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JESUS, BUDDHA, AND GÖDEL: Unraveling the Matrix Mythos
II. The Hero’s Journey
As the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell described in “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” there are symbols and patterns which are common to myths and religions the world over, regardless of culture or era. This commonality manifests itself in what Campbell called the hero’s journey: a cycle of separation, initiation, and return that provides the structure on which the vast majority of myth is built. It is exemplified, for instance, by the “Star Wars” trilogy (which George Lucas admits borrowed heavily from Campbell’s work): Luke, the hero, leaves his home on Tatooine, proceeds along a road of trials through which he is initiated into his role of Jedi, and then returns to Tatooine to rescue his friends and, ultimately, liberate society. Another example, from ancient Greece, is “The Odyssey”: Odysseus leaves to fight against Troy, has a long road of adventure, and ultimately returns home to his reward. The Oriental tradition has the story of Buddha: Prince Gotama leaves his father’s home to discover the true nature of the world and in so doing awakens to his role as the Buddha. He then returns home as a teacher and guide to enlightenment. The list of examples is endless.
The fundamental difference between the Occidental and Oriental modes of the hero’s journey lies in the nature of the hero’s awakening. The Occidental hero succeeds by gaining relationship with the source of divine power external to himself (e.g., Luke gets his power from The Force, Christ gets his power through his relationship with God the Father). The Oriental hero, by contrast, awakens not by communing with a separately individuated divinity but by recognizing within himself the power of the divine (recognizing the godhead within, as the Buddha would say). The Buddha achieved enlightenment by realizing his lack of individual identity or ego: he was simply a part of a greater universal consciousness. The differing Eastern and Western mythological traditions spring, at their most basic, from these different understandings of humankind’s relationship with the divine. The Oriental hero recognizes his own divinity; the Occidental hero, separate from the divine, establishes a relationship with it.
What is unique about the “Matrix” trilogy is that it blends both the Occidental and Oriental modes of the hero’s journey. The 'ordinary' cycle of the Matrix, as explained by The Architect, is very clearly an example of the Eternal Return common to myths of the Orient: a static, never-ending cycle of life and death punctuated by the repeated incarnation of a world-saving hero. The first movie was the hero's journey in the Oriental mode (despite the popular, though inappropriate, identification of Neo with Christ in that movie): the protagonist succeeds via a transformative realization in which he recognizes within himself (in contrast to the Occidental mode) the unity of life and power of the divine. In that sense, the first movie was about Neo awakening to become the Buddha and, accordingly, that movie was rife with references to, and symbols of, Eastern mythology (e.g. bald, enlightened, lotus-sitting children dispensing Zen-koan-like wisdom and bending spoons with their mind).
“Reloaded,” however, breaks from this tradition when Neo refuses to fulfill his "Buddha destiny" of merging his consciousness with the Universal in continuation of the cosmic cycle (which is what would have happened had he chosen the “door on the right,” and it would have been the typical conclusion to an Oriental myth). Neo instead embraces the Occidental mode of the hero's journey, in which the protagonist succeeds by gaining connection with the power of the divine beyond himself. He affirms his individual identity (as opposed to the egoless monad of the Oriental tradition) in the most fundamentally human way possible: he chooses the romantic love of Trinity. In so doing, he turns away from his Oriental destiny and towards his Occidental one.
It is in this sense, then, that Neo becomes the Christ figure. If the Matrix is about choice then Neo, in his role as The One, is choosing for the entire population of still-connected humanity, choosing an existence apart from the Imposed Choice of the Matrix. Just as Christ fulfilled the law so that Christians would be free of the law, Neo will (presumably) fulfill his choice so that humanity can be free of that choice. What that fulfillment for Neo will actually entail has yet to been seen, but undoubtedly it will involve his confrontation and destruction of Agent Smith, the embodiment of the anomaly (sin) inherent to every human.
The identification of “choice” in the Matrix with “sin” in the Christian tradition can be understood by recognizing the first “perfect” Matrix as representative of the Garden of Eden. Biblically speaking, Eden represents a state of Man without knowledge of good and evil and therefore without the ability to choose between them. By introducing choice into the Matrix, as the Architect explains was a necessary evolution, humanity is banished from Eden, banished from the ‘perfection’ of the matrix without choice. Original sin is what drove man from Eden just as the first 'perfect' Matrix was doomed because of the "imperfection inherent to every human being." Christ died to free humanity from the stain of Original Sin; Neo will die to free humanity from the bondage of Imposed Choice.
III. East Meets West and What “Revolutions” Has in Store
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