Have you noticed Zen Buddhist themes filtering into shmups and western games?

[SuguriSTG]

I watched a play through of ZeroRanger and it hit on Buddhist ideas and tried to emulate the Zen-like perfection of a final best run. I have found it so interesting that more and more western developers are tapping into Buddhist motifs, (as was also the case with Rain World.) I feel like video games are increasingly more drawn into exploring Buddhist philosophy and metaphysics rather than Christianity themes in an ever-secularizing world.

Perhaps Buddhism feels more intuitively true? Or perhaps it's just that Buddhism tickles the creative juices, with the story-telling possibilities of reincarnation across immeasurable scales of time? You also don't need to have gods in Buddhist world, but you can have them and make them nearly anyway you want without messing up the cannon if you want to tell a different story. And you're not going to offend any churches or trigger any boycotts by playing around with Buddhist mythology.

The spread of Buddhist themes in fiction has been happening even as Buddhism becomes less exotic outside of Asia. I find it really remarkable so I started writing this essay-thing.

Outside of shmups:

Rain World is an explicitly Buddhist world where a Buddhist society died out and left animals behind. More shmup adjacent games like Mixed Juice 100% and Acceleration of Suguri 2 while not very Buddhist did have endings where they revealed that some characters have lived enormous amounts of time. (46 billion years; which is closer to the immeasurable cosmic lengths of the "kalpa"eras commonly accepted in Buddhism rather than Abrahamic religions that say the world and human sentience are only a few thousand years old, and have in living so long forgotten important things and past relationships.)

Pretty much any visual novel that has time travel and alternate endings will have the stunningly unoriginal twist that there was a time loop all along. A genre of being able to choose your own adventure and then reload a save tempts developers who already are familiar with Buddhist themes to "reveal" that you weren't just replaying things, but the character themselves were too. It's so easily expected that I don't think I'd even spoil anything to just mention a few titles.

Muv Luv Alternative, Remember 11, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, etc. Even Fate: Stay/Night had a time loop in one branch. Not that I'm saying any of these are amazing, I'm just pointing out how common it is and how commonly Japanese work tap on Buddhist themes. Then there is Cross Channel, Steins;Gate, Yuno, etc. I think I've played more story-driven visual novels like this than without!

Another example I remembered that sounds like it has themes for the Nintendo DS is "Bravely Default." I haven't played it myself, but I read (upcoming spoiler alert)>! that near the end of the game it has a major character who tricks you when she urges you to go to fight the same bosses that you've already defeated, and if you win she'll just tell you to do it again, and again, and again, in a tedious time loop at the end of the game that makes you wonder if the game is glitching. She will just keep wasting your time by making you repeat your actions over and over with the characters that you control forgetting about any of it for as long as you keep following her orders like a dog, until when you finally defy those orders and decide to stop fighting anyone, which reveals the truth that she was tricking you and manipulating you into making time loop that was creating all of the suffering.!< I've been a little curious about it after I heard that, though since I kind of know about the spoiler maybe I wouldn't enjoy it if it's true. (Hopefully it wasn't on your to-play list either, but I did warn you that I would spoil it!)

Another shmup with a similiar timeloop to Zero Ranger, was Devil Engine, though it's minalistic enoguh that I don't know if it's very Buddhist?

Buddhism also seems to make its way into movies. Groundhog Day" (starring Bill Murray) and "Edge of Tomorrow" (starring Tom Cruise and adapted from a Japanese light novel) were also prominent examples of Hollywood playing with Zen themes that I actually watched, though most of a western audience wouldn't pick up on the origins at all. Groundhog Day in particular was a lot more dramatic, dark, and concerned with existential suffering in the original script which you can read on IMDB, but then the script was rewritten to be a comedy. But Bill Murray still reincarnates in a sense over and over until he finally lives a perfect day. I heard even the writers might not have even realized how Buddhist the story they were writing was though.

For the record, I'm not Buddhist myself and used to be Christian, though I was also a weeb and don't follow any religion anymore. I just have a sense of respect for Buddhism and their philosophy.

