Buddha vs. Mara, Neo vs. Smith: Some guidelines for self-liberation

By Rodrigo Cáceres Riquelme.

Are there commonalities between the Buddha and Neo? What do these people have in common?
In this essay I will attempt to do a parallel, comparative reading of the central conflicts or battles between Buddha vs. Mara (Buddhism) and Neo vs. Smith (The Matrix), in order to shed some light on the meaning of self-liberation, the method to reach it and how does the triumph of good over evil look like in practice.

In Buddhism, Mara is the main nemesis or opponent of the Buddha. According to Stephen Batchelor -specialist on the interpretation of Buddhism- the "army of Mara" is composed of  "sensual desire; discontent; hunger and thirst; craving; sloth and torpor; fear; doubt; hypocrisy and obstinacy [...]and the worshiping of oneself and undervaluing of others".

In another extract, Stephen Batchelor claims that the forces of Mara are the "thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, and stories that naturally arise because of the impact of the environment on the senses of a conscious creature". According to this, Mara seems to be omnipresent, since most of what we live are thoughts, feelings, beliefs and stories that unfold before us. Mara is literally built into the organism of the Buddha, since the Buddha inevitably has to deal with having thoughts and emotions that arise from his coping with the world. As Batchelor resumes, as long as we are embodied in flesh, bones, and blood, Mara is part and parcel of what it is to be human.

In this story, Mara is constantly deceiving and tricking the Buddha in order to make him a slave, to direct his actions and do exactly what Mara wants. We fall into Mara's traps, we are captured in the fishhooks of Mara or seduced by his daughters. People fail to understand why and how they keep getting tricked by the beautiful and hideous shapes conjured by Mara. And, failing to understand, they become like tangled balls of string.

To make this more concrete and applicable to our lives, let me look at an example. Let's say that I am talking to another person about something important to me and I find myself full of anger as a reaction to what the other person said. Mara, in this case, is the anger that spontaneously emerged as a reaction from hearing the other person's words. What Mara (the anger) does is that he predisposes us to act, move and speak in an enraged manner. Mara takes over our body and changes the state of our body (increasing the head temperature, reducing motor control, increasing the heartbeat) so that when we act we do it in the background of Mara's modelling: saying something cruel in return, yelling, losing patience, etc.

When it comes to become free from Mara, Batchelor explains that the Buddha does not succeed to destroy Mara, simply because Mara is built into the Buddha's organism. Rather, he manages to find a fundamentally different relationship towards Mara. This is a relationship of deep acceptance, that comes with coming to terms with the presence of Mara and saying "yes, this is the kind of organism that I am, and these are the feelings, thoughts, desires and fears that will arise from it".

Becoming free from Mara means knowing and accepting Mara, freeing oneself amounts to note how Mara's attractive shapes and appearances generally lead us to fuel their grip on ourselves, so that we end up doing exactly what Mara wants. The Buddha understood that if he did not nourish Mara by giving him our attention and our thoughts, if he did not identify with Mara's shapes and forms and if he did not get involved with whatever Mara showed him, he finally realized that Mara eventually fades away and disappears. As one the quintessential Buddhist teachings says: "whatever is subject to arising, it is subject to ceasing".

And once Mara eventually disappeared, Buddha realizes that he is freed to act, free from Mara, which amount to stopping being determined by the spontaneous and habitual reactions that Mara generates.

Even though Mara seems to be very encompassing and powerful in his ability to take control over the Buddha's actions, what is outside the scope of Mara, "beyond his domain of action" is what we understand as the cultural or collective world: rules, conventions, institutions, nation-states, religions, laws, police, economies, markets, prisons and governments. Enter the matrix.

In The Matrix (1999) movie, the matrix is also represented as an omnipresent entity: "The matrix is everywhere" says Morpheus to Neo, "It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth [...] that you are a slave, Neo. Born into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch, a prison for your mind."

Similar as Mara, the matrix is also that which imprisons you and turns you into a slaves. However, in this case you become a slave of the Matrix when you blindly follow and accept whatever orders, rules and belief systems you are told to have by apparent authorities like your parents, teachers and institutions like the government, laws, religion, god, the economy, the state or science.

The Matrix is, of course, embodied by Agent Smith (one might say a modern version of Mara). Smith embodies the enforcement of order and conformity, his main job being the one of preventing and hunting people that do not want to conform with the rules of the Matrix. His job is to keep at bay the people that have the deep feeling that they are slaves of the system and have a deep desire to understand what freedom means and how to attain it.

To make the parallel, these are people just like the Buddha, who could not ignore any longer the  need to respond to an urgent, most important question: "What is the emancipation of life?". Morpheus explains this feeling of urgent, deep desire for freedom to Neo when he says: "You know something, Neo. What you know, you can’t explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. There’s something’s wrong with the world. You don’t know what, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad".

As with Buddha and Mara, the relationship between Neo and Smith is one of deep unity. The Oracle tells Neo that Smith literally "is you. Your opposite, your negative, the result of the equation trying to balance itself out". As we know from the conflict of Buddha vs. Mara, in the end only one of them can win. As the Oracle states, "the future of the world will be in your hands (Neo) or in his (Smith)".

