Finding Buddhist wisdom
‘Princess Bride’ tale inspired new book
The sunlit meditation hall at the Shambhala Center in downtown Manhattan is usually reserved for serious Buddhist practice — austere contemplation, the silent cultivation of wisdom, deliberate reflection on the world’s fundamental impermanence.
But one afternoon last week a large flat screen television was arranged in front of the meditation cushions, and the sacred space doubled as a screening room for a surprisingly durable example of 1980s kitsch: “The Princess Bride.”
Ethan Nichtern, a senior teacher at the Shambhala Center, reckons he has seen the film some 40 times. It is a cultural touchstone for him, almost as influential to his worldview as his Buddhist studies.
Now Nichtern is hoping to transmit the wisdom he has gleaned from the film to a wider audience. Earlier this week, North Point Press published his latest book, “The Dharma of ‘The Princess Bride’: What the Coolest Fairy Tale of Our Time Can Teach Us About Buddhism and Relationships.”
Nichtern’s connections with the film go beyond mere fan-boy adulation. He grew up knowing Christopher Guest, the actor who played the film’s villain, the sixfingered man.
Aspects of the film, released in 1987, echo episodes in Nichtern’s own life that year. And, having internalized “The Princess Bride” and practically memorized the screenplay, it has become a sort of holy text for him, a reference point as Nichtern, now 39, has fallen in and out of love, gotten married and had a daughter.
Ahead of the book’s publication, Nichtern agreed to watch the film with a reporter, sharing his thoughts on why “The Princess Bride” is such an enduring piece of pop culture and what universal lessons it holds.
Nichtern’s book defies easy categorization. Part memoir, part Buddhist treatise and part cultural criticism, its pitch is that “The Princess Bride” is something more than a lighthearted send-up of the fairy tale genre — if viewed through the right lens, it is also a trove of timeless wisdom.
Some people will buy that no matter what. As a “Shastri,” or senior teacher, Nichtern is wellknown in Buddhist circles with a devoted group of students. The son of David Nichtern, an accomplished musician and a Buddhist teacher himself, the younger Nichtern, like his father, teaches in the Shambhala tradition, and also founded the Interdependence Project, a secular meditation group.
But if the book finds a wider audience, it will be thanks to the lasting appeal of “The Princess Bride.” Despite its modest performance at the box office, the film, directed by Rob Reiner and based on the novel by William Goldman, has emerged as a cult classic, spawning memes, board and video games and more.
Among those who count it as their favourite film is Sen. Ted Cruz, who acted out scenes featuring Billy Crystal and Mandy Patinkin on the campaign trail. (That drew a rebuke from Patinkin, who said Cruz was missing the point.) Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind Silk Road, the shuttered online bazaar for illicit drugs, assumed the nom de guerre Dread Pirate Roberts, a character from the film. The sports and culture website FiveThirtyEight deemed it the sixth “most rematchable” movie of all time. And on Rotten Tomatoes, the influential review website, it has a remarkable Tomatometer score of 97.
So what makes the film so enduring?
“It’s a deconstruction of a classic genre,” said Nichtern, watching the opening scenes of the movie, in which a grandfather reads a bedtime story to his grandson. “It’s a fairy tale that makes fun of the genre, but is also completely true to the form.”
Following the quest of Westley, a farmhand turned pirate fighting to win back his true love, Buttercup, from the evil Prince Humperdinck, “The Princess Bride” is a farce that pays loving homage to the object of its derision.
(It also had an all-star cast. In addition to Crystal and Patinkin, it featured Robin Wright, Peter Falk, Fred Savage, Wallace Shawn and André the Giant.)
All that helps explain why “The Princess Bride” has aged so well. But what makes it so special to Nichtern?
The story begins with his dad’s best friend, Guest, who plays Count Rugen, the six-fingered man. Seeing his family friend portray a murderous villain left a vivid impression on Nichtern.
Then, soon after the film was released, Nichtern’s grandparents committed suicide. His grandfather, Dr. Sol Nichtern, was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and he and his wife, Edith, decided to end their lives by overdosing on sleeping pills. Around the same time, the founder of the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, Chögyam Trungpa, died, and Nichtern’s parents, devoted students of Trungpa, divorced.
Amid this trauma, Nichtern found himself returning to “The Princess Bride” again and again, looking to the story for lessons about family, friendship and love.
“’The Princess Bride’ is a story that’s funny, sad and poignant, a tale in which, after many sarcastic turns, true love wins the day,” Nichtern writes in the book. “All of us, I believe, have held on to pieces of pop culture as we’ve proceeded on our own spiritual journeys.”
Nichtern doesn’t assert that film is a Buddhist parable in disguise. Instead, he uses its exaggerated morality, its absurd plot twists and its memorable oneliners as jumping-off points for discourses about Buddhist teachings.
Early in the film, as Westley chases three bandits who have abducted Buttercup, Nichtern reflected on the name of the sheer rock wall they scale, the Cliffs of Insanity.
“That’s sometimes how meditation feels,” he said.
Later, after Westley reveals himself to be the Dread Pirate Roberts, Nichtern riffed on the Buddhist theory of reincarnation. “Westley reincarnates twice,” he said. “First to become the Dread Pirate Roberts, and then when he comes back from the dead.”
At one point, Westley says to Buttercup: “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
Though the line sounds an awful lot like “Life is suffering,” a popular distillation of the Buddhist outlook, Nichtern takes umbrage with that interpretation. Buddhism, he argues, doesn’t paint such a bleak picture. Rather, it teaches students to recognize that life includes both pleasure and pain, and that both are fleeting.
“It would have been a more Buddhist line if it said ‘life includes suffering,’” he said.
Of course, there are plenty of un-Buddhist moments throughout the film. Fezzik the giant is goodnatured but not particularly selfaware and prone to violence. The bad guys show precious little aptitude for personal transformation. And the most famous lines of the movie — “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” — are rooted in a decidedly unhealthy fixation on revenge.
Watching “The Princess Bride” last week, Nichtern acknowledged that despite being a pop culture gem, it wasn’t a perfect analog for his teachings at the Shambhala Center.
And as he observed the climactic scene, in which Inigo Montoya plunges his sabre into of the sixfingered man, the Shastri Ethan Nichtern could only look down and shake his head in disapproval.
“Not very Buddhist,” he said. “Not very Buddhist at all.”