Read This: Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha

A few years back, I read volumes one and two of Buddha, a “biography” by the master manga artist Osamu Tezuka, and was immediately captivated by the visual style, particularly the mixture of realistic backdrops and cartoonish figures. But it’s not the just drawings: The very first chapter is a a parable—see sample artwork—with a heartbreaking finish, and Tezuka sustains a similar emotional involvement in his characters over the hundreds and hundreds of pages it takes to tell his tale… and Siddhartha/Buddha isn’t even the main focus much of the time. Tezuka has created several new characters, interweaving their stories with the traditional Buddhist canon, backtracking and digressing and looping it all together again and again.

For some reason, it took me several years to move past the first two volumes, but this weekend I decided to take the plunge, and worked my way through volumes 3-6, and I’m really glad I did. The story basically picks up as Siddhartha begins his spiritual training (albeit, as I said, with some long digressions) through to his initial enlightenment and the arrival of his first disciples. And though Tezuka is quite reverent as far as Buddha’s teachings are concerned, he’s just as playful when it comes to the storytelling, to the point where he’ll crack jokes about this all being a comic book. I can’t recommend these six volumes highly enough, and I can’t wait until I get a chance to read the last two.

23 August 2009 | read this |