“Tathāgata in Translation” explores a failed attempt by the CIA to win the hearts and minds of Asian Buddhists in the early Cold War. Its focus is an unpublished 1953 screenplay on the life of the Buddha conceived by the CIA as a psychological warfare strategy to encourage American bloc-building efforts in Asia. Tathagata: The Wayfarer was envisioned as a lavish Hollywood-style epic—shot on-site in India with live elephants and an all-Indian cast—for distribution in Asia’s newly decolonized nations. By equating the Buddha and Buddhism with peace and Free World values, The Wayfarer would encourage Buddhist nationalists to reject Communism and enable the CIA to forge valuable ties with Buddhist governments and cultural leaders. Despite its ambitions, the screenplay would be soundly rejected by the very Buddhist organizations it sought to influence, and fuel anti-American antagonism. This presentation explores how and why.
The Wayfarer project was conceived by a CIA-front organization called the Committee for a Free Asia (CFA). Its name derived referred to a U.S. State Department plan to forge a "Free Asia:" an imagined community stretching through the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, linked by trade, anti-Communism, and Free World values. The Wayfarer would further this strategy by leveraging Buddhist cultural narratives to align regional Buddhist leaders with American geopolitical interests.
The CFA structured the creation of the screenplay as a covert "East-West" collaboration. They hired veteran Hollywood script writer Robert Hardy Andrew to create the screenplay and secretly enlisted Dr. G.P. Malalasekera, a professor of Pāli and Buddhist Studies and president of the World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB), to tutor Andrews in Buddhism, and ensure the script would be acceptable to Asian Buddhist organizations. Malalasekera was happy to do so. The Wayfarer was his chance to promote his own vision of a transnational "International Buddhism" united by a shared history and a distinctly Buddhist political philosophy of ahimsa.
The Wayfarer script thus had a Herculean task: to mediate multiple, often conflicting bloc-building efforts and interpretations of Buddhism into a univocal Hollywood cinematic spectacle Its volatility is self-evident; the script was tacitly fueling two incompatible “imagined communities” – the first a two-bloc world in which Buddhism’s peace was a Free World value, and the other in which Buddhist ahimsa tacitly signified a non-aligned political identity -- a Middle Way, if you will, between American and Soviet bloc identities. The unwritten bibliography for Hardy’s script mirrors this hybridity: the Wayfarer draws on a mix of Pāli Vinaya works, Malalasekera’s oral commentaries, Mahāyāna texts in English translation, Indian Buddhist sculptures and American film images, to forge its Cold War American Buddha: the movie-star handsome prince who forfeits worldly rule to pursue truth, oppose despotism, and challenge his nefarious (read: Communist) cousin Devadatta‘s ruthless disregard for India’s downtrodden.
Was it an anti-communist allegory? A reaffirmation of Buddhist non-violence? A nationalist meditation on self-rule? I begin by unpacking The Wayfarer’s interpretative ambiguity through a close reading of three key portions of the script: (1) the Introductory Frame Story, (2) the story of Sakyamuni and the Wounded Swan, and (3) Devadatta’s Conversion. I pay particular attention to how Hardy frames the act of translation as a marker of the agency and modernity of post-colonial Indians, and to shoe how the script could be read through competing interpretative lenses.
Then, I switch gears to position the screenplay as a Translation Zone, in Emily Apter’s sense: a frontier where meaning is shaped through friction, power asymmetries, and competing political agendas (The Translation Zone, 2006). By relocating The Wayfarer from a CIA back office to a wartime frontier, we see that that its failure had less to do with its content than with the CIA’s inability to negotiate the ideological battleground of postcolonial Buddhist politics.The Wayfarer project thus underscores a larger insight: U.S. Cold War projects to win the hearts and minds of Asian Buddhists failed, not because they were underfunded or poorly executed, but because they became sites of resistance, where local actors repurposed them to suit their own goals.
“Tathāgata in Translation” explores a failed CIA effort to win the hearts and minds of Asian Buddhists in the early Cold War. Its focus is an unpublished 1953 screenplay on the life of the Buddha, conceived as a psychological warfare tool to promote U.S. bloc-building efforts in Asia. Envisioned as a Hollywood-style epic, The Wayfarer would convince Asian Buddhists to reject Communism and help the CIA forge ties local Buddhist leaders.
To examine its failure, I analyze The Wayfarer's interpretative ambiguity through a close reading of three scenes. I then frame the screenplay as a Translation Zone, in Emily Apter’s sense—a battleground for interpretative dominance. By relocating The Wayfarer from a CIA back office to a wartime frontier, we see that American efforts to court Asian Buddhists failed not from poor execution, but because they became sites of resistance where local actors adeptly re-purposed them to suit their own goals.