Julie: Your journey into understanding how religions can co-exist peacefully began when you were an exchange student in Nepal. Would you talk about that?
Paula: The Nepalese family I lived with had two mothers, one Hindu and one Buddhist. So the family was both Hindu and Buddhist and they worshipped in the temples of both faiths, which had a strong influence on me.
Julie: In what ways?
Paula: The two religions had blended into one for the Newar people who are indigenous to the Kathmandu Valley. It was a multi-faith community.
Julie: So you also got to know Hindu yogis.
Paula: Yes. I spent a lot of time traveling with the yogis to various pilgrimage places and getting to know their faith quite deeply, which is really a lifestyle more than a faith. Everything about the way they live their lives is sanctified whether they’re cooking food, whether they’re bathing, they’re so connected to the divinity of everything in life.
Julie: When did you embark in filmmaking?
Paula: Only about six or seven years ago, but before that I was writing scripts for five or six years. Usually the script writing process is one of rewriting, so it takes great patience but you learn the craft of story telling that way. I actually started directing and producing just about six or seven years ago.
Julie: Consciously or perhaps subconsciously, something happened that has finally led you, after two previous films, to this one.
Paula: Subconsciously. I never realized that I was going to end up making a film on this subject; it just sort of happened believe it or not.
Julie: In By Many Names you have managed to simplify and provide an accurate, objective representation of eight religions before you engage the viewer in the reality of a problem among them. That’s quite a feat.
Paula: I was really lucky because I had a lot of Moslem friends. I used to work in Kashmir three or four times a year. And I’d made Jain friends and I got to be exposed to the faiths when I’d go through Rajasthan taking tour groups. And I had Sikh friends. So it was a very personal subject for me.
Julie: You are Buddhist, but you had all these friends of different religions.
Paula: I wouldn’t say that I call myself Buddhist; I honor all religions. I love as deeply, several religions.
Julie: Would you say you have a passion for spiritual filmmaking?
Paula: Absolutely. To take something as great as consciousness or as great as the sacred and put it into any medium of art is a difficult task.
Julie: What’s your take on the genre called spiritual films?
Paula: It’s a ripe time to be doing this work and I have met various filmmakers in the genre. It is a challenge, but I know that the audience is there. I think that the makers of spiritual film are trying to support and help each other to make it easier for our work to come out.
Julie: Would you agree that there’s more responsibility on you now since it’s called ‘spiritual fimmaking.’
Paula: That’s very true. There are a lot of levels. Some prefer to call it conscious filmmaking, which is somewhat broader. There are so many ways to convey the oneness that is universal without having to say ‘it’s scientific’ or ‘it’s religious’ or ‘it’s of a specific path.’ It’s a more universal explanation; the spiritual can be considered narrow.
Julie: So interesting in this film, is that you show that many Hindus left Hinduism because of the caste system and went to other religions.
Paula: It’s something that has gone on for quite awhile. That’s a point that tour guides in Kashmir always make. If any of us were born and had to live as an untouchable, we’d probably convert out of that religion to have opportunity just to be equal and to be able to be educated and to lift ourselves up economically. Even today in India you’ll see magazines and the cover will be about mass conversions to Christianity, Buddhism and Islam.
Julie: You point out that whenever there are manmade walls, there is the fertilizer for religious division.
Paula: Nowadays, of course, the caste system doesn’t officially exist. Gandhi fought against the caste system and he named the untouchables ‘harijans, children of God.’ You certainly can’t blame them for wanting to rise up out of that category that they’ve been forced into against their will.
Julie: You went into this project in order to find out why religions go against one another in the name of God. In By Many Names you give three reasons that you discovered in your research. Let’s discuss those.
Paula: Political manipulation, struggle over territory such as we have in Palestine and Israel and Kashmir, those are the nuclear hotbeds that can drag in the whole world. Religions lay claim to holy sites. This is one.
Julie: You bring up the destruction of the enormous statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, as an example. Amazing footage. I don’t think much of the world actually realized that it was a territorial dispute fueled by religious intolerance.
Paula: Buddhism used to be very strong throughout India and Pakistan and all the way into Afghanistan. It was during the time of the Moslem invasion that a lot of the great sites were destroyed. A Buddhist friend pointed out to me that even when those Buddhist statues in Afghanistan were blown up and destroyed, you didn’t see any Buddhists going out and rioting over it.
But we don’t want to point a finger at anyone. The real problem is not being tolerant of someone else’s religion and there are fundamentalists of every stripe.
Julie: You also bring in the political fuel that feeds the fires of intolerance.
Paula: Religion is often misused by politicians because they want to manipulate poor people. One of the things we found out in our research was that people don’t have power, or education or a broad enough view of the world and can therefore be manipulated with propaganda because they’ve only been shown a very slanted or specific view of the world.
Julie: In the film you show boys in madrasas (Moslem schools) who only study a religious text and are offered no other view of the world. It’s like they’re living 1,000 years ago.
Paula: Yes, no other education of any other type, only a religious education that is quite narrow.
Julie: What’s the third reason for religious intolerance?
Paula: Exclusive claim to truth. That is, fundamentalism; that their path is the only true one to god. It kind of teaches an ownership of the divine.
Julie: You have the Dalai Lama, one of your narrators, really, saying ‘humanity needs different traditions.’
