Recognize yr mother in all beings
Going rare-crystal-drip mode and exploring "TEMPLE FRIENDLY" mindset with Devendra Banhart
Devendra Banhart: He’s cool as s**t, his music is popping, and he gets off big radiant fits like it’s NOTHING — that’s 3 of the highest-ranked qualities on our official list of “Top Blackbird SpyTraits” !!
Devendra started putting out albums in 2002, and his chunes have only gotten vibier with time — here at Spyplane H.Q. we’ve been known to throw on the super-posi video for the song “Taking a Page” and enjoy the pleasant sensation that the room around us is somehow getting WARMER and SUNNIER…??
Devendra shot the video during a trip through “Kathmandu, Muktinath, Ranipauwa, Pokhara, and a few remote parts of upper and lower Mustang” AND in a few scenes he pairs a SHERPA jacket with wild facepaint, cementing this as a BLESSED-GORP FILMIC ACHIEVEMENT …
Devendra just opened his first-ever solo show of paintings, at L.A.’s Nicodim gallery, and the work is fantastic — we hit him up to talk about art, reincarnated mothers, yaks, “TEMPLE-FRIENDLY” fits, PLUS a jawn so rare it had to be SMUGGLED around the planet …
Blackbird Spyplane: Tell me about the “Taking a Page” video real quick. You shot it in Nepal while you were acting in a movie about the 8th century tantric master Guru Rinpoche, who helped establish Vajrayana Buddhism in Tibet. There’s a moment in the video where 12 yaks are liberated from slaughter, which, since we are earth’s pre-eminent pro-animal-rights dope-joints newsletter, we loved. What’s the story behind that trip and those FREED YAKS?
Devendra Banhart: “Yeah, the yaks were liberated by my friend and teacher, Neten Chokling Rinpoche! I was there shooting probably the only film I’ll ever be in, where I play an author who has his career totally destroyed and goes on a crazy sci-fi adventure and learns about Padmasambhāva, Guru Rinpoche. We mostly shot the movie in Tokyo, but also Kathmandu and Muktinath, in really sacred sites, so it was fascinating to be there.
“So during the trip my teacher paid a thousand bucks a yak — you pay to liberate them, and they get marked so no one can ever hunt them. It’s beautiful, because he’s basically freeing a person, the butcher, from the karma of having to slaughter these yaks. And he paid quite well.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Speaking of liberation, I read an interview you gave to a Buddhist publication called the Tricycle, and a concept the writer brought up stayed with me: That we can liberate ourselves “from the hell of taking everything personally” by “recognizing all beings as our mother.” That’s fantastic…
Devendra Banhart: “That idea was one of the first things I found very attractive about Buddhism in general, because it didn’t really require belief — I don’t need to believe in reincarnation and don’t need to believe that everyone was my mother and I was theirs: I just need to have that attitude, and it makes it easier to put up with how angry I can be, or not angry, but how judgmental, and how easily annoyed. ‘This person is annoying me — but they were once my mother, and me theirs.’ That concept was very, very attractive.
“That was an initial, ‘Oh, okay, this is interesting, let me look into what this is all about…’”