize teachers, to create imaginary perfection, a sterilized idol, some action figure—a hero dressed in saffron robes instead of a cape or a pirate’s mask. This idealization results in the creation of impossible standards against which to judge your own progress. Admiring and looking up to people who have traveled a rugged path and developed hard-won qualities is wonderful. But it’s counterproductive to idealize any teacher because you think they don’t deal with the same stuff you face. This form of worship renders your own experience foreign to you. I have seen it happen many times. Idealization serves only to distance you from whatever you are studying, because it interrupts your accountability to your own path. The teacher can only tell you of their path. They can’t live your life for you.
Sometimes we choose impossible idols (rather than flawed people) to look up to because we actually want to remain distant from the path. Waking up is hard work, and if it were possible, who wouldn’t want the teacher to do that work for us? If we hold the teacher at a distance through idealization, maybe we can get away from our own trials and tribulations, our own shameful secrets. Waking up requires humanizing the people we look up to, forming a bridge between their wise experience and our own insights waiting to be discovered. Without that human connection, without knowledge of the teacher’s own process, anything we learn from them will be like obsessing over a Google Street Map for the planet Jupiter: a detailed description of a place you can’t ever visit. This distance doesn’t help anyone. What helps are human examples. To connect with teachers, we need to be able to ask the questions we really want to ask, not vague, polite ones that elicit more platitudes. Compassion is no platitude. Compassion is just a way to work with a big mess, because compassion flourishes when you feel inclusive of reality, and as long as people exist, reality will be a big mess.
Here are just a few of the questions I have always wanted to ask spiritual teachers:
What is your biggest emotional obstacle?
Who in your family annoys you the most?
Who did you vote for?
If you didn’t vote, why the hell not?
Who’s your favorite artist?
Have you ever butt-dialed someone?
Have you ever drunk-dialed someone?
Have you ever lied to a friend?
Have you ever felt haunted by a mistake you have yet to fully process?
How do you deal with those moments when you absolutely hate your partner?
Or … your parents?
Your teacher?
Or those moments when you hate your children?
Tell me, wise teacher, tell me of all the self-destructive mistakes you’ve made, all the obstacles you’ve faced, all your “clueless” moments on this journey—what did you learn?
When it comes to relationships, as both a teacher and a student, I feel the need to answer these questions myself.
My heroes are imperfect. Yes, they have wisdom, they know their subject thoroughly, but the best teachers are always still learning, and they help us glimpse the invisible bridge between confusion and wisdom. Confusion and wisdom are never completely separate experiences. Rather, they are merely different vantage points of the same human experience. We experience life from both perspectives all the time.
Teachers keep coming back, with deeply good intentions, to their own path, and by their persistence, they give us a glimmer of hope that waking up is something we, too, can do.
Pop Culture Has Become Our Spiritual Text
WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS have to do with The Princess Bride? It just happens to be the spiritual narrative I’ve chosen to guide me. There are certainly ancient texts one could look to for wisdom, and I look to those repeatedly, but I don’t particularly look forward to revisiting them with the same fervor as my favorite movies … or art or novels or any other piece of contemporary culture.
Like many other spiritual traditions, Buddhism is, and always has been, about storytelling. So, what is our cultural story? I often use pop and contemporary culture in my lectures. I use art and quote poetry; I reference apps, mention music, and certainly use a lot of movie references. It has occurred to me more than a few times that maybe it’s irresponsible to reference popular culture in a Buddhist lecture. Perhaps it’s a distraction or, even worse, a kind of cultural appropriation. Maybe there isn’t much spiritual insight to be found in a popular movie, song, or work of art. Perhaps quoting a line from The Princess Bride when I’m talking about karma, or emptiness, while affecting the accent of the Spaniard (“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…”), is a way to endear myself to an audience in the digital era, a wink of mutually accepted coolness, like a password uttered at the door to a secret nightclub of memes. Maybe this strategy is just a trick of public speaking, a way to earn my students’ trust before we get down to the real business of studying ancient teachings on the nature of the mind. Maybe it’s wrong to validate a culture shackled by consumerism, a society choking itself and the planet inside a dopamine-infused fog. Maybe people come to meditation precisely because they are suffocating, losing their minds within a digital prison. Maybe we should just turn off all that noise. Maybe I’m fooling myself to pretend that our modern culture has any spiritual value at all.
