For me all ways are the Buddha Way, and all movies are extended metaphors of the Way Home. The legend and teaching of the Buddha are the Way Home that is driven by the sense of a Paradise Lost. Because we live in a space/time world that is mapped linearly from here to there, we believe we have to get somewhere to find our Home. And the Lion was a story about finding home at a particular location. However, the emotional story of the movie, the story that you as the viewer feels is Here. The movie is Home. The movie as metaphor is your home, at least while you are traveling in the journey of the movie.

Here is where we have to make the shift from the objective (the movie) to the subjective (you as the center, you as the movie). Just as the hero in the movie had to remember his Home when he came upon the Indian food he remembered in the streets with his brother, when the smell reminded him like the perfume of a lost lover, we have remembrances of our lost home.

We human beings are wanderers in search of Home, that mystical place where we are absolutely OK, where there are no apologies, that place where we belong. There is no feeling that can substitute for it authentically, but so many products and beliefs are sold as pacifiers when this longing is awakened. This longing for the lost mother is universal. For the child the Mother and the World and the child are One. And so we search for our lost unity with the world.

In the movie the little boy is snatched from abject poverty and dropped into unimaginable luxury of our everyday middle class world. And yet, he still didn’t feel at home with all these substitutes, with this artificial paradise.