On the surface, Milton's Secret (2016) is a story about a financially-stressed family getting a visit from grandpa, who brings something unusual with him (besides his tea). Because Donald Sutherland really liked the character, he agreed to play Grandpa Howard. Grandpa has a secret, which he shares with his grandson, Milton. It fundamentally changes not only him, but also his parents. Howard brings Zen Buddhism and alchemy to his family. That the fictional (narrative) film explains and relates the two and renders both so transparent for the audience says something about the potential of the medium itself to handle abstractions and relate them to life.
The first hint that Grandpa
Howard is a bit different comes just after he arrives and is eating out with
Milton and his parents, Jane and Bill. After Howard takes out his tea packet
and makes his own tea at the table in the restaurant, Milton asks how the tea
tastes. “It tastes like tranquility; it tastes like calm,” Howard replies. What
follows in the rest of the film is how to achieve tranquility and calm without
the tea. In providing his recipe, Grandpa Howard essentially raises Milton out of
his childhood. “When I was a man, I put away childish things.” It’s from
Corinthians 13,” Howard says to Milton on his friend Timmy now going by Tim. The
reference is to spiritual adulthood, which in any religion is distinct from
what most practitioners believe and practice. The Gnostics in ancient Egypt,
some of whom were Christian, emphasized esoteric knowledge (i.e., knowledge
that is known, or can be known, only to a few).
The film is most significant because it makes such knowledge transparent
for a mass audience rather than just a few people. Indeed, for a film to
concentrate on a higher level of understanding is itself significant.
In real life, people
not willing to accept or able to comprehend esoteric knowledge tend to resist
it and even treat it’s holders with passive or even active aggression. In the
film, Bill is the skeptic. “You have to be skeptical of your skepticism,” Howard
relies to Milton on Bill’s skepticism of Howard’s lifestyle. It is not uncommon for skeptics of knowledge they
themselves do not have to go after superficial differences, out of a deeper
resentment. In fact, being oriented to superficialities or trifles is itself an
obstacle to giving up childish things.
Howard’s esoteric knowledge
begins as Milton is suffering from being bullied at school. His parents are
also focused not on their son, but on their momentary financial hardship. What
Howard says to Milton applies equally to his parents. Your thoughts on your problem: “They are
houseguests and they all go eventually.” Sitting outside with Grandpa Howard,
Milton asks, “Why is my cat always happy, no wonder what?” Howard replies in a
way that tells us the source of his knowledge. “I have lived with many Zen masters. Each and
every one of them was a cat. Contrary to humankind, cats can let go of whatever
happened yesterday and don’t worry about tomorrow and next week; they’re just
here. . . . I’m not in the future now, or in the past; I’m here in the present
with you.” This is essentially the Buddhist notion of mindfulness.
The Buddhist monk Thich
Nhat Hanh, who was banished from his native Vietnam for more than five decades,
has been typically mentioned along with the Dalai Lama as “one of the two most
influential Buddhist monks of the modern era.”[1]
Hanh is particularly noted for having spread the concept of mindfulness around
the world. Mindfulness is “a mental state achieved by focusing . . . awareness
on the present moment.”[2]
Through practice, people can “overcome their anger and negative emotions.”[3]
When a person’s attention is entirely in the present, anger about the past and
worrying about the future are eclipsed.
Practically speaking,
being focused on the moment means less chance of getting distracted and having
an accident. Interestingly, not having forgiven oneself for having hurt other
people can also be a distraction that keeps one in the past rather than in the
tranquility of the moment. Howard answers Milton on having had to kill people
in war: “Taking a life, Milton, causing hurt to someone, steals a piece of you
and then you have to try to find a way to forgive yourself for it. But you have
to try because without forgiveness, the past determines who you are in the
present.” It is not uncommon to find adults who grew up in abusive dysfunctional
families to be caught up in the past out of resentment, which in the absence of
apologies can be difficult to shed, when self-forgiveness instead may hold the
key to being in the moment and finally losing the past.
In Buddhist thought,
the self is not an entity. Hence a person can be thought of as whatever the
person puts into himself or herself. Howard gives Milton an empty beaker as a
birthday present. At parent’s night,
Milton speaks on the War Between the States. “It’s the war we’re all in, Milton says. We
argue so much, and hold grudges. “There was a civil war raging right inside of
me. Then my grandfather came to visit and he told me how to end the war,” using
a beaker. “Imagine that you are a beaker. Whatever you decide to put in it,
that’s who you are. If you fill it with hate and fear, pour in your worries
about past and future, you’re probably going to be miserable.” If you fill your
beaker “with love and caring, miracles can happen. That’s the secret. We all
can change. You just have to turn the empty space into gold. When you do that,
the war is over. We are all alchemists.” Howard tells Milton afterward: You had a beaker filled “with anger and fear,
but then you added beauty and you added a little bit of mischief. That, my
dear, Milton, is alchemy.” If the self itself is not an entity, then what we
refer to as a person is whatever that person has put into “the beaker,” which
in itself is empty as well as transparent. Referring back to Milton’s talk, moreover,
Howard tells his young grandson that he can again let his heart make sense of
what his mind couldn’t figure out. “No matter where you are, no matter who
you’re with, you hold the secret.”
1. Richard
C. Paddock, “After
Half a Century, ‘An Apostle of Peace’ Goes Home to Vietnam,” The New York Times, May 17, 2019.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
