Little Buddha tells its story from two directions at once, and the structure is the point rather than a stylistic flourish. In Seattle, a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks led by Lama Norbu arrives at the door of an ordinary American family to say that their nine-year-old son, Jesse, may be the reincarnation of Lama Norbu's own late teacher, one of three child candidates under consideration. To explain what reincarnation means and why it matters, Lama Norbu tells Jesse the story of Siddhartha, the sheltered prince who left his palace, encountered old age, sickness and death for the first time, and eventually found enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree, a story Bertolucci stages as its own full historical narrative running alongside the present-day search.
Bertolucci, a director whose earlier reputation rested on political and sexually frank filmmaking, treated the Buddhist material as something to be gotten right rather than merely evoked. Three practicing Tibetan teachers took part in the production directly: Khyongla Rato Rinpoche appears on screen as the monastery's abbot, and Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche served as a consultant with authority over every ritual gesture and item of ceremonial detail the film depicted, down to how a search party actually tests a candidate child against a predecessor's possessions.
The two stories never fully merge into one, and that is deliberate. Jesse's own uncertainty about what is happening to him, and his parents' skepticism, sit beside Siddhartha's far more assured, legendary path to insight, letting a modern audience enter the tradition's claims through the more relatable of the two doors before the film asks anything harder of them.