Paula: Yes, he says one tradition will not satisfy the variety of people. And if you look at all the continents and all the kinds of people we have everywhere, he realizes that being inclusive to allow all of these expressions of love for the divine is, of course, the only thing that makes sense. How can anyone say ‘I own the divine, and you’re wrong?’
Julie: But people all over the world are saying that. How can it change?
Paula: Through education, understanding and through promotion of values to see how the same threads and values run through all religions.
Julie: You have a great story in this film about the Jewish rabbi from India visiting Israel, taken to the Wailing Wall by an Arab.
Paula: By an Arab taxicab driver. The taxi driver got very upset and started badmouthing Jews, not realizing that the man riding in his cab was a Jew. At the end of the ride the rabbi got out and told him and the taxicab driver started hugging him and saying ‘I’m so sorry for ranting and raving.’
Julie: How often does one get to have a one-on-one experience with others of different religions?
Paula: Even in my case, as in the film, we’re with some young Moslem boys and their father, who is telling me how they hate Americans. Yet I was accepted in their home, drinking tea, and we were all extremely friendly. When they met me one-on-one, they didn’t hate me at all.
Julie: Had they ever met an American before?
Paula: I don’t think they had. In their area the newspapers were only giving one side about 9/11.
Julie: Also in the film, a Hindu swami in India states that ‘a true Christian cannot kill anyone.’
Paula: He said, ‘a true Christian cannot kill, a true Hindu cannot throw a bomb at others, a true Moslem cannot kill anyone else.’ Of course that’s true of all religions. If we transcended this human level of fighting and bickering and hate there would be no need to be violent toward each other.
Most religions – I can’t say the Jains have done anything – have been equally guilty of killing in the name of God. In the whole world there are at least 50 religious conflicts being fought at any one time. And most religions have been the aggressors at least one time or another.
Julie: If one religion does it, then it inspires another to do the same.
Paula: Yes, the Dalai Lama even talks about the cycle of revenge. In the case in India, it has been going on a great deal because of holy sites. The Moslems had knocked down Hindu and Jain temples and now there are some fundamentalists who want to go and knock down the mosques and erect temples again. So the cycle of carnage has been going on and it is extremely inflammatory. Thousands of deaths can occur whenever this takes place.
Julie: In this film, you don’t extrapolate these ideas to current world situations. Why is that?
Paula: We believe that the viewer is smart and they understand what’s going on. They hear it every time they turn on the news. We let the religious leaders themselves talk about their views. It wasn’t our place as filmmakers to interject our views; we merely provided a forum for people of eight religions to give us their messages and their ideas. I can’t voice it better than the Dalai Lama or Dr. Karan Singh.
Julie: Tell us what happened to you in 1984. You narrate this beautifully in the film.
Paula: I was trapped in a religious riot. People, including myself, were trapped in a bus and people were coming onto the bus to take off Sikhs and kill them. I was wearing a Sikh symbol around my neck. Thankfully it was hidden by my shirt and wasn’t noticed. I had experienced so much openness and love from these Hindus, and here I saw the extremes from those very people taking strangers off our bus to kill them. And it’s not to point a finger at them, but it’s to say that probably these extremes exist in most faiths all over the world. And that was the starting point for this.
What we have to do is find a solution and educate people about our similarities. We are the same whether you have brown eyes or blue eyes or green skin or purple skin. What’s the difference?
“In the whole world there are at least 50 religious conflicts being fought at any one time.”
Julie: One solution being proposed in Iraq is to relocate people by religious categories so they’ll stop fighting.
Paula: It’s very unfortunate and it’s back to fundamentalism. I used to work in Pakistan and Afghanistan and everyone at that time was getting along. If there are age-old hatreds or a sense of tribalism, that is something people should be able to get behind them, because in the meantime there are thousands of people being killed.
Julie: It’s so interesting for people from this country who haven’t been in India, to see that people there worship so many different gods.
Paula: But it’s only one god. There are a lot of different faces to god, there are a lot of different expressions of god, everything is divine. It’s very sad that people are fighting over which name of god is appropriate, when all of those paths have the same potential. It’s up to the human being to realize that potential.
Julie: What’s it like to have this passion?
Paula: It’s a responsibility. It is also a great passion and it’s extremely important right now in our world, suffering from these divisions. It’s extremely petty and it makes me sad. God is a part of all of us. It’s our birthright, so how can we be murdering each other in god’s name?
Julie: Did you struggle with yourself to take on this subject?
Paula: At times. It is a hot button issue for many people, so you want to be careful and not alienate people. What we’re talking about is inclusion, which is the only way. In the film, Dr. Karan Singh talks about how it’s alright for you to say your religion is better than mine, but it is not alright, therefore, to say that you can come and blow me up with a bomb just because I don’t believe in the same path as you.
Julie: What did you learn when you screened the film at the Sedona Film Festival recently?
Paula: In the Q & A, a lot of people were talking about tolerance nowadays not being a good term to use, because we can go farther than that. Tolerance can be divisive because it’s just putting up with each other. Most people in our film want acceptance, getting past the superficial level. In Kenya the Masai warriors will take a sip of blood from a cow’s neck when they’re hungry, but when you get right down to it, the blood in their veins is the same as yours or mine. It’s very simple. We are one.
For more information about By Many Names and other film projects by Paula Fouce, visit paradisefilmworks.com.
