Introduction
1. Nineteen eighty-seven was a great year for American movies. The Princess Bride was topped at the box office by many memorable films—Fatal Attraction, Moonstruck, Dirty Dancing, Wall Street, and Spaceballs among them, along with many movies not worth mentioning here. Number one at the box office that year: Three Men and a Baby, a film that precisely zero Buddhist teachers have ever contemplated in writing.
2. Bizarrely and brilliantly, The Princess Bride got a few mentions in the 2016 GOP presidential debates. In his article for Time, Patinkin said, among other things: “Every character in that movie is looking to be loved. I’m sure Ted Cruz wants to be loved. I know Donald Trump does. Everyone wants it. But we mustn’t look for love by spreading hate.”
3. Trigger has become an overused word in our language, but it is also the best translation I have found for the Tibetan word shenpa, which the teacher Pema Chödrön also translates as “getting hooked,” the moment when an emotional reaction catches us like a trap being sprung.
4. Louis CK’s bit “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy” and his discussions of loneliness could easily be early twenty-first-century Buddhist sutras.
5. Maybe the first Matrix movie was dharmic, I agree, but the last two really ran out of steam.
1: Mercenaries or Besties
1. The founder of the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, Chögyam Trungpa, said that the purpose of meditation is to “make friends with yourself.” In my book The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path (New York: North Point Press, 2015), I refer to meditation as “accepting your own friend request.”
2. David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You (New York: Pantheon, 2015).
3. Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence (New York: Harmony Books, 2013), 34.
4. The social nature of experience was even an inspiration for Shepard Fairey’s wacky Obey art project, which began as a joke among his Rhode Island School of Design friends with the tagline “Andre the Giant Has a Posse.”
5. From The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, by the fourteenth-century monk Ngulchu Thogme, based on Ken McLeod’s translation.
2: The Bad Guys
1. These three root tendencies of psychological confusion are often also referred to as “poisons.”
2. Technically, Westley does not kill Vizzini. He just gives him the proverbial rope to hang himself with, or the literal iocane powder to poison himself with.
3. Mandy Patinkin, “The Real Politics in The Princess Bride,” Time, December 18, 2015.
4. It is said that the historical Buddha spent a previous lifetime as a pirate who had to make very difficult decisions in the face of tyranny. In Tibetan Buddhism, many master meditators were also literal warriors of their family clans. Why couldn’t a dread pirate also be a warrior of compassion?
3: Find Your Inner Fezzik
1. These scenes between Inigo and Fezzik are only in the book version, and are omitted from the movie.
2. Road Runner cartoons probably deserve some credit as well. To clarify, for top-notch geeks, the sand in The Princess Bride is actually something called “snow sand,” a substance even worse to drown in than quicksand, but if you only saw the movie and didn’t read the book, you’d be forgiven for assuming it was quicksand.
3. These practices, collectively known as “windhorse,” are best learned in a personal setting with a teacher.
4. In our conversation about the problem with seeking revenge, Mr. Patinkin kept reiterating that revenge is a misguided attempt to fix a mistake that exists in the past. “You can’t ‘fix’ a mistake,” he insisted. “You can only move forward.”
5. By all accounts, Andre the Giant had massive back problems, and even underwent surgery during and after the filming of The Princess Bride. He spent much of this movie, and much of his later career, hiding a back brace under his clothing. The loving giant with major back problems is a perfect metaphor to describe “burnout,” or “compassion fatigue,” that is, the burden of generosity in a world of seemingly endless greed.
4: There Is No Buttercup
1. The movie does not make clear where Westley must go, but in the book he heads for America, of all places, that truly mythical kingdom.
2. I would love to see a remake of The Princess Bride that follows the same premise of the Ghostbusters remake, with a total gender reversal of all key roles.
3. See the Pew poll “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” Pew Research Center, May 12, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/.
4. Madyamaka, or the Middle Way, was a group of Buddhist philosophical schools dedicated to explaining what emptiness meant, and how cause and effect actually functioned, both psychologically and physically.
5. I can’t imagine having a romantic partner who is also your “disciple.” What?!
6. In The Road Home, this cycle of always chasing after the next “now” is illustrated with the metaphor of a commuter. When we are lost in commute, we are always trying to get back home yet never quite arriving.
