The God of Small Films

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nother character Dondup comes across along the highway is an 81-year-old apple-seller, played appropriately by an 81-year-old apple-seller whom Khyentse Norbu found in a market in Thimpu. The apple man in the film—and on the set—is a perfect representative of the innocence of old Bhutan that Dondup initially finds so unattractive. Despite the crew's genuine efforts to make him understand that he's an actor, the apple-seller thinks everything about the shoot is real. For three weeks, each time he is asked to board a vehicle bound in the story for Thimpu, he believes he's actually going home. When a scene calls for him to fall asleep by a campfire, he does just that. When he's offered a cup of butter tea with the cameras rolling, he complains that it's not salty enough. By his last day of shooting he's thoroughly confused. He's just played a scene in which he cheerfully bids farewell to the other travelers and steps onto a bus. When it stops seconds later and backs up to let him off for the next take, he stomps his foot in bewildered frustration. "It only took me four hours to get here from Thimpu," he says to Khyentse Norbu with a slight hint of reproach. "I can't figure out why it's taking me so many days to get back." The director pats him softly on the back. "I don't know what to say to him anymore," he confides. "He's like Chauncey Gardner, the Peter Sellers character in Being There." Later that night, when it finally does come time for the apple man to leave, he gives half of his salary back to the rinpoche, asking that it be saved so he can have a proper cremation when he dies.

Khyentse Norbu was born in 1961 in eastern Bhutan to a Bhutanese mother and a Tibetan high lama father. His paternal grandfather had also been a lama. So no one in the family was too surprised when, at the age of seven, Khyentse Norbu was approached at his Jesuit elementary school by a group of Tibetan monks. They informed him that he had been identified as the third reincarnation of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, a lama and theologian who presided over Dzongsar Monastery in eastern Tibet in the 19th century. The monks took the young rinpoche to Sikkim, now in modern-day India, where he spent the next six years in secluded monastic tuition. He then moved to Rajpur to study at Sakya College where an American friend (now one of his producers) gave him his first lesson in photography. He later attended London's School of Oriental and African Studies, adopting the pseudonym "Larry Newcastle" there to avoid being mobbed by Tibetan and Bhutanese emigrants living in the capital. It was in London that Khyentse Norbu met Bertolucci and began to consider making films of his own.

These days, the rinpoche's life is a unique blend of worldly involvement and ethereal detachment. He runs a foundation that teaches computer literacy in New Delhi, a Tibetan art school in Sichuan province in western China and a Buddhist retreat center in Vancouver. He presides over his traditional seat, the Dzongsar Monastery in Tibet, as well as several monasteries, colleges and retreat centers in Bhutan and India. But he also spends months at a time in isolated meditation. While he embraces the role dictated by his Buddhist lineage, he's no knee-jerk traditionalist: he views the ossified rituals and hierarchical structure of the clergy as threats to Buddhism's survival. Buddhism ought to be treated as a philosophy, he explains. "It's about how you look at your life. But sadly, (it) has become a religious theistic thing—a faith. And the young people are beginning to ask questions, 'Why should we circumambulate stupas? Why prayer flags?'" The message, he suggests, has been garbled by the very rites designed to promulgate it, and it may become lost unless it can be communicated afresh.

The rinpoche is renowned for his ability to do just that, deftly distilling esoteric concepts even for the uninitiated. His facility with self-deprecating humor and deliberately mundane metaphors makes him a mesmerizing teacher. At a packed lecture in Hong Kong's Convention and Exhibition Center last summer, he told his audience that they could go to sleep if they wanted because the sutra he was about to teach was "very, very long and rather boring"; he then held them rapt for more than three hours. Film, Khyentse Norbu argues, is an ideal vehicle for transmitting Buddhist wisdom with freshness in the 21st century: "(For a long time) Buddhism has the tradition of using all kinds of mediums: statues, paintings, monasteries. And although it's difficult for people to accept, I see film as a modern-day tanka (a kind of Buddhist painting). Film has so much power because we're conditioned primarily by what we see and hear." Someday, the rinpoche hopes, he'll make a movie based on the life of Siddhartha, as seen through the eyes of an imprisoned Tibetan monk, but until he can achieve the recognition—and amass the funds—necessary for such an ambitious project, he'll continue to build his résumé with smaller, independent movies like this one.

Khyentse Norbu's provocative take on Himalayan Buddhist convention is also evident in the way he interacts with his cast and crew. On set, he's the least formal of lamas, sipping water out of a Sesame Street cup and expertly indulging his typically Bhutanese penchant for obscenely dirty jokes. "Most so-called rinpoches like myself are too perfect," he says, sitting outside the bamboo shack that has served as his home for the final month of shooting. "And when you have someone who's perfect up there, when you're looking at a so-called perfect being, it doesn't make you happy yourself. You think, 'Oh, I'm imperfect. He's perfect. I can never be like him.' And that's totally and absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism. It's completely a cultural habit. And this is something we have to break." In the evenings, with shooting complete, his foreign crew members—mostly Buddhist students of his—hold workshops for aspiring Bhutanese filmmakers in a woodstove-heated tent. Here the revered teacher sheds his usual air of pensive authority and becomes a fellow student, raising his hand to ask questions and carefully taking notes.

In the end, though, he can't escape being a teacher. Taking a few minutes off from a particularly tricky horseback-riding scene in the dazzling Phobjika Valley, Khyentse Norbu explains his attempts to realize a Buddhist teaching that calls for blending elegant behavior and outrageousness. "You have to be a little outrageous," he says, "or else you become enslaved to society. But at the same time, if you eschew society altogether you can have no connection to other people. And then you can't be an effective teacher." As he speaks, the crew bickers heatedly about how to deal with a recalcitrant horse. It's supposed to run away with an actor on its back, but it refuses to budge. As if to prove his point, Khyentse Norbu bursts in with a seemingly ridiculous non sequitur. "This horse's bum isn't at all sexy," he exclaims. "Usually they have such sexy bums." There is a moment of abashed laughter, and the crew quickly forgets the squabble. The rinpoche is back behind the camera and shooting resumes.