Huge Sekiro spoilers ahead.
In Buddhism, the three marks of existence are impermanence, non-self and suffering. It’s our failure to accept these things that leads to Samsara: an endless, painful cycle of reincarnation and an aimless wandering through a ceaseless existence.
Like weeping over wilted cherry blossoms when autumn arrives, we struggle against transience, and so we suffer. We cling onto fixed identities in ourselves and others, expecting to step into Heraclitus’ river over and over, and so we suffer. Perhaps most painfully, we reject suffering itself, treating its presence in our lives as a failure, rather than a natural occurrence. And so we suffer.
“Sometimes, I feel obsessed… with this insignificant thing called ‘self’. But even so, I am compelled to preserve it.”
A line easy to imagine from one of Sekiro’s Buddhist monks, but this lament is from the lips of Dark Souls 2’s Lucatiel of Mirrah. Sekiro may be the first of From’s Soulslikes to have you grapple through valleys overlooked by stone Buddhas, but Buddhist themes have been present since we first awoke in the Undead Asylum. Themes of ego, and transience. Of the conflict caused by our perception dividing reality into disparate, binary oppositions. Of endless cycles, and endless suffering. Hollow gods and monarchs grasping at former glory. Academics driven to communion with malevolent entities on the path to ascension. Shinobi caught in purgatorial, deathless struggles somewhere between duty and compassion.
Let’s Play Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – Sekiro Shadows Die Twice PS4 Pro Gameplay Watch on YouTube
We play a part in these stories, too. Caught in our own recurrent loops of struggle, death and resurrection. We’ll get what we think we want, eventually. Then hit ‘new game plus’, willingly perpetuating the same cycle that has stolen the sanity from the creatures we’ve just spent hours putting out of their misery.
Ever get the feeling that – like a crotchety, tamarin-bearded sensei hitting us over and over again with a bamboo stick – From might be trying to teach us something?
Sekiro’s exploration of this karmic ouroboros manifests itself within two parallel cycles. One of stagnating immortality, the other perpetual violence.
“Asura” or the Japanese “Ashuradō” is one of the six Buddhist realms of existence Tibetans call “the wheel of life”. A demon realm, characterised by anger, jealousy and constant war. One said to be on the path of ‘Shura’ is trapped in relentless conflict, seeking only to gain greater martial prowess. For Wolf, the lure of Shura remains a constant threat, and one the sculptor sits as a monument to the dangers of.
“Every buddha I carve is an incantation of wrath,” he laments. “The fate of those who owe a deep karmic debt. You’ll understand when you try carving one for yourself someday.”
If we share enough saké with the Sculptor, we’ll learn of his past as a Shinobi, and the fate of his own left arm, cut off by lord Isshin “for his own sake”. At one point, the Sculptor interrupts his own explanation of the prosthetic arm’s potential.