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  • Once the Buddha Was Born as Keanu ReevesThe Shaping of Buddhism in American Film and Popular Culture
  • Sharon A. Suh (bio)

Once the Buddha was born as Keanu Reeves, the Hollywood actor whose multiple onscreen emanations and real-life deeds have saturated social media with memes, videos, and tweets of his myriad acts of generosity, selflessness, and Zen-like equanimity. These popular stories bear witness to Reeves’s everyday acts of Buddha-like kindness as they perpetuate images of the actor happily signing autographs, giving up his seat on a New York subway, buying his movie crew motorcycles, and inviting strangers to share a van after their plane makes an emergency landing. These gestures are captured and widely circulated in popular culture and function much like the meritorious acts of the Buddha recounted in texts known as the Jātaka tales or “past life stories” that record the Buddha-to-be’s ethical virtues in previous lives and begin with the phrase, “Once the Buddha was.. .”1

Similar to the Jātaka accounts, Reeves’s public acts of dāna or “giving” disseminated in social media as “Keanu-Stories” attest to the actor’s selflessness, calm demeanor, and generosity, thus likening him to the Buddha-to-be. Like the Jātaka tales, Keanu-Stories hold up the exemplary model of the actor for adoration and emulation. In his article, “What all of us can learn from Keanu Reeves to live a more fulfilling life,” journalist Huy Hoang writes, “There’s something very fitting about the fact that he [End Page 276] played Buddha in the film Little Buddha (1993). He seems to have adopted a lifestyle and mindset that has glimpses of Buddhist teachings” such as treating others as one would like to be treated, practicing selfless conduct, being peaceful, showing compassion and minimizing harm. Hoang them remarks, “These only scratch the surface of Buddhism, but summarizes the kind acts that seem to drive Keanu in his personal and professional life, which is something I think we all should strive for in our daily lives.”2


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Figure 1.

Caption: Keanu Reeves in Little Buddha, 1993. Recorded Picture Company production. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Reeves’s various emanations in filmic universes, from the slacker time-traveler Ted tasked with saving the world in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure trilogy to Neo, “the One” who brokers peace with the Machines that have imprisoned humanity in The Matrix trilogy, and the assassin John Wick in the John Wick trilogy have all shaped the public’s romanticization and Buddhist spiritualization of the actor in real life. The intertextual fusion of his various film characters, the “Keanu-Stories” circulating in social media, and his personal life clearly muddle the line between illusion and what is real, between the conventional and ultimate truth, yet one wonders whether this matters much at all from a Buddhist perspective. Francisca Cho argues, “the weight of Buddhist tradition rejects the distinction between signifiers and signified, sanctioning the conclusion that cinematic illusion is ontologically no different from life itself,” thus giving lie to the solidity of our perceptions.3 In this way, the actor, meme star, and ordinary human becomes the object of our [End Page 277] affections; like the Buddha himself, everyone wants to catch a glimpse of his virtues and good looks likened to those of Prince Siddhartha.4 Remarking on the power of film to invoke a new way of seeing reality as it truly is, Cho notes that films inspire “certain ways of being in the world that have previously been attained through ritual and contemplative practices.”5 I have also argued that film can function like sutras or Buddhist texts that inspire new ways of seeing the self, the other, and the world anew. Films and their characters do not have to include traditional Buddhist elements in order to inspire this new vision, although certainly Reeve’s films and Keanu-Stories make both explicit and more subtle connections to the Buddhist world.

In her New Yorker piece entitled, “Keanu Reeves is Too Good for This World,” Naomi Fry writes about the actor as...

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