 COMICS |  | DEEPAK CHOPRA COMIC CONNECTIONS | | The Virgin Comics visionary prepares for his version of the life of Buddha to hit shelves with all its controversy intact. | | | By Kiel Phegley | | Posted 3/25/2008 | |  | | When it comes to sometimes trendy and always philosophical discussions of “East meeting West,” Deepak Chopra’s name coming up is a virtual certainty.
Born and raised in India and trained as a doctor in the U.S., Chopra has become one of the most powerful spiritual writers in the modern world with books including non-fiction titles like The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and novels including The Return of Merlin becoming critical and sales hits in both his native and adoptive home. Chopra’s most recent foray into cross-cultural outreach has been his role as “Chief Visionary” for Virgin Comics where his ideas have been used to mold science fiction heroes based on Indian myth by his son, Virgin Editor-in-Chief Gotham Chopra.
| |  This week, Chopra’s affair with comics enters a new phase as Virgin releases the first issue of Buddha, the comic adaptation of Chopra’s fictionalization of the life of the revered spiritual leader.
Originally created as a film pitch with friend and co-Virgin visionary director Shekhar Kapur, the novel was released in 2007. Chopra took a few minutes to talk about the controversy of telling stories of religious leaders, comics potential for creating cross-cultural bridges and his upcoming appearance in a Mike Meyers film.
From film idea, to novel, to comic book, Buddha is your first project that has been created to exist across multiple media platforms. Is it because you wanted the story to reach many people in many ways, or is it just the first opportunity to do so many different variations?
CHOPRA: It’s a sign of the times, these days. I’m video blogging, audio blogging, blogging and writing, blogging and multimedia. It’s just the nature of how everything is being propagated in the media. But also, Buddha is a very archetypal, mythical story that has crossed cultural, archetypal, romantic expressions across all kinds of boundaries. So I thought one way to reach young people with the story of Buddha is through comics, for sure.
This did begin as an idea for screenplay, and then you moved into the novel from there, is that correct?
CHOPRA: Right. And I moved into the novel from there and then into the comic book. But comic books also serve as storyboards for film producers. And this particular book has been optioned by Peter Guber and Mark Canton and Cathy Schulman, so they are looking at a possible movie.
So you get to go full circle, then.
CHOPRA: Looks like it.
What is it like for you to be continually revisiting the story? Obviously, in some ways it’s a story you revisit over and over again whenever you’re reading on Buddha or Buddhism. But for your actual creation, when you’re working the screenplay idea and then you go to a novel and then a comic so quickly. Are you changing small things?
CHOPRA: I’m changing small things for sure. I want somebody like a thirteen-year-old girl in Oregon or in Idaho or in Montana to be fascinated by Buddha’s story. That’s not an easy thing to do. So this medium lends itself to doing that.
Tell me a little bit about—for folks who haven’t read the novel—you actually start as early as you can go in the inception of Buddha’s life and go from there, right?
CHOPRA: Yeah, I start with—that is the original story. But the first 20 years of his life or less, the first few years of his life are full of mystery, magic, adventure...that would probably be the second issue where he trains in martial arts and he speaks to a contemporary, young audience as much as Harry Potter does. And then as he’s growing up, something happens. And that is that for the first time he confronts old age, disease and death, and has an existential crisis. At some point, every child grows up. And this is the story of every child who at some point grows up and says hey, these things are part of reality, and they’re going to happen to me. I’m going to grow old, have disease, and I will most certainly die. This is a most interesting personal journey of a young man who was born a prince, had everything life had to offer him, but yet at a certain point he was scared. He was scared by just the fact of living. And instead of looking at an external authority, or looking to God, as they say—in fact, he was agnostic. He did not believe in God. So he made an inner journey and that’s a journey that I think a lot of us at some point, if you go through crisis or through curiosity, are going to have to make.
Interview continued below...
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When you initially announced this entire cycle of this book, was there resistance from any readership or any critics? Because I know when you take an unknown part of a religious figure’s life and try to flesh out details and in some ways fictionalize certain elements of it, there seems to be some resistance. Were people open to the idea?
