The Wolverine: A Ronin on the Road to Mortality

by Christopher Barr

To live forever is to live without meaning.  Does a person need to become aware of death, one's own death before learning to live their life with meaning, like in the case of the Buddha?   Can the Wolverine finally become the Buddha and be remembered as the one who woke up, or will he be doomed to be a Ronin without a guiding master?

The Wolverine is one of the most interesting comic book characters today. A character born with a mutation that accelerates his healing abilities, this mutant healing factor, and regenerates damaged bones and destroyed tissue well beyond the capabilities of an ordinary man.  His body heals but the healing factor doesn't suppress the pain he endures during injury.

Also he was subjected to a clandestine US Government military project, the Weapon X Program, to artificially and involuntarily assist his mutation.  His skeleton was reinforced with this indestructible metal alloy known as adamantium.   Wolverine was to be the first test subject of this program and was kidnapped and taken to the Canadian facility, where he was exposed to a brutal process of bonding the adamantium to his skeleton.  Wolverine recovered much quicker than expected and slaughtered most of the remote facilities personnel upon escaping.  

His mutation also consists of natural animal-like adaptations of his body, including three sharp retractable claws housed within each forearm. Wolverine's hands don't have actual openings for the claws to move through, thus cutting through his flesh every time he extrudes them.

So what is it to live a life of immortality?  This phenomena is often portrayed mythologically as unpleasant and undesirable.  Do we need to be aware of an ending to life to enjoy it?  What about boredom without a time limit on opportunity.  Does death and the knowledge of death actually give meaning to life?

The problem with Wolverine is that all our existing institutions, all that's considered meaningful is based on the assumption of mortality, for the most part, Religions (the denial of death) notwithstanding.  We make meaning in our lives because we are the only species that possess knowledge that we are going to die. Achievement and the desire to make and leave a mark all come from the anxiety that accompanies our imminent departure.  

Everything is changeable, everything appears and disappears; there is no blissful peace until one passes beyond the agony of life and death.   - Buddha

Is Logan suffering from anti-thanatophobia?  Why is his fear, a fear of living?  My grandmother before her death, spoke to my mother about being okay with her inevitable death, she felt a solace in knowing she was close to dying.  So was her desire for death a result of weakening muscles and heath or was it a culmination of disappointments and realizations?  

We must begin this journey to enlightenment with suffering and Logan has suffered.  The Supreme Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived about 2,500 years ago, asks that you accept that you will one day die but while you are here and now you should embrace the natural world and learn.  This is the path to the fulfilling life.  Knowledge of death breathes life into those who have allowed it.  The idea of waltzing with death is a plight Wolverine can only imagine.  Impermanence, suffering and death, as seen by Siddhartha in his late twenties was to wake up the young prince, who has only lived a life of pleasure and luxury, sheltered from the reality of existence.   It was during these little treks outside the palace, in Northern India, that Siddhartha came to the conclusion that he will also become sick, become ill and one day die.  Wolverine doesn't know what it feels like to fear death for he is a body out of time.

No knowledge is won without sacrifice and like the Buddha, Wolverine left what he believed to be his family, those that cared for him and looked out for him.  In order to gain anything you first must lose everything.  Logan goes on his pilgrimage to seek out inner peace and in some cases closure.  He has lived many lives, not in the circular sense of reincarnation, he has lived as himself.  Born in Alberta, Canada, and living through history, through wars and disease, he's suffered the deaths of those who were once young but have grown old and died as nature in its powerful evolutionary force intended.  It’s certainly no wonder that he's preferred the life of a nomad, a traveller of the earth, a wanderer.  

Wolverine is a man seeking enlightenment but is unable to because with enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense, one must seek death and embrace death.  He cannot, or in his case not for a very long time which is believed to be over 400 years.  A Buddhist quality that Wolverine possesses is the knowledge of the world suffering a constant rebirth of ideas and adolescent knowledge.  Wolverine has achieved what F. Scott Fitzgerald hoped one would achieve in his short story, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', not to be confused with the Brad Pitt film that completely overlooked the primary theme of the story.  Fitzgerald was troubled by wasted youth, vitality and knowledge often missing a synchronistic equilibrium.  He felt that if one was born old and gained wisdom through life experience that one might be able to achieve this happy medium of knowledge and youth coexisting.  One doesn't need to grow old before one achieves an intellectual enlightenment.  Wolverine in the fictional sense has achieved what Fitzgerald could only dream, youth, knowledge and wisdom of the world.

Wolverine has suffered many injuries to his body, through various battles, but yet he heals.  Scares remind us that the past is real but yet he doesn't have any.  He does suffer, phantom limb syndrome with his injuries though.  To achieve enlightenment one must reconcile with the body and the pain one suffers as a result of their body, by doing so, one doesn't allow the inevitable pain and suffering of the body to alter one’s state of mind.  

Buddhism is not about being special; it’s about being normal and doing normal things.  In the case of Wolverine, whether he likes it or not, he's special, he's not normal and he knows it, hence his failed quest for enlightenment as he roams the earth.

Wolverine can attain Nirvana in his mutated state, for Nirvana is within us all and just needs to be seen with a heightened elevated mind.  Like Jacques Lacan's 'Order of the Real', transcending language, transcending meaning and attaining reality is a journey that most - never travel.  The point is not to debate with reality for reality is.