The Tale of The Princess Kaguya

In Pure Land Buddhism — the dominant Buddhist tradition in Japan for most of the last thousand years — the spiritual goal is rebirth in the Pure Land of Amitabha Buddha, a realm of pristine light and continuous teaching from which final liberation becomes possible. The Pure Land is paradise. The earthly realm is samsara, characterized by suffering, impermanence, and attachment. The standard story of the Princess Kaguya was read for centuries as a parable in this register. She belonged to the higher realm. She was sent down to learn. She returned. Earth was illusion. The moon was home.

Takahata read the folktale and saw something else entirely. He saw that Kaguya did not want to go home. He saw that her tears at the end were real tears. He saw that the lunar procession was not a rescue. It was extraction. The Pure Land in the film is not depicted as desirable. It is depicted as the place where memory ends and attachment is forcibly removed. The robe of forgetting is the most violent image in the film. To return to paradise, you must agree to forget that you ever loved anyone here.

This is doctrinally daring. Takahata is not arguing against Buddhism. He is arguing within it, and his argument is that the standard reading of the Pure Land as straightforward salvation may be a misunderstanding of what gets lost. He is filming the position of the bodhisattva who voluntarily refuses final liberation in order to remain in samsara with suffering beings. Kaguya is that bodhisattva, except that her vow is overridden by the lunar bureaucracy. She is taken against her will.

The Buddha figure at the head of the procession smiles serenely throughout. He is not malicious. He simply has no framework within which Kaguya's grief makes sense. From his perspective, she is being rescued from delusion. From hers, she is being torn from everything that ever made existence valuable. The film holds both positions and refuses to choose. The viewer is asked to consider which one the film's eight years of labor was defending.

Late in the film, Kaguya remembers why she was sent to earth in the first place. She had seen earth from the moon. She had heard a song carried on the wind. She had longed for it. The longing was the crime. The lunar court does not permit longing. To want a thing is to have a center of gravity outside the Pure Land, and the Pure Land is supposed to be the only center of gravity that should exist. Her sentence was banishment to the place she had longed for, so she could discover that longing produces suffering.

The lunar court's pedagogy is precise and is exactly the standard Buddhist diagnosis: wanting causes suffering, therefore extinguish wanting. Kaguya was supposed to come to earth, suffer, understand that suffering, and return enlightened — relieved that the moon never permitted the wanting in the first place.

She does not do this. She comes to earth and she wants more, not less. She wants the wind. She wants to run through the grass. She wants the boy from her village. She wants the bird that she watched her father release. She wants the cherry blossoms that bloom and fall in the same week. Her sojourn on earth, instead of curing her of attachment, gives her a thousand new attachments. By the time the moon comes to collect her, she has become a being who would rather suffer infinitely on earth than be at peace on the moon.

Takahata is challenging the foundational Buddhist diagnosis at its most sensitive point. He is asking: what if the wanting is not the problem? What if the wanting is what makes a creature a creature? What if the Pure Land's serenity is not enlightenment but anesthesia? He is asking these questions in his final film, dying as he asked them. He is not answering them. He is asserting, by structural decision, that Kaguya's longing was sacred and that the universe that punished it was the smaller intelligence.