From the Garden of Eden to Nirvana: A Comparative Reading of Immortality in the Documentary 'The Chosen Child'

The documentary film 'The Chosen Child,' directed by Nati Baratz (2008), was screened at the 142nd session of 'Sunday Documentaries' at the Ostad Naseri Hall of the Iran House of Artists, where Saman Bayat reviewed it with audience participation.

According to Ambassador Arjan's report, quoted by the House of Artists, Saman Bayat, by analyzing the ontological concepts in the documentary "The Chosen Child" directed by Nati Baratz, believes that the meaning center of this work, rather than being based on the phenomenon of reincarnation, relies on the fundamental concepts of heaven and immortality.

With a comparative analysis of the image of heaven in religions and mythology, he said: In the Islamic perspective and based on verse 31 of Surah Faslat, heaven is a place to achieve every wish and desire. While in the narrative of the Torah, heaven is not a future destination, but a lost origin; The Garden of Eden from which a person fell after being deceived and now yearns to return to it. In Christianity, this place is tied to the direct presence of God, and in Greek mythology, Elysium is a classy and exclusive paradise for heroes that does not allow the downtrodden.

He also distinguished between these perceptions and Eastern traditions and added: In Hinduism, heaven is not unconditional and eternal, and there is a possibility of falling from it, but in Buddhism, heaven is beyond the satisfaction of sensual desires, a place to achieve awareness and nirvana, while hell is considered an endless cycle of repetition.

Bayat went on to psychologically analyze the concept of eternity in the context of human beliefs, touching on its dual and frightening aspect and said: In Abrahamic religions, we are faced with the idea of ​​eternal heaven; Where the impossible is within reach. But the fundamental question is whether the concept of eternity and the endless flow of time is attractive or scary? The unlimited extension of desires over thousands and billions of years can carry a terrible meaning.

Referring to the archetypal search for immortality in the myth of Gilgamesh, he said: The question of whether immortality is really equivalent to infinite time is an old concern that can also be seen in the epic of Gilgamesh and his struggle to find the medicine of life in the heart of the mountains. An effort that is challenged when the hero falls asleep on the way back, and makes meaningful the thematic layers of Natty Baratz's documentary in the relationship between man's mortality and his eternal thirst for survival.

This cinema researcher, in the continuation of the analysis of the relationship between the myth and the immortality of the epic of Gilgamesh, considered the departure point of a philosophical question about the nature of human footprints on the world and said: When in the mythological narrative, a snake devours the plant of life and Gilgamesh loses the opportunity of biological immortality, he is faced with a fundamental question that if I am not going to live forever, what will be left of me after my death? This is the same gap that is reproduced in the Greek myth of Tithonus; Where he asks for immortality from the gods, but because he did not ask for eternal youth, he is trapped in old age and absolute imprisonment in the suffering of old age. A tragic situation similar to that created by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels and in the face of helpless immortals; The suffering that arises from the gap between the constant transformation of the surrounding world and the rigidity and immutability of the eternal person.

By connecting this tragedy to Buddhism, Bayat added: If awareness and memories are supposed to be permanent, this continuity can turn into a deadly torture; Therefore, in reincarnation, the memory is erased so that a new birth is possible. But the more complicated issue is, after rebirth, what component of the previous person is preserved? Feelings, memories, desires or consciousness, and what guarantee is there that this nascent body is not a completely alien identity? By relying on psychological archetypes such as the Enneagram and the diversity of personality types, we can see that human identity is not one-dimensional and has various layers. These questions directly intersect with Nati Baratz's documentary; When a child, who is called the reincarnation of a Buddhist master, is seen in a remote hut, deprived of water, electricity and gas and at the peak of poverty, the audience is faced with this contradiction, should the purpose of years of austerity and piety be to return to such a life?

In the next part of the meeting, after the two-way analysis of the work with the audience present in the hall, he said: the concept of heaven is not a rigid and pre-made thing, but perhaps it is a reflection of the same path that the subject has tried to search for throughout his life; A cycle in which the ascetic, after years of wandering, is born again in the same primitive climate so that his disciple recognizes him and starts this cycle of awareness anew.

Focusing on the production process and the naked realities behind the scenes of the documentary "The Chosen Child", he found the formation of this work to be the result of a surprising and coincidental partnership between the documentary maker and local rituals and said: Nati Baratz completely coincidentally finds himself in the process of searching for the reincarnation of a deceased teacher and decides to record this path; An exhausting process that takes four years and is the result of refining hundreds of hours of rush and visual material to finally become a coherent work. The student who carried the burden of this sacred mission later admitted in an interview that he saw no way out of this duty and despite the difficulty of accepting a camera in this faith walk, he finally came to terms with the presence of the filmmaker.

Pointing to one of the most painful moments of the film, which reveals the contradiction between the sacred and the violence of primitive life, Bayat added: When that Buddhist priest was asked which part of the film was painful for you, he pointed to the scene of shaving the child's head with a blunt razor; A bitter picture of a child in an extremely deprived village where access to the simplest facilities and even the purchase of a new razor was not possible, and the child's head became bloody in the middle of these rituals. This is the image that forces the audience to ask if this deprivation is the body recreated in the form of a symbolic paradise.

In the final analysis of the overlap between religious rituals, he said: the similarities between traditions are amazing; From unstitched and unstitched veils to rituals of circumambulation and turning around a sacred axis, they all show that religions are close to each other in their conceptual foundations and differ only in their narratives. One belief speaks of going to a distant paradise and achieving one's dreams, and the other of rebirth in this world to achieve one's purpose; However, the belief in an abstract and eternal paradise in an invisible world is a concept that is simply not possible to imagine and fight for in the mind of modern man.