Peace Rhetoric, Soviet Style: The Soviet Peace Offensive

Andrews's script and the Committee for Free Asia grew out of the Truman administration's effort to counter the rising tide of anti-American Communist propaganda abroad. The United States’ public offer of economic aid to Europe in June 1947 had set off a wave of Soviet vitriol. The Marshall Plan was perceived by Stalin to be a bloc-building strategy: a blatant attempt by the United States to draw Europe into its sphere of influence through “dollar, atomic, and cruiser-diplomacy.”Footnote ⁸ It enacted the geopolitical vision of Halford John Mackinder, wherein a great collection of “coastland” nations would ally to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating Eurasia. In Stalin's framing, it was the United States that was the real Cold Warrior, the true successor to European empire-building.

So began the Soviet Peace Offensive—a full-fledged campaign that involved the “saturation of the complex Soviet propaganda machine with the ‘peace’ theme, the exploitation of front organizations and UN agencies as propaganda sounding boards for ‘peace.’”Footnote ⁹ Its rhetorical logic was starkly oppositional: the Soviet Union wanted peace; the United States did not.Footnote ¹⁰

For the next two years, the United States publically condemned peace advocacy as a Communist tactic and a threat to national security. Soviet rhetoric, by contrast, linked “peace” to a brand of internationalism: right-thinking people from every region must unite to defend world peace by opposing U.S. imperialism.Footnote ¹¹ The State Department watched with alarm as this message spread through a growing network of national and international congresses “dedicated to the defense of peace.”Footnote ¹² The 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace drew participants from forty-six countries, including luminaries Pablo Picasso, Bertolt Brecht, and Anna Segher. It concluded with a resolution to defend world peace against “a handful of greedy people in America and Europe who have inherited the fascist idea of racial superiority and the negation of progress . . . [and] are planning the assassination of the spiritual heritage of peoples of the world.”Footnote ¹³ This message was repeated in Paris less than a year later, when nearly two thousand delegates from seventy-two countries attended the World Congress of Partisans of Peace. This time, its high-profile attendants included African-American activist W. E. B. Du Bois, actor Charlie Chaplin, the playwrights Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets, and even an ex-president of Mexico and the Queen Dowager of Belgium. Picasso contributed a drawing of a dove that would become an international emblem for peace.Footnote ¹⁴

From the U.S. perspective, the worst was still to come. In September 1949, the Soviet Union detonated a nuclear device. One month later, Mao Zedong stood at the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing and announced that the largest nation in Asia was now Communist. The “loss of China” was devastating to the United States, which had predicated its policies for Asia on a Nationalist victory in China and, thus, on a U.S.-oriented East Asia. President Truman requested a complete review and reevaluation of America's Cold War diplomatic strategy. Four months later, the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State delivered NSC-68, a top-secret report calling for a broad-based containment policy toward the Soviet Union. NSC-68 outlined a rapid military expansion of conventional forces and the nuclear arsenal—including the development of the new hydrogen bomb—and significant increases in military aid to U.S. allies.Footnote ¹⁵

While Truman contemplated the estimated $50 billion price tag for the NSC-68 vision of containment, the World Peace Council launched the Stockholm Peace Appeal in May 1950. America watched in dismay as the People's Republic of China joined in with its own mass “peace signature campaign.”Footnote ¹⁶ By the end of the year, nearly five hundred million people—a quarter of the world's population—had signed the appeal calling for “all men and women of good will throughout the world” to demand that atomic weapons be outlawed “as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples.”Footnote ¹⁷ It was clear that the United States needed a new weapon in the international war of representation.Footnote ¹⁸

Peace Rhetoric, American Style: Campaign of Truth

In 1950, Washington launched a counterattack. On April 20, Truman opened a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors by assailing Communist representations of the United States as a nation of “warmongers” and imperialists. “You and I know how absurd this is,” Truman prompted his audience. “We know that the United States is wholly dedicated to the cause of peace. We have no purpose of going to war except in the defense of freedom.”Footnote ¹⁹

