Prince Siddhartha, the boy who will one day become the Buddha, has cast off his life as a prince and becomes a monk. Volume 3 of Tezuka's epic chronicles his ordeals, opening with the beautiful boy monk asleep under a tree wakening in full awareness to a new day. We follow him as he meets with the monk Dhepa whose backstory was introduced to us in Volume 1. He takes Siddhartha to meet his master Naradatta introducing him along the way to the ascetic tradition of undertaking ordeals in order to cleanse the self of desire and become purer, entertainingly ridiculed to show how the Buddha began to question this polar opposite to his former regal life and at the end of this volume attains enlightenment.
Tezuka brings together the familiar Buddhist myth with a cast of ordinary people, tragic, hilarious, stupid, drawn with such skill and bringing the story of Siddhartha's inner and outer journeys vividly to life within a landscape and society that are both historic and timeless, with some wonderful anachronisms.
No comments:
Post a Comment