Films with alleged associations with Buddhism

Abraxas (Naoki Katô, Japan, 2010)
A Japanese Zen Buddhist continues in his secular attachment to punk rock. His master suggests he perform a live concert.

In the Shadow of the Naga (Nak prok, Nasorn Panungkasiri, Thailand, released 2010, completed 2008)
Three criminals become Buddhist monks in order to recover stolen goods buried beneath a temple.

  Release of this film was delayed due to protests by Buddhists.

Only the Way (Dang Tak-Wing, Hong Kong, 2008).
A washed-out songwriter's bad karma begins to catch up with him. His life goes into free fall as his girlfriend leaves him, his career goes downhill, and his mother passes away. All these setbacks make him live in even greater spite of the world until he encounters a Temple Street vendor who introduces him to Buddhism.

Zen Noir (Marc Rosenbush, USA, 2004).
A detective investigates what seems to be a murder at a California Zen temple.

I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell, USA, 2004).
Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin. A man hires "existential detectives" to investigate his life. According to the director's commentary, ideas in the story are based on his college classes under noted Buddhologist Robert Thurman, who also serves as the model for Dustin Hoffman's detective character.

The Simpsons episode 332 (season 15), "Simple Simpson" (Jim Reardon, USA, 2004).
Homer becomes a superhero, "The Pie Man," throwing pies in the faces of the deserving. Mr. Burns unmasks him and puts him to work for evil. As a part of this plan, The Pie Man is ordered to pie the Dalai Lama. Because Lisa has become a Buddhist, Homer is conscious stricken. The Dalai Lama is depicted making jokes and flying.

Ok Baytong (Nonzee Nimibutr, Thailand, 2003)
A Thai Buddhist monk leaves the temple where he has lived since he was five, after learning his sister has been killed by insurgents. He learns to live in the secular world and meets Muslims in south Thailand.

Travelers and Magicians (Khyentse Norbu, Bhutan, 2003).
This movie is among the first to take a Himalayan Buddhist perspective. Wikipedia

Hollywood Buddha (Philippe Caland, 2003).
This is the story of Philippe, a down and out European film producer, who lives in a tent in the shadow of his unfinished house in Brentwood. Philippe is struggling to sell a film he made five years ago to foreign distributors. Nearly broke, and on the verge of eviction, he seeks spiritual help from Master Atchoum, a Buddhist Guru. Master Atchoum pushes him into practicing Buddhism and convinces him to buy an expensive metal sculpture of Buddha.

The release of this film was cancelled because Buddhists protested about the poster (left) and the content of the film. It will be released in the Fall 2009 as a part of a trilogy titled "buddha, karma and the gypsy".

Running On Karma (Johnnie To and Ka-Fai Wai, Hong Kong, 2003).
Big is an ex-martial artist monk who has turned body-builder. He has the ability to see karmic connections. He befriends a female cop and helps her solve cases with his visions and fighting skills. But it is her destiny that really concerns him most.

Samsara (Pan Nalin, An independent Italy/France/Indian/German film, 2001).
Tibetan with English Subtitles A spiritual love-story set in the majestic landscape of Ladakh, Himalayas. Samsara is a quest; one man’s struggle to find spiritual Enlightenment by renouncing the world, and one woman’s struggle to keep her enlightened love and life in the world. But their destiny turns, twists and comes to a surprising end. Directed by Pan Nalin. With Shawn Ku, Christy Chung, Neelesha BaVora. .

Echos of Enlightenment (Daniel J. Coplan, U.S., 2001).
Allegedly inspired by the "Skill-in-means" chapter of the Lotus Sutra, which is referenced in the film.

Enlightenment Guaranteed (Doris Dörrie, Germany, 2000).
Dörrie creates a comic work about two brothers who travel to Japan for a retreat in a Zen monastery in hopes of getting their screwed-up lives back together.

The Cup (Phörpa, Khyentse Norbu, Bhutan, 1999).
Young monks scheme to watch the World Cup in a Tibetan temple in exile in India.

Himalaya or Himalaya - l'enfance d'un chef (Eric Valli, France/Switzerland/U.K./Nepal, 1999).
"Elemental, sweeping, and often majestic, this is both an engaging drama and a labor of love in tribute to the Buddhist, semi-nomadic people of the Dolpo, a remote region deep in the interior of the northwest Himalayas." — Wally Hammond, Time Out. Funded through France-based corporations. It was the first Nepalese film to be nominated in the Best Foreign Film category at the 72nd Academy Awards.

Nang Nak (Nonzee Nimibutr, Thailand, 1999).
Local monks struggle with the ghost of a women who refuses to be parted from her husband in death.

The story is also told in the Thai film The Ghost of Mae Nak, 2005 (see above).

Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci, U.K./France, 1993).
Shot on location in Nepal and Bhutan, "Bertolucci's sincere, even rhapsodic, study of Buddhist history and modern-day reincarnation is a visual delight." — The Film Journal

Keanu Reeves stars as Siddhartha

Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? (Yong-Kyun Bae, South Korea, 1989).
Bae is an extraordinary stylist whose understanding of cinema's relationship to intuitive knowledge gives this film its revelatory quality, and shows us the promise of potential knowledge in everyday incidents.

Kung Fu (television series, 1972-1975) and The Way of the Tiger, the Sign of the Dragon, its feature-length pilot (Jerry Thorpe, USA, 1972, ) 74 mins.
David Carradine stars as Kwai Chang Caine, a Chinese-American Buddhist priest, trained in the Dharma and martial arts in China's famous Shaolin Temple. Caine travels around the American wild west in the 19th century, philosophizing, righting wrongs, attempting to spread peace and inevitably kicking bad-guy butts.

Siddhartha (Conrad Rooks, 1972).
The story of a young Indian who embarks upon a journey to find the meaning of existence. Based on the novel by Hermann Hesse.

The Burmese Harp. (J. Biruma no tategoto, Dir. Kon Ichikawa, Japan, 1956).
At the end of WWII, a soldier of the Japanese army escapes capture by pretending to be a Burmese Buddhist with surprising consequences.

Zen (Banmei Takahashi, Japan, 2009)
A biopic on the life of Dogen. Japan Times review: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20090116a3.html
Japanese with English and other subtitles.

Recalling a Buddha: Memories of HH Karmapa XVI (Gregg Eller, USA, 2006).
The life story of His Holiness Karmapa XVI is told by those close to him in Tibet.

Not only was a Buddha recalled but so was the film. Likely because of complaints about production and content quality (see reviews on Amazon, etc.), the filmmakers decided to rework it. Currently (April 2009) it is not for sale.

Milarepa (Neten Chokling, Bhutan, 2006).

Angry Monk: Reflections on Tibet (Luc Schaedler, 2005) 
Description at  http://icarusfilms.com/new2006/angr.html

Kundun (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1997).

Seven Years in Tibet (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1997).
True story of Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountain climber who became friends with the Dalai Lama at the time of China's takeover of Tibet.

Kūkai (Setō Junya, Japan, 1984)
Currently in Japanese with no foreign subtitles. But if you know the basics of his life story it's easy to follow.

3-Iron (original Korean title means Empty Houses. Kim Ki-duk, Korea, 2004).
The plot revolves around the relationship between a young drifter (a kind of modern-day śramana) and a battered housewife. The film is notable for the lack of dialogue between its two main characters.

Waking Life (Richard Linklater, U.S., 2001).
"Richard Linklater's (Slacker) first animated work, a painterly extension of reality, is astoundingly lovely and touching...The interplay between words and animation is both haunting and startlingly witty." — David Denby, The New Yorker

After Life (Wandâfuru raifu, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 1999).
After people die, they spend a week with counselors, also dead, who help them pick one memory they can take to eternity. They describe the memory to the staff who work with a crew to film it and screen it at week's end; eternity follows.

Fearless (Peter Weir, U.S., 1993).
Inspired by the story of an airplane crash survivor, Max (Jeff Bridges), who is incapable of coping with life, finds comfort in another survivor, Carla (Rosie Perez). Weir describes, "when the aircraft crashes [Max] discovers a wonderful treasure: an almost ecstatic acceptance of death, a glimmer of eternity." — Berlin Film Festival

The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, U.S., 1999).
Since it's premier "in 1999, its strength as metaphor has only increased... The monopolization of information by vast corporations; the substitution of an agreed-on fiction, imposed from above; the sense that we have lost control not only of our fate but of our small sense of what's real-all these things can seem like part of ordinary life now." — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

Fight Club (David Fincher, USA, 1999).
Analyzed by critics as a man’s philosophical struggle with himself, progressing along the lines of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path.

Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1953).
This simple, sad story of the gap between generations in a Japanese family revealed to Western viewers the poetic acuteness of Ozu's style. "Wonderful....One of the manifest miracles of cinema." — New Yorker

Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1990), also called Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, USA, 1991).

Bank robber/surfer/skydivers led by a free-spirit called Bodhi/Bodhisattva are hunted by a federal agent who learns about life from them.

My Dinner With André (Louis Malle, U.S., 1981).
"It's like a mad tea party or a mad, modern Platonic dialogue about the meaning of life... Malle creat[es] the illusion that we are simply listening in on the dinnertime conversation of the playwright Wallace Shawn and the former avant-garde theater director André Gregory." — Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne, USA, 1990).
A man wounded in Vietnam continues to live a nightmare in New York. His path of intrigue and horror seemingly leads to hell or heaven. Allegedly based in some part on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol).

Angulimala (Sutape Tunnirut, Thailand, 2003).
Based on a Jataka. Believing people seek release from suffering, Angulimala tries to kill 1000 people for his own spiritual merit. After an hour and a half of murder and mayhem, Angulimala meets the Buddha and lives a converted live for the last 10 minutes of the film.