In Truman's presentation, the true threat to world peace was not U.S. belligerence but Soviet deception. The Free World, he said, was in the grips of an ontological battle between Truth and Falsehood: between the “plain, simple, unvarnished truth—presented by [American] newspapers, radio, newsreels” and the “(d)eceit, distortion, and lies” used by Communists “as a matter of deliberate policy.” It was Truth that would set men free, for “[w]hen men throughout the world are making their choice between communism and democracy, the important thing is not what we know about our purposes and our actions—the important thing is what they know.”Footnote ²⁰

Thus, the Campaign of Truth began. Americans were encouraged to write letters to friends and relatives abroad to extol the United States as a bastion of freedom and journalistic integrity and a haven for the working man and to sign Freedom Scrolls that attested to the U.S. commitment to global freedom. The Crusade for Freedom campaign urged Americans to “Help Truth Fight Communism” by donating “Truth Dollars” to efforts such as Radio Free Europe and the Crusade for Europe. A supplemental Congressional appropriation of nearly $80 million bolstered the production of posters, pamphlets, movie shorts, radio broadcasts, comic books, and even bubble-gum cards portraying the deceit, cunning, and ruthless despotism of Communism in its quest for world domination.Footnote ²¹

In June 1950, the Cold War became hot. Seventy-five thousand troops from the Soviet-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea spilled over the 38th parallel—an attack that, in Truman's vision, made clear that “communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war.” For the first time, America would demonstrate military “containment” to the world. Truman sent air and naval forces to South Korea and successfully petitioned the United Nations Security Council to “repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security to the area.”Footnote ²² In September, Truman signed NSC-68 into policy, creating the basis for U.S. Cold War policy for the next two decades.

Simultaneously, the Peace Offensive turned east. A torrent of Communist propaganda in Asia portrayed America as a cold-blooded warmonger that had invaded the “people's democracy” of North Korea. The following year, the United States was accused of using biological warfare to subdue Korea's people. Chinese Communists similarly alleged that America was engaged in germ warfare across Asia.Footnote ²³ As photographs circulated worldwide “showing Russians being mutilated, killed or tortured, presumably at the hands of Americans,” Washington's Psychology Strategy Board formally identified this as an effort to “discredit the U.S. in the eyes of Asiatics.”Footnote ²⁴ Embroiled in its first major proxy war with a Soviet Communist–supported enemy, the United States desperately needed to augment its efforts to win Asian hearts and minds.

World Peace, Buddhist Style: World Fellowship of Buddhists

Of particular interest to CFA was the collective Buddhist identity emerging in Asia as governments throughout the continent planned large-scale celebrations of the twenty-five hundredth anniversary of the Buddha's enlightenment—his jayanti—in 1956 and 1957. Its most visible manifestation was a Buddhist revivalist organization called the World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB), conceived by Dr. Gunapala Piyasena Malalasekera (1899–1973), dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Ceylon and president of the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress. As a teenager, Malasekera had been deeply inspired by the Buddhist revivalism of Anagarika Dharmapala. He had subsequently completed a doctorate at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies under none other than Mrs. Rhys David, president of the Pāli Text Society. He returned to Ceylon to dedicate himself to Buddhist scholarship and the “great struggle the Buddhists had to go through in order to achieve their rights, to establish themselves here in the country of their birth, to achieve solidarity, to become strong.”Footnote ³⁵

In summer 1949, Malalasekera proposed a plan to the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress: They should establish a world federation of Buddhist centers that would meet in conference every two years to “secure unity, solidarity and brotherhood amongst Buddhists.” They would be apolitical but would “make [their] voices heard in international councils” and make “their due contribution to the attainment of peace.”Footnote ³⁶ Asian Buddhists, it seemed, were doing some peace-centric bloc-building of their own.

