Kangyur Rinpoche became one of the first Buddhist masters to accept Western students. One of those was New Zealander Kim Hegan, who had ended up in Darjeeling in the 1960’s almost by accident, coincidentally arriving at Kangyur Rinpoche’s front door. 35 years after Kim is persuaded to return to India to tell the story of Kangyur Rinpoche’s life, with Kim’s daughter, Yeshe, in the director’s chair.
The directorial debut of Yeshe Hegan, Return to Gandhi Road is a documentary with a simple goal; for Aucklander, Kim Hegan, to return to India and find the Buddhist Monastery that he went to 50 years earlier. The journey itself is largely uneventful and straightforward, so the documentary instead fills the gaps with the life story Kangyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan Monk that has been widely claimed as the origin of Buddhist teachings into the wider western world, and a number of interviews with other people that Kangyur Rinpoche has directly affected with his life’s work.
With a collection of exquisitely intricate photography and filmed footage of the gorgeous lush Tibetan landscapes that greatly contrast the overcrowded slums of India’s ghettos, the visual topography will no doubt be adding locations to the audiences’ bucket list of places to visit. What Return to Gandhi Road fails to do, however, is come together is a cohesive vision.
From a narrative standpoint, Return to Gandhi Road is a simultaneously vague and convoluted mess of half-baked story threads. What does Hegan want the documentary to accomplish? There are attempts within the 90-minute feature to teach us about the life of Kangyur Rinpoche from a variety of sources, the movement of thousands of sacred Tibetan script from Tibet to India, how Kangyur Rinpoche taught the first westerners, or how westerners have since gutted and commercialised Buddhist teachings for profit. None of the ideas are properly realised, and despite nuggets of interesting anecdotes, the way in which all of the elements are stitched together prevents the audience from being able to properly follow the sequence of events.
Hegan has simply bitten off more than he could chew, in this case. In a documentary that is based all around the life’s work of Kangyur Rinpoche to experience, collect, copy, transport, protect, disseminate, and transmit Tibetan script, less than five minutes of the feature is dedicated to the actual content of the script. With a religion that aims not for conversion, but for the transmission of their message, Hegan has missed an opportunity to engage the audience and provide an opportunity to truly learn about the original teachings that eventually transformed into yoga and “live laugh love” ornaments.
Like watching the Harry Potter movies if the Voldemort scenes had been removed, Return to Gandhi Road lacks substance about the topic it is attempting to promote, with a frustratingly limited amount of time spent discussing topics such as non-duality and impermanence, enlightenment is constantly discussed but never delved into, in a documentary led by a man that never completed his journey, had no commitment to return, and only did so to connect with his daughter.
Lacking passion and a strong narrative direction, Return to Gandhi Road disrespects the achievements of Kangyur Rinpoche by constantly interrupting his biography with unnecessary interviews with white westerners, diverting attention away from Buddha, and towards the westerners and the western world.
There is a brilliant story of a families’ strength and determination to learn, catalogue, transmit, and later to physically transport and protect the Tibetan scripts as they flee from a country under siege by China. Whether it is worth sitting through the rest of the documentary to get to that chapter of Kangyur Rinpoche’s life, will come down to the patience of the viewer. Personally, unless you have a love for Buddhism and a wealth of background knowledge on the subject, I would wait until the title is available to stream online or for purchase in a physical copy.