5: Lost on the High Seas
1. In the movie version of The Princess Bride, Westley and Buttercup are separated for five years. In the book version, they are separated for only three.
2. I have always considered zombie stories a Western thread of the classic hungry ghost tale, a narrative of the “mostly dead” places we all get caught up in, those emotional states in which we are still breathing yet too numb to be considered fully alive.
3. This student-teacher narrative, a seemingly brutal master who turns out to give the student exactly what they needed, pervades so many stories in both East and West. In the Tibetan lineage called Kagyu, this narrative appears in the story of the great Milarepa with his guru, Marpa. Milarepa is desperate to attain enlightenment because of bad karma accumulated earlier in life from harmful choices, and he holds on to this urgency while Marpa gives him a seemingly unending list of grueling tasks that at first appear to have nothing to do with awakening. This same structure is repeated in The Karate Kid, Kill Bill, and even Christopher Nolan’s reinterpretation of Batman: the teacher who is seemingly belligerent and selfish but who turns out to train the student to overcome their fear, doubt, and hesitation.
4. My father, David Nichtern, wrote a book called Awakening from the Daydream: Reimagining the Buddha’s Wheel of Life (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016), which examines in much greater detail these classic psychological realms of Buddhism: hell, hungry ghost, animal, human, jealous god, and god.
6: Basic Goodness
1. Once again, Inigo Montoya demonstrates his wisdom in the face of uncertainty.
2. My friend Jenni Muldaur once said this when we were discussing the human tendency to date those people who aren’t good for us.
3. In the book, this pivotal line is given to Fezzik’s dear departed mother in a totally different context. Many masters have echoed the truth embodied in its skepticism of platitudes and salesmanship, and in the belief that life is necessarily painful.
4. It is never recommended to give your true love a dharma talk. Trust me.
5. Virabhadra is the Sanskrit word for “warrior.” In Tibetan, it’s pawo or pamo.
6. If you are waiting for a text message that may not appear, here’s a trick I have learned: practice compassion meditation, and imagine everyone in your current city or town who is likewise waiting for a text message they might not ever get. It might help you feel that there is nothing wrong with your desire, and that there is also nothing wrong with its not working out for you. All of us, even Buttercup, have waited for a message that was never going to come.
7: As You Wish, Part I
1. A chapter of The Road Home is devoted to the practice of listening to and expressing oneself.
2. William Goldman expressed his difficulty in creating a sequel for The Princess Bride at the twenty-fifth-anniversary screening at the New York Film Festival in 2012. “I’m desperate to make it and write it and I don’t know how,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. Maybe the difficulty is based on our narrative entrenchment: we simply don’t know how to tell the story of what happens after the script ends.
8: All Sentient Beings Have Been Grandpa
1. When I was a child, my father would make up spontaneous bedtime stories for me about a boy from an alien world, a kid named Boober of the planet Raltron. Boober was exactly my age, a sweet Buddhist kid with Smurf-toned skin and a Tintin-like adventurous spirit. Boober had his own private spaceship, which he used to explore foreign planets, each created on the spot from my father’s imagination. For a musician, my father was top-notch at creating spontaneous narrative. If the Moth StorySLAM had existed in the 1980s and included a category for Buddhist Children’s Sci-Fi, David Nichtern would surely have been crowned world champion.
2. Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind (New York: Guilford, 2015), 51.
9: Fred Savage Is a Jerk, and I Am Fred Savage
1. Chögyam Trungpa, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior (Boston: Shambhala, 2015), 9.
2. This term was coined by a friend who worked at Starbucks and had to deal with customers’ constant complaints about minor imperfections in their orders.
3. In Shambhala teachings, this is also referred to as the imperial lineage.
4. In Tantric Buddhism, depending on the specific type of meditation practice you’re working with, these heroic archetypes are also called yidams, and also, depending on their function, “dharma protectors.”
10: As You Wish, Part II
1. The classic text The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Bardo Thodol, goes deeply into the postdeath and prebirth experiences of consciousness. Is any of it true? Your guess is as good as mine.
Conclusion
1. Mark Epstein, for example, does a wonderful job of examining the life of Siddhartha in terms of the trauma that must have been part of his early experience, given his familial and social circumstances. When we tell people’s stories, it is crucial that we treat them as human beings; otherwise we don’t have anything but abstractions to look up to.