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119 c h a p t e r 7 Text, Tradition, Transformation, and Transmission in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai Mario D’Amato One of the ways in which Buddhism enters the cultural imagination of the West is through film. This chapter addresses the imagination of Buddhism in the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jarmusch 1999). I am interested both in how Buddhism has been imagined to play a role in the self-understanding of the film’s protagonist and in how we—as scholars of religion interested in the transformation and transmission of Buddhism across cultures—might imagine Buddhism through reflecting on the film. I will not focus primarily on the Buddhist motifs in the film (although they are certainly present, even if Buddhism itself remains unnamed), nor will I argue that Ghost Dog is in some way a Buddhist film (although I think it is). Rather, I will use the film as the basis for a meditation on the concepts of text, tradition, transformation, and transmission in Buddhism. First, a brief question: What does a violent film about an African American contract killer who imagines himself to be a samurai following the code of bushidō have to do with Buddhism? Quite a bit. “Bushidō” (lit., “the way of the warrior”) is the name given to the imagined ethico-religious code followed by the samurai.1 One influence on bushidō, and on samurai religion generally, was Buddhism, especially Zen.2 So while the film employs Buddhist motifs, these are refracted through the lens of bushidō. One of bushidō’s representative texts is Hagakure (“In the Shadow of Leaves”), composed by a Buddhist monk, Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719). Hagakure plays a central role in the film, with each chapter of the film beginning with Ghost Dog reading a passage from the text3 and reflecting in some way the quotation from Hagakure that precedes it.4 The text provides the vision for Ghost Dog’s own understanding of himself as a samurai in a late twentieth-century urban American 120 Mario D’Amato environment. According to a passage from Hagakure read in the film’s opening scene, the way of the warrior is found in constant meditation on death—or in Buddhist terms, on the transient nature of things: The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. (Jarmusch 1999; Yamamoto 2002, 17, 164) In the film, Ghost Dog’s life is indeed a meditation on death: as a contract killer, his profession revolves around the question of life and death. Hence from a thematic perspective, the film’s violence highlights the bushidō—and by extension Buddhist—undercurrents of the film.5 For those who are not familiar with the film, I have included a summary as an appendix. Text In Buddhism, as in various other religious traditions, the role of the text is fundamental. The dharma after all is only made manifest through specific collections of utterances—through scriptural texts such as sutras, or discourses of the Buddha, and treatises that further elucidate the meaning of Buddhist teachings. Without such fundamental texts, a religious tradition remains unarticulated and intransmissible; but with religious texts, followers of a tradition are offered a vision of life and the world. We might reflect on the centrality of the text for a religious tradition through considering the role of the text in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. In the film, Ghost Dog’s very way of life, his entire mode of being in the world, is shaped by an ancient vision of the way of the samurai, a vision mediated for Ghost Dog by a specific text, Hagakure. As noted above, each chapter of the film is structured by a passage from the text, suggesting that Ghost Dog’s life is a meditation on and embodiment of the text’s vision of things. As Paul Griffiths points out, according to...

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