One of stagnating immortality, the other perpetual violence. Sekiro's exploration of this karmic ouroboros manifests itself within two parallel cycles. 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.Įver 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? We'll get what we think we want, eventually. Caught in our own recurrent loops of struggle, death and resurrection. Shinobi caught in purgatorial, deathless struggles somewhere between duty and compassion. Academics driven to communion with malevolent entities on the path to ascension. Hollow gods and monarchs grasping at former glory. Of endless cycles, and endless suffering. Of the conflict caused by our perception dividing reality into disparate, binary oppositions. 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. But even so, I am compelled to preserve it.'Ī 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. with this insignificant thing called 'self'. Perhaps most painfully, we reject suffering itself, treating its presence in our lives as a failure, rather than a natural occurrence. We cling onto fixed identities in ourselves and others, expecting to step into Heraclitus' river over and over, and so we suffer. Like weeping over wilted cherry blossoms when autumn arrives, we struggle against transience, and so we suffer. 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. In Buddhism, the three marks of existence are impermanence, non-self and suffering.

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