Juan You - The Matrix (Personal Blog #4)

Everyone has seen the first Matrix movie at least once by now. An everyone can deduce that the film contains a lot of existential and religious themes, most of which revolve around Christianity. However, careful analysis of the movie can also make it so that we tie in Buddhism with the film.
It does also hint at the idea of reincarnation and multiple lives. When Neo talks to the Oracle, she claims that he is “waiting for something”, to which Neo asks “What?” and she answers “Your next life maybe, who knows? That's the way these things go.”
According to the movie, everything we know and we live in is generated by a computer, by technology. What we think is reality, is in actuality just a computer-generated landscape. It is a illusion, as Buddhism would say, and the main problem with us humans is that we are unable to understand or comprehend this fact. We are, in a sense, too attached to the material world.
As Morpheus claims, the world “has been pulled over your eyes, to blind you from the truth... you are a slave... you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste, or touch... a prison for your mind.” And though Neo chooses the acknowledge and accept the fact that he lived in a false world in hopes of emerging out of it, he is only one of the few. As Morpheus explains, not everyone is ready to accept this 'truth'.
Even his close associate, Cypher, is unacceptable of the truth. Cypher strikes a deal with Agent Smith, asking for his memory of the matrix to be wiped. After all those years spent in the matrix, his inability to deal with the sacred world, the reality, concludes with his idea that “Ignorance is bliss”, which proves Morpheus' point that there are some people who are so enamored with the matrix, our material world, that they are unwilling to see and “are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.” This ultimately is the parallel of us humans, and our inability to comprehend a world above what he know, beyond what we are presently aware of.
Buddhism teaches us to free ourselves from suffering and reality. There is really nothing so important in our world that we need to attach ourselves to. Desire for material objects creates suffering. In order to achieve happiness and the truth, we therefore need to free ourselves from everything we know, in this case, the Matrix.