The First General Conference of the WFB had convened in Ceylon at the height of the Stockholm Peace Accord effort, two weeks after Truman's Campaign of Truth speech. Its size exceeded even the expectations of Malasekera, let alone of the U.S. State Department. One hundred twenty-nine delegates from twenty-nine nations crowded into Colombo, along with heads of state, including Jawaharlal Nehru. Most came from nations that would be targeted by the CFA: eighty from Ceylon, twenty-two from Burma (Myanmar), and eight from Thailand. During three days of speeches and choreographed pilgrimages, the participants simultaneously extolled their shared histories and Buddhism's unique vision of peace. Verse 5 from the Theravāda Dhammapada text was the conference leitmotif: “‘Hatred does not cease by hatred,’” recited a lay representative. “‘Hatred ceases only by love.’” These themes were linked through repeated allusions to India's King Ashoka, a third-century BCE Buddhist ruler legendary for governing under a public policy of nonviolence and sending Buddhist missionaries to Ceylon. Asian Buddhists, it seemed, had a shared ruler whose sovereignty was grounded in Buddhist peace, not in “atomic energy and microbial poison.”Footnote ³⁷

Nehru's emphasis on this distinction had especial resonance. Even before its 1949 independence, India had called for an end to an international politics based on “power politics”—especially nuclear arms races—and for the need to structure international relations on the basis of mutual interdependence, not superpower binaries.Footnote ³⁸ Nehru had subsequently deployed Ashoka's symbols to spearhead this vision of a secular, unaligned Indian state, guided by a universal ethics rooted in the nation's ancient Buddhist past, that could serve as a prophylactic against global conflict. The Buddhist dharma wheel (dharmacakra) had replaced Gandhi's spinning wheel (carkha) as the central symbol of India's flag, and Ashoka's lion symbol was taken as the image for the seal on all official government documents. The first president of India was sworn in beneath a sandstone image of the Buddha carved in Mathura eighteen hundred years before.Footnote ³⁹ Standing before the sea of Asian Buddhist delegates, evoking Ashoka and quoting the Dhammapada, Nehru's message seemed clear: “Buddhist peace” was a plank in his policy of nonalignment.

For the CFA, it was past time to integrate this liminal Buddhist bloc and the WFB's leader into the Free Asian orbit. By the time the WFB gathered for its Second General Conference in Tokyo, CFA's Rangoon representatives had finagled a seat on Malasekera's peace train. They would underwrite the travel expenses of several Asian attendees to Tokyo, and Malalasekera would allow CFA to send in an American film crew to make a short documentary about the conference. When the film was complete, Malalasekera could edit and distribute it in Burma, Ceylon, and beyond. The WFB would acquire a professional-quality publicity tool; CFA would gain an inside opportunity to steer a burgeoning trans-Asian movement into Western-friendly waters.

The Tokyo Conference, comprising 149 delegates from nineteen nations, reiterated Buddhism's association with peace and India's imperial Buddhist history. Its date coincided with the fourteen hundredth anniversary of Buddhism's entry into Japan, suggesting the conference itself as a marker of Japan's postwar rebirth into a community of Buddhist nations. Buddhist India was foregrounded as the first conference meetings were held in Tsukkiji Hoganji, a temple built in the Indian Gandhara style. Most significantly, Malalasekera had arranged for a procession of seven orange-robed monks from Ceylon to escort to the conference a “bodily relic of the Buddha” unearthed in India. The relic further linked India's peaceful Buddhist past to Japan's war-torn present: at the end of the conference, it was somberly installed in a structure at Hiroshima, flanked by saplings descended from the tree under which the Buddha had attained enlightenment.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Buddha's peace would heal the wounds of war and nourish a new future for Japan.

Malalasekera repeatedly intertwined the linked themes of Buddhist empire, peace, and a collective Buddhist identity. Evoking Japan's own imperial Buddhist past, he reminded his audience that Buddhists were seasoned rulers: “[W]e have no need to go to any political philosopher for inspiration.” He noted that the heart of Buddhist political philosophy could be summed up “in the sentiments expressed by the Buddha two thousand years ago: ‘Hatred never ceases by hatred but only by love.’” For Malalasekera, this verse from the Theravada Buddhist Dhammapada seemed an anthem for a pan-Asian Buddhist identity. In a world “divided into power blocs who devote all their energies and their minds to the sterile, negative, stupid business of war,” Buddhism's unique brand of peace could be both antidote and alternative. Buddhists, he declared, “form one-fifth of the world's population. At least one-fifth of the world's happiness and peace, therefore, devolves upon us.”Footnote ⁴¹ Like Nehru's vision, Malalasekera's “Buddhist peace” was nonaligned, prophylactic, and a marker for trans-Asian Buddhist identity.