I believe there’s a great deal in our pop culture generally, and in this film in particular, that is spiritually useful. There’s just something about this postmodern fairy tale, something about The Princess Bride’s rare ability, like a perfect balance of acidic and sweet flavors, to both utterly mock and fully celebrate the genre of which it partakes. The film deconstructs our assumptions about storytelling, but not in the service of the apathy that so many contemporary rearrangements seem to peddle. Rather, this fairy tale, cobbled together from cheesy tropes and sarcastic memes, is offered up in the service of something important, something we can’t lose sight of, ever: optimism and, yes, love. True love. And not only true romantic love, but also the true love of one’s family and friends. Every time I see this movie, I end up feeling that the love that exists between friends and family is indeed a real thing. This film reminds me that romantic love (even “mawidge”), though it has been commodified, degraded, inflated, repackaged, and misunderstood countless times, is still worth pursuing desperately.
As a teacher, I have noticed again and again that it is when I refer to the stories we share as a society that the Buddhist teachings become most accessible, and my own insights most alive. Today, many of us are as likely to quote something said by Yoda as by Jesus. And from the Baby Boomers onward, Holden Caulfield’s story of heroic disillusionment has resonated even more than the origin story of Siddhartha Gautama. Just in the last week of writing this introduction, friends and students have e-mailed me to discuss Buddhist teachings in relationship to: the novels of David Mitchell, the visual art of Kara Walker, the music of Prince and David Bowie, a film by Laurie Anderson, and the comedy of Louis CK.4 And for the past two decades, people always, always, always want to talk about how totally Buddhist the Matrix is, how Morpheus is actually a Buddhist guru.5 They are far less likely to quote the Dhammapada or even Rumi nowadays. When students are too tired or upset to meditate, few of us pass out while reading Buddhist lectures or yoga sutras. Instead, we might fall down the cultural rabbit hole called Netflix. (As a teacher, I just hope my students get in a little meditation practice before the binge-watching gets under way.) So, in the face of this assault of pop culture, what are we modern practitioners supposed to do?
Culture is everywhere, all the time, and there is no way to become “mindful” outside its grasp. What if we could use our whole cultural experience mindfully, treating our culture as the shared story that helps us all wake up, rather than as the lullaby that keeps us dreaming through a dissatisfied and isolated life? It’s impossible to pretend that culture isn’t influencing our personal narratives, and therefore our privately held thoughts and beliefs, all the time. So if you come to my Buddhism class, I might quote The Princess Bride a few times, usually to immensely positive reception—the story is packed with funny moments, perfect sayings, and potential lessons. In a society where fewer and fewer of us identify as “religious” in any traditional sense, our popular culture, the narratives we have shared from childhood onward, and all the trillions of dollars we have spent and earned sharing them, are now our spiritual texts. In an increasingly nonreligious society, we are stuck with pop culture to guide our spiritual lives.
This approach might anger spiritual purists (though purists, by definition, are easy to anger), but I see its potential to reclaim us from our apathy—to help us become more connected, more compassionate, more equipped to facilitate awakening. Choosing to embrace your world, rather than reject it, is the very essence of enlightened inspiration. If we are going to avoid our wellness practices and hide out in the comfortable crevices of pop culture, then we may as well use that culture, or at least the parts of it that contain brilliance, to help us wake up to reality. After all, every thought you think while you sit in meditation is influenced by the cultural moment you inhabit. What if culture already is part of your practice, whether you like it or not? Culture is the air we breathe. Air may be invisible, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t keeping us alive.
Most often, human beings look to the ancient world for values and principles and to the modern world for narratives that put those values into action. More than any other form of narrative, our movies and television shows are the place where spiritual lessons are learned. Many of these stories teach us cynical lessons: how to be consumers of disposable objects, how to numb ourselves with isolating ideologies that keep us unconcerned about the plight of others. A few rare tales, like The Princess Bride, teach us something much more profound: true love definitely exists, but not quite the way you think.