The similarity between Mara and Smith goes on when we note that Mara literally translates as "the killer", that leads one to greed, hatred and to a barren spiritual life, the path towards death. Similarly, Smith is identified with violence, punishment, determinism, control and destructive power. As in one of the latest dialogues of the Oracle, Smith is "very soon [...] going to have the power to destroy this world".

The similarity between the Buddha and Neo also amounts to note that when these heroes believe that they finally vanquished their enemies, they are proven wrong. What for the Buddha seems to be a victory over Mara such that Mara is "cut off like a palm stump, never to arise again", turns out to be not true, the Buddha is not in capacity to cast out Mara forever, as Mara is a constitutive part of Buddha. In the same manner, we see that Neo destroys Smith in the first movie, only to discover in the subsequent movies that Smith continues to live and thrive by taking control over many people.

I must make explicit here that the comparison between these two stories is to be considered when it comes to their symbolic meaning. What I mean is that for the practical purposes of this essay, it is  literally irrelevant if Buddha, Mara, Neo and Smith actually existed or if they are just fictions. What is important is what they and their stories tell us about our own situation within world in which we live in.

What we can conclude from this comparative analysis is that Neo's scope of liberation is greater than the one of the Buddha. The Buddha mainly reaches a personal liberation from his turbulent thoughts, ideas, feelings and emotions and becomes effectively unaltered, immutable and immune to their grip. However, the Buddha at least implicitly accepts living in the patriarchal, misogynistic, monarchic and hierarchically structured society of IV BC India, since he does not openly revolt against these cultural rules and institutions.

Conversely, Neo reaches not only personal liberation but also liberation from the cultural matrix. The One is someone "born inside (the matrix) who had the ability to change whatever he wanted, to remake the Matrix as he saw fit". In other instance when Neo talks to Smith, he tells him that he will "show people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible". 

In other words, Neo as a freed hero is able to transform and deactivate the predetermined, instituted rules of the system and open the space for creating new possibilities for living in society. He does this, at the beginning, by refusing to conform to the dominant rules as well as refusing to give in to Smith's threats. But what is a constant throughout the trilogy is Neo's will to become free.

He starts from a place of utter ignorance, in that he has not the least idea about what he needs to do in order to break free, he only follows his profound desire for truth and liberation. This desire even leads him and his friends to abandon very profound and long-held beliefs and dreams, as when Morpheus confesses "I have dreamed a dream... but now that dream has gone from me." before he continues accompanying Neo on the quest for freedom and the end of war. 

In this sense, Neo's story is framed as a completely uncertain and unknown pathway with an unknown ending point. And because of this, he has to take a provisional stance towards his own beliefs. This means that whatever belief may have worked for him in some situation, it may fail to adapt to new situations, so he constantly needs to avoid taking absolute and fixed positions. As we learn at the end, his provisional stance towards his beliefs is  oriented towards his ultimate, existential concern for freedom, the end of war and the end of the matrix's control over people' actions. This ultimate concern is taken to the extreme as Neo eventually has to accept the consequences of his desire for peace and freedom, which result to be the incoming death of the woman he loves as well as his own death.

Many authors have touched on the topic of culture or societies being spontaneously repressive systems. Humberto Maturana (2006), for example, was insightful enough to note that a cultural system or matrix is more stable and enduring when it restricts, represses and discourages innovative, creative and intelligent modes of thinking from its individuals. He writes that in an enduring, stable and restrictive society, "intelligent behavior is a social threat that must be neutralized through its elimination, or through a rigid establishment of behavioral modes that define a range of behavior variability that the society as a system can compensate (and absorb without change)". This is simply the fact that if individuals or groups of individuals start acting independently from the rules of society, creating new rules and new institutions, the society is effectively transformed into another society with different rules and conventions.

Terence Mckenna also reflects upon this when he says "What is wrong with the operating system that we have? Consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is. It’s very non-competitive. It wastes the environment, it is inefficient, it runs on stereotypes, it runs on a low sampling rate, which is what creates stereotypes... low sample rates make everybody appear alike, when in fact the glory is in everyone’s differences".

What is specially illuminating about the Matrix is that portrays the cultural system as a fictional entity. In other words, it sheds light onto how the underlying beliefs that the system wants to preserve are fully arbitrary and have no other foundation that the preferences of the people that created them.

For example, there is no objective foundation to why we have to be consumerists concerned with being in fashion and having the latest technological toys; there is no objective foundation to why multinationals have to destroy and pollute natural landscapes all over the planet, there is no objective foundation to why governments get to decide what is legal and what is not. The whole matrix is based on arbitrary preferences and agreements that are portrayed as "the way things are", as well as portraying that everyone has to comply and conform to the rules of the system, without questioning. Becoming successful, happy within it without trying to transform it.

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References

Batchelor, S. (2015). After Buddhism: Rethinking the dharma for a secular age. Yale University Press.

Maturana, H. R. (2006). Desde la biología a la psicología. Editorial universitaria.

Transcript of The Matrix. Link here