[Buddha-l] Withdrawal of the senses

[Joy Vriens]

Dan wrote:

>Ch. 11 of the Gita has Krsna give Arjuna a divine eye: The "vision" 
>initially impresses him with its beauty (light of a thousand sons), but it 
>turns horrifying and frightening. Krsna's body starts to aquire (or Arjuna 
>notices) parts that are devouring the soldiers on the battlefield (it is a 
>very contextually-specific vision), the light turns into scorching flames, 
>and Arjuna is so overcome by terror that he asks for his regular eye back. 
>The result is he fawns and supplicates himself to Krsna, which the Gita 
>explains at the end of ch. 11 and the entire ch. 12, is what bhakti is. 

A very interesting passage and the first time I see a vague resemblence with the movie "The Matrix". I guess every Buddhist is tired of hearing about parallels between The Matrix and Buddhism, particularly Cittamatra, but I can't help thinking of the choice between the red pill and the blue pill here. Of course, for the parallel to stick, the "divine eye" should be read as "universal perspective", but who knows perhaps that's what Krsna meant anyway. The "God" perspective/universal perspective being the red pill and the individual perspective the blue one. It reminds me also of a Buddhist story I have read in the past and tried to track down without any success since. It's about a bodhisattva king, whose country is in war. The king has a private protected well, but the general water supllies of the town are poisoned by the ennemy. The people of the country all become insane and start hallucinating. Ultimately, the king no longer being able to "govern" his people with his "sa!
 ne" point of view, decides to drink the poisoned water so he can share the hallucinations of his people and continue governing them. A wise decision IMO, otherwise one may end up governing from a universal/God perspective, thinking in terms of collateral damage and doing away with critcism by saying the losses are "just a comma" in the history books.