When the Committee's completed Tokyo documentary won Malalasekera's “enthusiastic approval,”Footnote ⁴² CFA approached him with a more ambitious collaboration: They would hire an independent film company and produce a feature-length film on the life of the Buddha, shot on site in India and screened in America and Asia. Malalasekera would consult with the script writer to ensure its adherence to orthodoxy and help “sell” the project to Asian Buddhist authorities. In short, CFA and Malalasekera would join forces to foster their separate but overlapping imagined communities.

Operation Wayfarer

In winter 1952, Malalasekera and the CFA formalized their relationship. Malalasekera hoped a full-length film on the Buddha would fuel a new appreciation for the Buddha by Asians and usher in a new Buddhist renaissance. Presumably, he welcomed CFA's financial support, film expertise, and government connections. CFA would harness the power of film to demonstrate the innate incompatibility of Communism with Buddhism and, in so doing, would fold this liminal Buddhist bloc into the superpower binary and forge a Western-friendly “Free Asia.”

The project would check other institutional boxes. CFA officers were troubled by the Communists’ successful use of film to wage psychological warfare in Asia. They saw Wayfarer as an opportunity to recover ground:

This problem was especially acute in India, where friendship links between Indian and Soviet filmmakers had flowered since the mid-1940s. Between 1949 and 1951, Soviet theaters had screened two Indian films to general critical acclaim, and the head of the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries had paid a formal visit to New Delhi.Footnote ⁴⁴ By contrast, American relations with India had become progressively strained since Nehru had called for Beijing to be seated at the United Nations and America had fostered relations with Pakistan. Indeed, CFA had been repeatedly denied permission to open an Indian field office. Perhaps it could ride in on Malalasekera's Buddhist coattails and gain a local foothold.

In February 1953, CFA signed a contract with Cascade Pictures, the same film company that had made their Tokyo documentary, and Cascade hired veteran screenwriter Robert Hardy Andrews to prepare the script. Formerly a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, Andrews had achieved legendary status in the 1930s as a wildly prolific writer of radio soap operas. “When Andrews hit his stride and began to turn out five radio scripts a day,” wrote James Thurber in a New Yorker feature piece, “the author of a book called ‘How to Write for Radio’ declared that he was not one man but three or four. ‘Charles Robert Douglas Hardy Andrews,’ said the author ‘is a syndicate.’”Footnote ⁴⁵ Andrews had a brief stint voicing The Shadow on the eponymous radio show before twenty-two-year-old Orson Welles took over that role.Footnote ⁴⁶

Relocating to West Hollywood, Andrews had worked on contract with Hollywood studios as a screenwriter of wartime and anti-Communist features such as Bataan (1943) and I Married a Communist (1949; later renamed The Woman on Pier 13). His civic persona was patriotic, New Deal–style; Andrews had been the chairman of the Hollywood Democratic Committee's “Writers for Roosevelt” campaign in 1944 to reelect Roosevelt.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1948, he had been censured for this affiliation in the Un-American Activities: Communist Front Organizations report of the committee chaired by Jack B. Tenney.Footnote ⁴⁸ (Hardy would return the favor in the second revised final draft of I Married a Communist by renaming the San Francisco cell leader “Nixon.”)Footnote ⁴⁹ When Cascade Pictures contacted him in 1952, Andrews had returned from a public relations tour with the “Hollywood USA!” campaign to convince a jaded public that Hollywood was neither corrupt nor communist but, really, just another hometown of America.Footnote ⁵⁰

Andrews proved to be an enthusiastic “witting” participant. According to Malalasekera, he threw himself into researching the life and teachings of the Buddha.

