A friend and I regularly have unserious vitriolic debates about all manner of topics. One such is whether The Matrix is primarily coded with Buddhism or gnostic Christianity.
In favor of the latter, I point to details which have clear symbolic value according to a ‘Christian’ reading of the movie’s text and subtext.
The chief protagonist, Neo, is introduced to viewers by the name Thomas Anderson. ‘Thomas’ is an Aramaic word which means ‘twin’, alluding to Neo’s dual life, middling programmer by day, hacker activist by night. According to New Testament gospels, Thomas was the nickname of one of twelve disciples, and he was particularly revered in early Eastern Christian traditions. Some even identified him as the twin of Jesus, due to his nickname, befitting Neo’s portrayal (at times explicit) as the ‘savior’ of humanity at large and ‘Zion’ in particular. The mixed etymology of ‘Anderson’ ultimately means ‘son of man’, used as a messianic title in the New Testament. When Neo dies in the third film, a cross-shaped glow covers his body, at which time a character literally named ‘God’ declares It is done’.
Though there was no singular religion we call ‘Gnosticism’, Christianity contained within it a variety of theologies, some of them gnostic in flavor. Degrees of gnosticism can be found in the Letters of Paul and the Gospel of John, but they are popularly recognized in the Nag Hammadi library, a collection primarily comprising scriptures written by ‘Sethian’ and ‘Valentinian’ Christians in the second century onward. According to these brands of gnostic Christians (in overly-simplified summary) the world visible to us is corrupt, made by a lesser god called the demiurge (‘architect’). Humanity is trapped in this illusory world, but Jesus entered into it to share the truth (what the architect doesn’t ‘want them to see’), and by truly knowing this truth, a person may escape this ‘prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch’ for the higher reality.
In the words of the Gospel of Thomas (which may be called ‘gnostic’, but is neither Sethian nor Valentinian), this truth is not to be discovered out somewhere else. It is already within the individual, waiting to be found.
Whoever knows everything,
but needs to know himself,
is in need of everything.
Hence, this emphasis on enlightening the mind comes from the Greek word gnōsis. Definitely not Buddhism