Killing the Buddha in 'Kill Bill'

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How are we to understand Rinzai's admonition to kill the Buddha as a training tool to achieve enlightenment? In Zen Keys, an introductory "guide to Zen practice," the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh explains: "For the [student] who has only devotion, this declaration is terribly confusing. But its effect depends on the mentality and capacity of the one who hears. If the student is strong, she will have the capacity to liberate herself from all authority and realize ultimate reality in herself."

In Kill Bill, the character who embodies these Zen principles is The Bride, an assassin played by Uma Thurman (who happens to be, in real life, the daughter of Robert Thurman, a renowned scholar of Tibetan Buddhism). Her weapon of choice is a hand-crafted samurai sword, and it is in the context of a religious ceremony, in which the sword smith bestows the weapon upon its wielder, that Rinzai's koan is repeated. By the end of the Kill Bill cycle, the sanguinary Bride (whose given name is revealed to be Latin for "she who blesses") achieves a salvation of sorts, liberating herself from all worldly authority by following the Zen warrior code.

Perhaps Tarantino's references to Rinzai's school of Zen Buddhism should be understood in the same light as the fictive "Ezekiel 25:17" speech Samuel L. Jackson's character recites in Pulp Fiction: it's just "something cool" he once heard in a movie. On the other hand, the religious aspects of Tarantino's films are too often overlooked. Kill Bill is the work of a master storyteller in a powerful medium, and a tale of a warrior's spiritual journey that is as convincing a representation of "samurai soteriology" as anything I know of on film.