Malalasekera likewise impressed on Andrews the importance of keeping the script acceptable to Ceylon's traditionalist Board of Buddhists, who had a history of hostility to films about the Buddha. Not only should “all members of the cast . . . be Asiatics and, as far as possible, Buddhists,” but “no actor should take the part of the Enlightenment.”Footnote ⁵¹ Andrews's script adhered to the last of these strictures by portraying the Siddhartha's postenlightenment form as a disembodied, six-color orb of light—an “AURA”—from which Buddhist wisdom emitted.

A close reading of Andrews's script confirms that Andrews did, indeed, draw on Buddhist source texts in translation and from English-language books about Buddhism.Footnote ⁵² The script's first half is most indebted to Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia (1879), a blank-verse translation of Édoard Foucaux's French translation of the Lalitavistara Sūtra. The latter is a Sanskrit Mahāyāna biography of the Buddha, which concludes with his first sermon in Deer Park. Arnold's florid Victorian poem had become an unlikely international classic; even Nehru had claimed it “one of my favourite books.”Footnote ⁵³ In Andrews's America, it was by far the best-known popular text on the life of the Buddha. In the 1945 film version of Oscar Wilde's classic novel Dorian Gray, when Gray slips over to the dark side, his friend begs him to correct course by reading the Light of Asia. “I'm never without it,” he confides to Dorian. “The story of Buddha, a good man. Promise me you'll read it, Dorian.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The Manichean duality of the anti-Communist worldview so familiar to Andrews demanded a tale of good versus evil, but Arnold's biography lacked a good villain. It may have been Malalasekera who directed Andrews to the Theravāda materials describing the transgressions of Devadatta, the Buddha's nefarious cousin.Footnote ⁵⁵ In any event, Andrews's final product combines two threads: the core elements of Arnold's telling of the Buddha legend—miraculous birth, ambivalent prophecy, marriage to Yashodhara, Four Sights, Departure, and Enlightenment—with a story about cousin Devadatta's lifelong machinations to usurp Siddhartha's rule.

The ideological associations of the rivals in Wayfarer are clear. Andrews's Devadatta is the cunning and power-hungry Communist of Campaign of Truth lore:

Andrews's Free Asian Buddha is “tall, deceptively strong, set apart from others by self-control and mystical dedication.” Driven solely by a commitment to Truth and freedom, he forfeits worldly power for the sake of suffering beings. “Spirituality shines through him; yet always he has utter human-ness, true humility. His voice must be unforgettable.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The conclusion to this battle of ideologies is as foregone as the Buddha's enlightenment: Communist iniquity will succumb to the superior moral power of Free World values.

Appropriately, Andrews opens Wayfarer not in ancient India but in an integrated and cosmopolitan Free Asia. The scene is the 1956 jayanti. The place is Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha's enlightenment. A close-up of King Ashoka's Lion Seal—the official emblem of India—visually links Free Asian Buddhism to Nehru's new republic. Yellow-robed Buddhist monks, pious children, and brilliantly costumed lay people stroll through ancient ruins and shrines while one hears a “mingling of many racial strains, of many tongues intoning chants and litanies of all the languages of the Buddhist East.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The result is not the cacophony of Babel; the chants of these separate languages are magically made harmonious by their shared Buddhist tradition.

Nor are these the wide-eyed Buddhist monastics of Kipling fantasy but cosmopolitan citizens of the world. When a Buddhist holy man stops to help an American father struggling to take a photograph of his family, the former is initially rebuffed; surely such a one cannot understand the camera or the father's English. Reversing the role of the Teshoo Lama of Kipling's Kim, who marveled at the technology of British spectacles, however, Andrews's monk expertly corrects the setting of the light meter and photographs the family. After rejecting the crass offer of money by the abashed American father—in Free Asia, an Indian is an equal bestowing a favor, not a native lackey—the monk explains the celebration to the “puzzled but impressed” family.Footnote ⁵⁸ This postcolonial mea culpa to the land of Ashoka initiates the transition to the story itself.Footnote ⁵⁹

It also places Andrews's Free Asia in the lineage of a uniquely Cold War style of U.S. Orientalism. In her analysis of American films of the 1950s, scholar Christina Klein highlights what she calls a “global imaginary of integration” that “imagined the world in terms of open doors that superseded barriers and created pathways between nations.”Footnote ⁶⁰ For Klein, this imaginary of integration helped differentiate U.S. from European expansion efforts. In this America, it was implied, noncommunist Asia was an ally and partner, not an enemy or object of conquest. Andrews's camera-savvy monks and respectful Americans resonate with this implicit narrative of anticonquest.

