Kundun

Kundun is a 1997 film by Martin Scorsese about Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.

Dalai Lama

 * I will liberate those not liberated. I will release those not released. I will relieve those unrelieved, and set living beings in nirvana. ... Thus by the virtue that has collected through all that I have done may the pain of every living creature be completely cleared away.
 * A brief version of the Bodhisattva vows.


 * They have taken away our silence.
 * Upon hearing the propaganda loudspeakers blaring outside the palace monastery.


 * I see a safe journey, I see a safe return.

Mao Zedong

 * Religion is poison.

Dialogue

 * Indian border guard: Are you the Lord Buddha?
 * Dalai Lama: I believe I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you see yourself.

About

 * Many films have been made on Tibet, such as Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha (1993) and Jean-Jacques Annaud's Seven Years in Tibet (1997). Do these films reflect reality? The Dalai Lama responds: “I can talk about Kundun (1998), the Martin Scorcese film, for which Harrison Ford and his wife came to see me. I took the opportunity to correct the errors, particularly the fact that it did not adequately depict the horrors that the Tibetan people have had to endure since 1950. In fact, Harrison Ford and his wife began to cry when I told them some of these horrors. » Since then, this great actor has become a devotee of Tibet and even managed to release Riching Geyde, a Tibetan guide arrested by the Chinese when he tried to give Western tourists information about human rights in Tibet . “This is why,” notes the Dalai Lama, “that these films, however Hollywood they may be, have allowed the world to become aware of the plight of the Tibetan people. He adds: “I actually saw Little Buddha by Bertolucci, and I really liked it, even if, as a disciple of Prince Gautama, I cannot imagine that an actor, however good he may be, can embody what the Buddha represents. But at least this film introduced Buddhism to the West – and that's great. » And he concludes with a smile: “Do you know that to counterbalance the film Kundun, which was a worldwide success, the Chinese made their own version of Kundun, which was so bad that even Chinese audiences didn't like it? "
 * Dalai Lama, quoted from François Gautier - Les mots du dernier Dalaï-lama (2018, Flammarion)


 * I read the script and liked its simplicity, the childlike nature of it, that it wasn't a treatise on Buddhism or a historical epic in the usual sense. It's just too much to know about Tibet and China and their relationship over the past fifteen hundred years. That was all incidental. What you really dealt with was the child and the child becoming a young boy and the boy becoming a young man —his spiritual upbringing, and this incredible responsibility which he inherits and how he deals with it on the basis of nonviolence. And the concept of him escaping and taking Tibetan culture and religion with him to the rest of the world.
 * Martin Scorsese