[Buddha-l] Re: Withdrawal of the senses

[W. Codling]

Thank you Michael for that summary of "The Matrix".  I have seen a 
couple of them and could never figure out what the film offered that had 
so many people attaching so much significance to it's content.  To me 
the films resemble more those martial arts films that suggest the 
availability of super-human abilities deriving from esoteric and 
demanding training.  But your summary points out some interesting 
spiritual-cum-religious aspects which I did not appreciate.

The insight that almost any line of enquiry will lead to some of sort of 
dyadic foundation is, I think, rather easily come to.  The reflex is to 
pick one; or better, to think that a choice must be made.  You have made 
the argument for why a choice must be made, but many forms of Buddhist 
thought suggest that is a false conclusion.  It's a false, but 
inevitable conclusion based on the interrogative notion, 'why?'.  It is 
surely a cliche by now that the basic Buddhist interrogative notion is 
'what?'.  Following the 'what is is?' line of meditative inquiry also 
leads to a dyadic insight, but it lacks the urgency of the 'why is it?' 
questioning.  Yogacara thought suggests that picking one of the pills is 
'falling into extremes' and tries to articulate a relationship between 
the extremes which is not mutually exclusive.  We are told in Zen that 
there's a hair's breadth difference between samsara and nirvana, so the 
pills should be almost the same colour if one wanted to convert the 
Matrix into a Buddhist parable.  The iconographic point made by having 
the pills red/blue illustrates a conceptual assumption about the 
relationship between the two.  The whole point of the film would be 
different if the pills were almost the same colour; and I predict that 
this would make no sense to us because our icon-receptors are not 
configured to this notion of the basic relationship.
Wayne



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