Buddhist thought has a special role to play in the updating of storytelling. Buddhism is a tradition based on the context of the present moment, the here and now. For its twenty-five-hundred-year history, Buddhist teachings have relied on dialogue between fellow practitioners, or between teacher and student. The most important teachings in Buddhism utilize examples drawn from the time and place of the people who happen to be its current practitioners. Buddhism has no one core text except for memorized dialogues and instructions, the retold exchanges between students and teachers. Sure, Buddhism has collected bodies of ancient teachings on psychology, ethics, and metaphysics, and these teachings maintain some kind of general orthodoxy. In certain Buddhist traditions, the earliest teachings hold the greatest primacy, especially if those dialogues come from Siddhartha Gautama himself. But even these ancient teachings are conversational, relying on the characters present at that moment, revealing to us what was on their minds. And what was on their minds was based on the culture and society they inhabited. So, even ancient teachings, set in stone or on calligraphed scrolls, as hallowed as they may seem, are nothing but a window onto a specific cultural moment, one captured in time with the purpose of transmitting an insight somehow capable of transcending the moment, of extending toward a more universal human truth. You can’t fully convey any ancient teaching without contextualizing the cultural experience of its original audience. Without some understanding of cultural context, no ancient teaching makes much sense. It is context (the who, what, when, where, why, and how of spiritual teaching) that brings the teachings to life and makes them resonate timelessly. They may not have called it “pop culture” in Iron Age India, but you can bet that the Buddha taught absolutely zero outside his cultural and political understanding, zero outside the popular narratives of his own time and place. Siddhartha’s story is just one story of awakening. There have been, are, and will be many others.
The people I encounter are generally trying to understand life in the here and now, in this oddly fragmented yet pervasive culture, this strangely globalized world of the twenty-first century in which classic stories (of heroes and villains, good and evil, fear and courage, drama and rom-com, verité and fantasy, sci-fi and historical fiction, noir and anime) have been regurgitated, xeroxed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and kept on life support many times over. It has been repeatedly stated that there is no such thing as a new story, that all narrative structures have been exhausted. It is our running out of new stories that gave rise to postmodernity in the first place: the exhaustion of choices regarding how we share human experience. The question for present-day spiritual practitioners is this: How do you tell the story of your spiritual life while living in an era after every original story has already been told?
The answer we’ve come up with collectively is pretty obvious: you don’t really tell new stories, because, well, you can’t. You retell a familiar story in a new context or with a new twist, and hope the retelling is beneficial to everyone. Nobody really seems to care that there’s no such thing as a new story. We still fork over the cash and go see a movie with a derivative plot, as long as doing so makes us feel good about the experience. After all, what else are we as humans going to do except share stories, perceptions, memories, insights, and advice?
Meditators learn quickly that there’s no such thing as an original thought, either. It’s just a lot of the same old recycled material of fear and doubt, love and hate, all reinterpreted for a new moment. If we can’t find a new story to tell or a new thought to think, maybe we can learn something we missed the first time around in the many stories already told, those already written and staged and screened. In Buddhism, this sharing of stories, ideas, and practices across generations is known as lineage. According to the Shambhala teachings, if you can’t connect with your lineage, then you are truly lost.
The ability to freshly retell a story that has already been told many times is the magic of The Princess Bride. Like any Buddhist master, The Princess Bride is self-aware, and also aware of its era. It knows exactly what it is: a postmodern fairy tale, a fairy tale that exists after the exhaustion of all fairy-tale possibilities, after all fantasies have long ago been told. The Princess Bride also knows that true love is exhausted, and the fantasy version of love is, well, full of crap. One of the primary features of our cynical era is that we don’t easily worship any idealistic version of romance anymore. This loss of heart about true love makes us halfway numb and halfway fixated on instant gratification, which is a recipe for unhappiness.
An “Awake-ist” story must do something ironic. It must deconstruct false views, but in the end, it must also recover optimism for those who share the story. A good Awake-ist fantasy—and that’s what I believe The Princess Bride is—will make you fall deeper in love with the world as it is. It will make you plug yourself back into the rugged beauty of reality, so that you will want to protect this imperfect world more, and protect the imperfect beings who live here. For the Awake-ist, a good fantasy leads you back to now with a renewed sense of compassion.
When it comes to relationships, no pop culture story has been more my companion over the years than The Princess Bride. What follows are insights and blunders I’ve collected in a life spent trying to be a basically good Buddhist kid and eventually a basically good Buddhist man, a man attempting to wake up to himself and help others. Yes, it is ironic that I need to discuss a fairy tale to tell you what I know of love in the real world. May it be of benefit to those nostalgic romantics, glued to our screens, still trying desperately to wake up.