The Greatest Movie Never Made: The Life of the Buddha as Cold War Politics

Abstract

This article explores the backstory of a 1953 screenplay on the life of the Buddha conceived by the CIA as a psychological warfare strategy to draw Asian Buddhists away from the Communist orbit and into the Free World. Developed in collaboration with Ceylonese Buddhist scholar G. P. Malalasekera, Tathagata: The Wayfarer (hereafter, Wayfarer) is best read through the lens of the U.S. Campaign of Truth propaganda effort launched by Truman in 1950. I draw on declassified government documents and archives to highlight the screenplay's trajectory as a covert attempt by the U.S. government to work with Asian Buddhists to further U.S. foreign policy needs in Asia and to demonstrate a truth rarely recognized by scholars of religion and American culture: For the early Cold War American state, Buddhism was an object of foreign policy.