CHOPRA: You know, it’s very interesting. When I mentioned the idea to the Dalai Lama, he loved it. When I mentioned it to Western scholars of Buddhism, they hated it. Which was just the opposite of what I expected. I’m doing the same thing right now with Jesus. I have a Jesus book out right now called The Third Jesus, which is getting a lot of attacks from the Christian fundamentalists. If that is a lot of attacks, then the next book is going to be really be crucified. Appropriately. Because it’s about the boy, and the man who wanted to be Christ. It’s the missing years of Jesus. Obviously it’s fictionalized, but when you do fiction you have to lay a context. To create the context for that fiction, you really have to do scholarly work on the times, the period, what was happening. You have to lay it out in the terrain in which the story actually happened. So I’m finding this new venue for me—I don’t know if you’re aware, but I just finished a PBS series that’s airing right now a little bit on the life and teachings of the Buddha. So that’s another medium I’m exploring as well.
There is another version of the life of Buddha in comics form that is much older from Japan that Osamu Tezuka had done. I wondered if you had any interactions with either that, or similar works like it, which were about the life of the Buddha from a Japanese perspective as opposed to an Indian perspective.
CHOPRA: No, I am aware of it, but I’ve never actually seen it, and it’s just as well. There are so many different versions if you go to southeast Asia. Buddha’s life is depicted in different ways in Sri Lanka, in Tibet, in Japan, in China, in Vietnam and so on. I’m aware of that series but I’ve not looked at it.
You’ve been connected with Virgin Comics, and been a creative voice within that group since their inception. It’s been, in a way, not only entertainment but outreach. You’ve done so much in your own books, in building bridges between the East and the West. In general, is that your main goal with Virgin Comics?
CHOPRA: Essentially, the human race in general is a race of storytellers. Our unconscious motivations dwell in this mythical storytelling world. Right now for example whatever is happening in the world, whether it’s global warming or the Iraq war, the Abu Ghraib prison, radical poverty in certain parts of the world, war and terrorism—this is the story we’re telling ourselves. If we could start to create new stories and do them in a way that’s entertaining but in the same way enlightening, a new narrative in our collective unconscious could certainly project itself as a new story for humanity. I know that sounds very, kind of, arrogant and almost megalomaniac, but on the other hand, that’s how things change in the world. My belief is that we need to create new cross-cultural heroes, new archetypes, new mythical beings, and that’s already happening. I think George Lucas laid the terrain for that with Star Wars and characters like Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia and Darth Vader, and I think this is the next step.
Like you said, fiction needs a context, and it seems with the Virgin comics, they’re providing a cultural context for these broader ideas that people can tap into.
CHOPRA: And there’s a wealth of this mythology that needs to be tapped into, and people haven’t heard of it.
Have you had a favorite of the Virgin Comics that you’ve seen?
CHOPRA: There’s one that Gotham is working on right now. It’s called Beyond. It’s about a parallel reality where in that reality, what happens determines what happens in our current reality. We’ve shown it to a number of people with the idea of a movie as well. Everyone’s very excited about it, and it’s in development right now.
I’ve heard you appear in the new Mike Meyers film “The Love Guru.” I saw a preview for this a few weeks ago. It’s one of those movies where at first, you kind of look at it askance, but it seems that once you really get into the meat of it, it seems pretty kind-hearted—
CHOPRA: It’s kind-hearted. It’s fun, but it’s going to enrage Hindu fundamentalists, I can tell you that right now. So what, you know? They’ll only make it more popular by their protest. I think if religion cannot laugh at itself, then its faith has to be questioned. Then the faith becomes a cover for insecurity.
Actually, Mike is a very serious scholar of Vedic mythology and Hinduism. He knows more about it than many so-called scholars in India as well. He has a knack of honoring something while making fun of it at the same time. In many ways, if you go beyond—if you see the film with that in mind, you’ll see that it’s a tribute to a body of knowledge, but done in a way that people can have a good laugh. I’m doing a book at the same time “The Love Guru” comes out. It’s called Why Is God Laughing? It’s actually about a comedian who covers up his existential doldrums through jokes.
You seem very, very busy these days, with so many books and projects coming.
CHOPRA: It’s only natural for me. I’m traveling on planes, I have a computer, I write...I enjoy this. I’m not thinking at that time what this project is going to be, I’m just having a good time with myself telling a story.
Buddha #1 ships this week from Virgin Comics to comic shops nation-wide.
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