Now the rivalry can begin. Our first view of Devadatta is a “furiously jealous youth of fourteen” who is beating a playmate with a toy sword. Seven-year-old Siddhartha intervenes—“[v]isibly [he] means only to protect.” The young Siddhartha “gallantly” holds his own against Devadatta's “berserk attack” until his father, the king, intercedes. As Siddhartha turns with compassion to the injured playmate, Devadatta arrogantly challenges the king: “A true Prince of the Sakyas should be able to fight his own battles,” he sneers. “My son will fight,” responds the king, “when the time for fighting comes.”Footnote ⁶¹ Andrews's Asian Buddhist audience would understand what this means: this fight is not over.

They would also understand the Wayfarer as a story about ideal rule. Buddhist legend historically emphasizes how Prince Siddhartha forfeited a career as great universal monarch (cakravartin) to leave home and become a Buddha. In Buddhist societies, debates about the proper forms of those two royal careers were also debates about the proper forms of secular and religious authority. Andrews's CFA handlers were well aware that, in the newly decolonized nations of the Wayfarer's audience, those questions were under intense negotiation. Here, though Devadatta is royal, he is without honor. Evoking the totalitarian (read: Communist) dictator of U.S. vitriol, he will attack his friends and almost murder his own cousin to seize worldly power. It is the young Siddhartha who is the true king: Compassionate and committed to righteousness, he fights bravely for the welfare of others, even when the battlefield is uneven. Free of anger, his conviction is grounded in peace. In a later scene, Siddhartha-as-Buddha will quote the verse from the Dhammapada to admonish an angry king: “Shall we meet hatred with hatred? Hatred never ceases by hatred. Hatred ceases by love alone.”Footnote ⁶²

But does Siddhartha's peaceful nature render him unfit to be king? Is violence a necessary foundation for rule? Andrews links three separate scenes from Light of Asia to prove the negative. In the first, we watch through the eyes of Siddhartha's frustrated father as the teenage Buddha-to-be fights with Devadatta over the ownership of a swan his evil cousin has shot. The conflict is brought to the council clan for judgment. In the eyes of the state, who has a greater right to the swan? The camera pans over Siddhartha, Devadatta, and King Suddhodana as a mysterious sage renders his verdict: “The destroyer only spoils and wastes. The good friend saves and preserves. . . . In obedience to the Law above laws made by men—they must judge that [the swan's] life belongs to the Price Siddhartha.”Footnote ⁶³ Unlike those of “godless Communists,” Siddhartha's sensibilities reflect his adherence to a higher power.

Andrews's Buddhist audience would have been familiar with the second scene, in which Siddhartha chooses the lovely Yashodhara to be his bride from among a host of beautiful women. Devadatta's prominence at this event, however, would have been new ground. Andrews offers his viewers a Devadatta who is “Luciferian in black, studded with gems,” astride a coal-black horse that “snorts and whirls . . . hooves narrowly missing a tragic woman of the untouchables and her sick child in arms. . . . Such worthless creatures mean nothing to Devadatta.” With the ruthless obliviousness of a totalitarian dictator, “Devadatta sinks spurs deep. . . . People are knocked down. Screaming, they roll and scramble to escape being trampled.” Yashodhara's “shocked reaction to Devadatta's casual cruelty” heightens the unstated contrast between totalitarian inhumanity and the democratic benevolence of the Free World. Andrews pulls out all the Hollywood devices to resolve the tension between martial prowess and compassion by portraying Siddhartha's ultimate victory over Devadatta in the legendary Tournament of Warriors. Devadatta—in true Communist fashion—sabotages Siddhartha at every turn. He cheats, connives, and tramples his own friends underfoot in his doomed quest to win this Cold War. Siddhartha could easily wage war but he, like Truman's United States, chooses not to do so.Footnote ⁶⁴