[Faith]

Well, there are a lot of Buddhist in Japan and surrounding countries, lol.

But I can also add: I also said this for my review in Crimzon Clover; that the game has taught me that being zen and following the wind... is the way to go.

Deep down, there is a lot of zen to be found in STG. You are surrounded by thousands of bullets, constant death.

There are non-stop enemies coming at you. Lasers. All sorts of... threats... from every angle. And I think many can relate when we say that when we first saw expert-level STG play especially:

"This is impossible. No human can do this."

So, being surrounded by such threats and the perceived impossibility of our situation... we have a choice: do we embrace fear, panic, and so on. Or do we find and embrace the peace in it all?

Every bullet which grazes past my ship is energy which fuels my resolve and determination.

I also have no religion. But I did always say to myself that if I ever were to embrace one... it will be Buddhism. And STG's are my zen.

[Randorama]

I am answering just to indulge myself. I will only make some general observations, and a free suggestion:

1. Time travel in Western Fiction gained traction as a concept in the 19th Century. However, Buddhism does not actual have the concept of "people moving across time at will": it has the concept of "souls reincarnating in bodies after death". According to this view, if I die today (2025), my soul will reincarnate sometime in the future (e.g. 2026), once the Buddha or whoever else decides in what form (e.g. a human, again).

Briefly: No reincarnation in the past, as time proceeds in an unidirectional flow ("past" to "future") and souls can aim to "get out of the flow", into "nothingness". Buddhism has no time loops: that's a SF concept.

2. Reincarnation is not a concept exclusive to Buddhism.

Plato proposed a concept comparable to reincarnation and known as anamnesis. Other Greek philosophers preceding Plato also developed several ideas, and Gnosticism had its own version of reincarnation.

In sum: the idea of reincarnation has been going around in various forms across different cultures and across different historical periods, and it is not exclusive to Buddhism.

Tangent: traditional Christian views hold that life progresses in repeating cycles (e.g. the seasons) until one dies and is judged. The afterlife may be Heaven or Hell or Purgatory "forever": mortal life is usually conceived as the repetition of these natural cycles. "Linearity of time" and progress are concepts originating in the Enlightenement and Industrial Revolution.

In sum: "past" and "future" are modern concepts; religions generally conceive mortal life as "repeating present", usually in cycles (days, weeks, seasons, etc.).

3. Buddhism has been accessible to Western cultures for centuries.

Knowledge of Buddhism slowly spread into Western culture during the Middle Ages, to the point that the Buddha was considered a Christian Saint (back when there was just one denomination, i.e. in the 14th century). Knowledge of this religion gained traction in the 19th century and then expanded in the 1960s. The spread of Buddhism in fiction is not exactly new: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light was one early SF novel released in 1968.

In sum: Buddhism has not really been exotic outside of Asia for a while, at least for people who read a bit. It might still be exotic to rednecks, MAGA people and functional illiterates. Bonus: check out a book about Zen Buddhism and motorcycles, and see when it was written, to get some further time-stamps on Buddhism's cultural expansion.

4. Japanese culture is entrenched in its own variant of Buddhism.

There are probably dozens of books you can read on this topic: please google them. Regarding fiction, influences and citations probably seep in just about every artistic work for the simple reasons that Buddhist practices permeate Japanese culture (e.g. thanking for meals). In doubt, Japanese authors drop Buddhist references to make works look more..."Japanese", I guess.

5. S(cience) F(iction) and time travel stories remove the assumption that people must follow the "tyranny" of linear time and can move around time and possible worlds as they please. They thus drop an assumption shared by Christianity, Buddhism, and Enlightenment/Progressist views (but not necessarily Science: read here).

The moral of the story:

Game designers may pilfer ideas from many sources, but I wouldn't link cyclical time travel to Buddhism; religions do not even have a true concept of time. Science and Science Fiction do have time concept(s), and like to play with them a lot.

Three cheers for S(cience) and S(cience)F(iction) and Sh(mups), endless boos for religion.

Oh, and please read on topics before attempting "essays", OP: it might be useful to get informed opinions, in general.

[SuguriSTG]

1.) Time travel isn't in itself very Buddhist; however, I see it often paired with Buddhist themes and allegories. It's often paired with motifs about breaking free of delusions, of fixing things with esoteric knowledge, with epic cycles of death and rebirth, quests for enlightenment, and savior characters who go back in time to rescue everyone as if they're a Bodhisattva. When fiction dives into talking about parallel universes it can be similar to or even allegorical to when Buddhism addresses the consequences of having had infinite past lives. In Buddhism a person has already experienced every possible circumstance and set of variables already, whether they formerly lived as a "hungry ghost", a dog, a slave, a king, a woman, a man, or an asura (a deity.) It follows then that if they can remember any of that they could be be ready to move on and not repeat the past through yet another cycle. After experiencing any possibility before, and an incalculable amount of past suffering and struggling, an individual could be ready to wake up, have a moment of zen and a final release. Sometimes games explore this when they have a true ending that can only be unlocked by doing the bad endings first, or have a game + mode.

2.) I'm not familiar with Gnosticism and often forget about them, so their belief in reincarnation comes as an interesting counter-argument. Whenever I've tried to read about them or any other esoteric religion I quickly get more confused. I've gathered there were many variants over the millennia, though I don't really have the patience or enough personal interest to learn in detail about the different schools of alternate fringe ideas that the early Christian church fought to stomp out.

3.) and 4.) are points I'm aware of. However, I think you can observe that Buddhism has diffused into popular culture much more since the 1960s. Only a handful of people were ever hippies back then, and only a slim minority were remotely receptive to listening to what the beatniks, Beach Boy's yogis, Alan Watts, or a motorcycle travelogue writer thought about anything at all. Since that era there have both been more Asian immigrants who have helped diffused some of it to their descendants, and Asian pop culture has gone more mainstream. Buddhism is still fairly exotic when only 2% of the US are Buddhist, and they're heavily concentrated in Hawaii and along the west coast, (where the hippie movement was the strongest and there are more Asian immigrants.)

Buddhism has grown slightly in the USA recently. Many of the young people who leave Christianity but who still want religion or some kind of spirituality are choosing trendier "new and exotic" alternate religions like Buddhism, Wicca, or New Age practices, which results in Buddhism leaning toward the younger side. It also probably helps that it isn't just liberals and hippies who are willing to teach Buddhism in the United States any longer, and the door has been opened to conservatives who want to meditate their way to mental wellness, better productivity, and getting rich just like the Buddha. Even the teachings about kindness and compassion are optional now. I don't think you can quantify how much interest in Japanese media has encouraged interest in Buddhism, but I think it has been a real pull when anime and Japanese games have gone mainstream globally since the 1980s.

5.) I don't think I'd get much out of trying to read this paper or mathematical proofs that imply time travel is possible. Even if mathematicians think they've "proved" time travel by following some axioms to their logical conclusion, that still doesn't mean it even exists until there is actual scientific proof. Math is just theoretical and it lets you think up universes that don't even exist, and you can make a mental playground with any kind of geometric model you want, but it's the assumptions that make or break how truthful it is. Models are wrong all the time and can erroneously imply things that are later shown to be false when you find out about new variables in the universe. As the expression goes, "The map is not the territory."

Finally, I totally agree about the need to read more, though there is just too much to read everything.

[AGermanArtist]

Read Manly P Hall.

[Randorama]

OP, to cut a long story short:

You seem to have discovered Bouddhism as a tool, so everything looks like a nail to you.

If you want to see Time Travel as an idea invented by Gautama himself (y'know, the one who introduced the concept of [url=ttps://thezenuniverse.org/sunyata-the-zen-universe/]Śūnyatā[/url] which is all about removing the spatio-temporal boundedness of the self), good luck with your repeating this point over and over again, perhaps even into later lives. To each their own and the wolf to the sheep, we say in my hometown.

You may however do something useful and check shmups with Buddhist motives in them, and perhaps write an "EffortPost" (TM by Sima Tuna) here. Hint: Ikaruga is one of at least a few dozen titles.

Good luck!