There has been some carping on various forums about the characters in Sankarea not being particularly interesting or original. Indeed, if the series were only a run-of-the-mill shōnen zombie-fest, they wouldn’t be much to write home about. But I would rather see Sankarea following the pattern of Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War; the point of the characters is not to be original or deep, but to act as representations or avatars of ideas and archetypes. Taking Sankarea’s characters as such representations, I’d say that it was among the best of the year.
Behind the zombies and potions, Sankarea’s main plot point is related to the existence or non-existence of an essential being. The questions are, can there be eternally continuing life and is there an essential “self” that can be brought back to life. These are also fundamental questions of Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrine, which are exposed in (among many other texts) the Heart Sutra, which we see Mero copying at her desk in episodes 6 and 9.
Dan’ichirō tries to bring back his dead wife by training Rea to be her replacement. Being able to bring someone back to life as-they-were is effectively presuming that there is an abiding and essential selfhood which can be reborn. According to the Perfection of Wisdom doctrine, this is a fallacy; not only does death mark the dissolution of the five elements of being (“skandhas”), the elements themselves did not have any essential or abiding existence to being with. To quote the Heart Sutra (Red Pine translation[1]):
The noble Avalokiteshvara Boddhisattva,
while practicing the deep practice of Prajnaparamita,
looked upon the Five Skandhas
and seeing they were empty of self-existence,
said, “Here, Shariputra,
form is emptiness, emptiness is form;
emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness,
whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form.
The same holds for sensation and perception, memory and consciousness.”
The visible phenomena are often compared to “foam on the ocean waves” in Buddhist texts. Foam appears and disappears, even sooner if you try to grasp it. You can’t hold on to that kind of being (“form”), as it is, as Avalokiteshvara states here, equal to emptiness.
However, Chihiro is able to revive Rea after a short while of being dead or at least nearly-dead. In a sense this goes against the previous principle, but I think we can treat it as a handwave to bring about the next problem: zombies are still corpses and will eventually rot away. Chihiro tries to fight the decay by investigating further potions and trying to keep Rea out of sunlight, but at least by the end of the anime, in vain. This is in keeping with above doctrine; while becoming a zombie might represent a temporary halt on the dissolution of being, zombiehood is not an escape from or contradiction with the usual workings of the world of phenomena.
The only one who sees her situation clearly is Rea herself. Chihiro has granted her a reprieve from the Dan’ichirō’s resurrection hell; she doesn’t want eternal life, she only wants to see what this world has to offer, for however short while that might be. That is, she has accepted that “form is emptiness” (that is, that life is transitory) and thus represents “enlightenment”[2].
In addition to their resurrection projects, both Chihiro and Dan’ichirō want to preserve slices of Rea in eternity in their photographs and videos. In effect by preserving Rea on film, they believe that they can bestow not only eternal life but eternal youth on Rea. The photographs and videos also underline that Chihiro and Dan’ichirō are effectively the same person, if we take the characters as representations of ideas. As a phenomenal existence, Chihiro is no doubt more pleasant for Rea, but both men represent the striving for an essential, eternal existence. Striving in the belief of the essential existence of phenomena is, of course, the cause of suffering[3].
The show contains various other Buddhism-related jokes. For example, it is rather logical the children of a Jōdō Shinshū temple household have a death-obsession (Chihiro’s zombie movies, Mero’s death-dress), as the doctrine makes it easy to end up on a waiting-for-better-life-after-death trip similar to Christianity.
Footnotes:
- [1] Red Pine: The Heart Sutra
- [2] That she doesn’t think of “enlightenment” or such actually makes her more so; one of the central points of the Heart Sutra is that there is “no knowledge, no attainment and no non-attainment”. That is, “enlightenment” is not a goal to attain.
- [3] In the spirit of monism, there are actually no essential causes either; see the book.