All of these themes are consolidated in the screenplay's closing action. Siddhartha is now the Buddha. Devadatta—like the Soviet Union—is playing the long game and has joined the sangha (monastic community) as an apparently devout follower of the Buddha while secretly plotting to usurp the Buddha's leadership. Andrews draws on Pāli materials to portray Devadatta's thirst for rule at any cost, including his multiple attempts to take the Buddha's life. At times, Devadatta seems close to victory: several disciples break off from the Buddha, and Devadatta's rolling boulder wounds the aging Tathāgata. But the balance inevitably returns to righteousness. As Devadatta descends into madness and despair, the growing masses of Buddha's followers chant the refuge prayer. Appropriately, it is a group of Untouchables that fulfills Devadatta's deathbed request to be taken to the Buddha to utter his final words: “Buddham-saranam-gacchami” (“I go for refuge to the Buddha”).Footnote ⁶⁵ The “Judas-like villain” takes refuge in the Buddha as he falls lifeless to the ground. The Buddha's ultimate victory has the logic of mission; his power-mad cousin is saved from himself before death. Free World victory signals opportunity rather than wholesale destruction.

Andrews's script was met with a mix of positive reviews and logistical concerns. “This film will do more toward fighting communist propaganda and bringing peace and security to Southeast Asia than any single effort previously made by any group or individual,” pronounced James W. McFarlane, president of Freedom Film Corporation. If seen by 25 percent of the world's six hundred million Buddhists, it would generate a “handsome” profit. Charles Tanner, the supervisor of CFA's motion picture program, agreed that “it is a good script” and “could be a potent anti-communism effort,” but he feared it would cost millions to produce. CFA should “approach Hollywood with a plea that such a picture be produced by them in conjunction with some first-class Indian company.” In any instance, CFA's role in the project would remain unpublicized to avoid giving the impression that the film was American propaganda or that CFA favored one Asian religion over another.Footnote ⁶⁶

The script got off to a bumpy start in Asia. In September 1953, CFA's field officer in Ceylon submitted Andrews's script to the Maha Bodhi Society for comments and review. Despite Andrews's disembodied Buddha-orb and strategic integration of Pāli textual material, there was instant pushback. Why had not Malalasekera spoken openly about the film with other Buddhists? Why did he presume he could speak for Ceylonese Buddhists? CFA was initially unsurprised: “Once the script hit the field and was read by the Buddhist leaders the firework[s] were bound to begin. Any organization which is as split as the Buddhists are is sure to have major difference of opinion, on minor and major points.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Perhaps a roundtable with representatives of various Buddhist groups could build consensus.

But Ceylonese Buddhist opposition quickly escalated beyond the reach of a friendly luncheon. One week later, an angry letter in the Ceylon Daily News highlighted CFA's carefully unpublicized association with the project. Wayfarer was clearly an American anti-Communist effort, not a manifestation of cross-cultural collegiality. CFA also noted with alarm that “an amazing amount of space” in the October 21 issue of the Buddhist World was dedicated to attacking the project. Its contributors excoriated “The Buddha-Film” as “vicious and sacrilegious . . . a travesty . . . blatantly intended to be a box office draw of sensation and sense-excitation.” Malalasekera was pushing Ceylon's Buddhists toward “irreligion” and crass American materialism: “If the time comes when the flower of gods and men, Prince Siddhartha, gets identified with Gregory Peck . . . (as Tarzan has got identified by the masses with Johnny Weismuller), the last nail of the coffin will be driven into the Buddhadhamma in this fair Sri Lanka.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Wayfarer had become a liability. By the end of the year, when outraged Ceylonese Buddhists were promising to “ask President Eisenhower to intervene and stop the production of a film on the life of the Buddha planned by the ‘Anti-Communist Committee for Free Asia,’” Charles Tanner recommended a full retreat. CFA's main objective, he argued,

Cascade Pictures subsequently received formal notification that CFA had canceled the Wayfarer project.Footnote ⁷⁰ This would be the CFA's last attempt to produce a film. In 1954, the CFA—renamed the Asia Foundation—would redirect its motion picture program from producing films to supporting existing film industries in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea.