“The Supreme Lord [Krishna/Vishnu] said: I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds. Even without your participation, the warriors arrayed in the opposing army shall cease to exist.”
– Bhagavad Gita 11:32
While there are no overt references to Buddhism in Oppenheimer, the underlying themes that connect to central Buddhist concepts are everywhere throughout the film.
First, as background, the film sketches the evolution of theoretical physics which has increasingly provided scientific parallels if not explanations for Buddhist accounts of phenomenological ontology (simply put, of our experience of being). Then, in the film’s foreground we are presented with its most memorable line — “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — that, while translated from the Sanskrit of a Hindu sacred text, resonates with Buddhist themes when used as a touchstone for Oppenheimer’s personal moral and spiritual (and to some extent his political) dilemma.
These thematic threads are reflected in the formal and structural elements of the film. Much has been said about its parallel plot structure: the use of color for the first-person narrative pertaining to the Oppenheimer security-clearance hearing versus the use of black-and-white for the third-person narrative pertaining to the Strauss confirmation hearing. But Oppenheimer’s personal qualms shown in claustrophobic closeups (like a series of overblown Chuck Close portraits) are seen against the big picture of quantum physics (kaleidoscopic micro- and macrocosms); and these form the double helix of the film’s thematic DNA.
The appearances of and allusions to Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg usher us into the unpredictable world of quantum mechanics. (I confess my ignorance of both theoretical physics and Sanskrit, so any insights I might stumble upon here are tempered by their relativity and my uncertainty.) For the benefit of those of us who lack sufficient mathematics or physics background to comprehend their mysteries, the film reminds us of how our culture has been influenced by the implications of first Einstein’s and then Heisenberg’s theories. Nolan shows us Oppenheimer’s prized copy of Eliot’s The Waste Land; then has the scientist linger in front of Picasso’s Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms; then shows him listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, each work by an artistic innovator in touch with the advances of science and its implications. These allusions might be helpful for all of us who are flummoxed by blackboard equations but may be familiar with Western landmarks of Modernism in the arts.
We might not be as familiar with the ancient Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita, which is where Oppenheimer finds both a philosophical context for his role as a scientist-warrior and, in his reading at least, condemnation for his actions in that role. He could also have found solace and expiation for his personal “sin” had he been more of a believer in the religious dimension of that sacred text.
When the theories of relativity and uncertainty first made headlines, the layperson’s concerns were phenomenological questions of psychology and epistemology, questioning our sense of ourselves in the world and how we know what we know. Quantum mechanics, in philosophical terms, took us into more unfamiliar territory of ontology, thrusting upon us existential questions about the nature of being and how we are like or unlike all other physical entities.
Trying to put quantum mechanics in a nutshell for his future wife, Kitty, over a cocktail, Oppenheimer asks (rhetorically) why we don’t pass through each other if on the molecular level we are temporary forms floating in a sea of nothingness? His explanation is reminiscent of Mahayana Buddhist concepts of form and nothingness (shiki and ku) outlined in the Heart Sutra and inherited from the Hindu philosophical tradition of the five skandhas (aggregations), which determine how we know we exist in the world. The issue is not unlike the existential question raised in Barbie — to move from the sublime to the ridiculous — when Barbie disrupts the Barbie dance party by blurting out whether any of her fellow Barbies has thought of dying (gasp, sound of needle scratching pink 45 record, silence).
Meanwhile, the poor player Oppenheimer struts and frets his three hours upon the stage, his personal tragedy playing out as variations on a theme provided by the much-discussed line from the Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” (This focus on the individual is the heart of the film, abandoning the horror of the death of so many Japanese civilians to mere off-camera mentions or his own hallucinatory but not-very-horrifying visions, a “sanitizing” for which the film has been justly criticized.)
Other objections have been raised by right-wing Hindus because Oppenheimer is made to read the line while copulating with his communist consort Jean Tatlock (a much more accomplished woman in life than the film portrays her, another reason to fault the film’s focus, which I won’t go into here). The objection to the sexualization of the spiritual text seems disingenuous considering the centrality of tantric eroticism in Hindu religious texts, traditions, and temples. Pavan K. Varma, in Firstpost, for example, makes the case that such objections have their origin not in Hinduism at all but in the colonial legacy of Victorian prudishness left behind by the British who felt revulsion for Hinduism’s sacred eroticism.
Kama (sensual or erotic enlightenment), of course, as we have all been aware since we were curious adolescents discovering the Kama Sutra, is one of the four pillars of an enlightened life in Hindu tradition, along with Artha (material enlightenment), Dharma (enlightened conduct, following one’s individual path in relation to the cosmos), and Moksha (spiritual enlightenment, culminating in release from the round of samsara).
Nolan’s decision to have Oppenheimer quote the sacred text during the sexual act is thus an absolutely crucial artistic decision, since the scene embodies the karmic intersection between creation and destruction, eros and thanatos, sex and death. Removing it, as these misguided Hindu zealots have demanded, would gut this core theme of the film.
Oppenheimer’s quotation is actually a paraphrase of what Krishna (as Vishnu’s avatar) tells the warrior Arjuna during a pause in the battle between good and evil. The original line has also been translated as “The Supreme Lord [Krishna/Vishnu] said: I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds. Even without your participation, the warriors arrayed in the opposing army shall cease to exist.”
The film’s version of the quotation, reducing Time to Death, is more succinct and powerful but distorts the meaning. By taking the blame on himself, Oppenheimer usurps the role of the gods, refusing to see himself as their pawn. Instead, he could or should have seen himself in the role of Arjuna, whom the gods are absolving of his personal (karmic) guilt. Oppenheimer, however, takes on the burden of what is the gods’ responsibility, a burden he is not required nor equipped to bear, in spite of his arrogance and ego. Oppenheimer uses the quotation of the Gita not to excuse but to accuse himself.
Vishnu is not normally a destroyer but rather a balancer, one who restores order, although sometimes he must do this through violence and war. Indeed, the context of the quotation is that Krishna/Vishnu is trying to relieve the common soldier (Arjuna) of his guilt and moral qualms by asserting that one lone player has little effect in the big picture, a drop in an ocean of karma.
In classical Western mythology, Time is the father of Death. Kronos (or Saturn) both creates and destroys, bringing forth children and then devouring them. (Or, in Milton’s perverse religious allegory, Death is the incestuous offspring of Satan and Sin.) That Oppenheimer utters the famous line while having sex with Jean Tatlock illustrates the karmic relationship between sex (creation) and death (destruction), which concludes with her eventual death by suicide. That Oppenheimer is haunted by causing this single death is paralleled by causing the death of tens of thousands or even by seeing himself as the destroyer of the world.
In religious terms, then, Oppenheimer’s moral qualms point to an inflated ego, his inability to cede responsibility to the gods, or in Buddhist terms to practice nonattachment. He ignores the context of the Gita quotation, in which Krishna/Vishnu is attempting to absolve the warrior Arjuna of his personal culpability in the death of his enemies, since it is the gods who decide who lives and who dies, not the warrior (or scientist) himself.
Nor can Oppenheimer embrace the nonduality espoused in the Gita (and Buddhism) by Krishna’s assertion that there is (in ontological terms, and perhaps in theoretical physics, as well) neither slayer nor slain. Contrary to common misconceptions, Karma is impersonal. Karma is often misinterpreted in a way that holds individuals responsible for specific actions which put into motion great consequences. But Krishna disabuses Arjuna of this notion, or rather refines it, by letting him know that as long as he acts according to his duty (dharma) he need not be worried about karma because there are more forces at work in war than the actions of one individual. To think otherwise is hubris.
Viewing actual footage of his postwar interviews, you can see Oppenheimer trying to parse exactly what his duty (dharma) was as a scientist, and trying to convince himself that it was not up to him and other scientists to decide how to use their destructive discoveries for military and political ends (that was the dharma of generals and politicians). Yet he never seems to be entirely convinced, as evinced in his halting, stumbling, Hamlet-like soliloquies, trying to come up with the right words for a right philosophical take on his role. He is troubled by this idea of dharma as duty and responsibility, even as it seems to absolve him of the worst of his guilt. One’s dharma when confronted with a battle with evil (in this case Nazism) demanded a decision either to engage or not to engage. But his hubris forces him to take on more guilt than he needs to, so that “he” has become Death, when actually it is the powers beyond him (not just the military and political deciders, but the gods themselves, karma itself, time itself) that are responsible for the destruction of HIroshima and Nagasaki and, in future, perhaps the world. In any case, Time will ultimately destroy everything.
But Oppenheimer was not a Hindu; he happened to be a Jew who did not believe in the immortality of the soul. As a Humanist he believed in the sacredness of life and in human agency, which is why he was haunted by his role as “destroyer.” For him, the Bhagavad Gita was not a sacred text as such but a very personal philosophical guide to his life as a scientific “warrior.” Neither Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor accomplished Stoic (like his Sanskrit tutor Ryder), Oppenheimer remains a haunted figure. In the end, Oppenheimer inhabits not the realms of devas or humans (two of the six realms of samsara), but that of a self-condemned emaciated hungry ghost whose thirst for forgiveness can never be sated. This is the vivid portrait the film has painted.
— Richard Collins
REFERENCES
Arnold, Edwin, translator. The Song Celestial or Bhagavad-Gita (1900). London: RKP, 1948. https://merton.bellarmine.edu
Berridge, George. “‘Now I Am Become Death’: The Delicate, Destructive Words of Oppenheimer.” 27 July 2023. https://artreview.com
Khorana, Alok A. “How Robert Oppenheimer Was Influenced by the Bhagavad Gita.” 10 July 2023. https://lithub.com
Ryder, Arthur W., translator. The Bhagavad-Gita. Chicago: The U of Chicago Press, 1929.
https://shreevatsa.net/ryder/1929-gita/Ryder-BG.pdf
James Temperton. “‘Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ The Story of Oppenheimer’s Infamous Quote.” 21 July 2023. https://www.wired.com
Varma, Parvan K. “Why Oppenheimer controversy Is a misplaced outrage over Bhagavad Gita.” 27 July 2023. https://www.firstpost.com
