Lecture: When Kirk was the Buddha

The Star Trek episode “Catspaw” (S02E01) is a cartoonish fun-time Halloween episode that imparts a profound insight.

Kirk, Spock, and Bones (hereafter, the Three Friends) find themselves in a fake Halloween-style matrix. The scene where Kirk liberates them exactly parallels the famous altercation between Gautama and Mara immediately prior to Gautama’s awakening, and transformation in the Awake One, or Buddha. Here is that gripping climax:

INT. CASTLE

SYLVIA: You fool. Don't you know what you're giving up? Everything that your species finds desirable. Look at me! I am a woman! I am all women!

KIRK: I don't know what you are but you're not a woman. You've tortured my men and taken their minds from them. You ask for love and return pain instead.

SYLVIA: (holding a phaser) Korob was wrong. I didn't destroy all your weapons. Give me the transmuter. Give it to me!

(Kirk smashes the wand against the table, and there is a blinding blue light.)

EXT. PLANET SURFACE

(Kirk is standing on the rocks holding a phaser. Spock approaches wearing his tricorder. McCoy, Scott and Sulu follow him.)

MCCOY: What happened, Jim?

KIRK: That'll take some explaining, Bones.

SCOTT: Everything's vanished.

KIRK: Not everything.

(By his feet are two tiny blue fluffy creatures of the flowy-wispy variety: pipe-cleaner arms and legs, and facial squid tentacles, and natural insectoid -crustacean posteriors.)

KIRK: Korob and Sylvia as they really are. Their forms were an illusion, just like the castle and everything else. Only the power pack gave them reality.

SPOCK: Fascinating. A life form totally alien to our galaxy. If we could preserve and study this

(But the little puppets collapse and die. Smoke rises from the bodies.)

MCCOY: Too late. All of this, just an illusion.

KIRK: No illusion. Jackson is dead. Kirk to Enterprise. Come in.

In this, the most metaphysically profound moment from the Original Series, Kirk functions precisely as the Buddha defying Mara:

Renunciation: Kirk is tempted by Korob and Sylvia and offered the position of Lord of the Matrix. She warns him,

Don't you know what you're giving up? Everything that your species finds desirable.

Kirk refuses lordship inside a simulation in favor of communion with reality.

Similarly, Mara attempts to tempt Gautama with promises of glory and pleasure, and highlights the consequences of the Gautama’s breaking away from his religious and secular duties. Gautama easily rejects these, knowing they are meaningless.

Fear of death: Kirk is threatened by monstrous apparitions specifically tailored to be maximally upsetting to humans—gothic-style imprisonment and unavoidable doom, all present in a classical Halloween style. The peculiar designer nature of their horrors motivate Spock to suspect that their world is not real but a mind-reading anthropologist that can only access our collective unconscious:

INT. DUNGEON

SPOCK: I’m sure we’ll find out shortly. Jim, all of these things that we’ve seen. To an Earthman like yourself, they must seem quite familiar.

KIRK: Familiar. Startling. Not rational.

SPOCK: Precisely. I refer you to the psychological theory of the racial subconscious. The universal myths, symbols.

KIRK: Ghosts, witches.

SPOCK: And dungeons and castles and black cats. They all belong to the twilight world of consciousness.

KIRK: They tried to tap our conscious mind.

SPOCK: And they missed. They reached basically only the subconscious. Korob seemed puzzled by your reaction to the environment he’d provided.

Spock’s fascinating insight is hinted at earlier by Bones: “Three witches, what appears to be a castle and a black cat.” Kirk adds an additional consideration and you realize—beings in the world are a thematic production:

INT. CASTLE

MCCOY: Three witches, what appears to be a castle and a black cat.

KIRK: If we weren’t missing two officers and a third one dead I’d say someone was playing an elaborate trick or treat on us.

SPOCK: Trick or treat, Captain?

KIRK: Yes, Mister Spock. You’d be a natural. I’ll explain it to you one day. Shall we have a look around?

And again:

INT. DUNGEON

MCCOY: You were saying something about trick or treat.

KIRK: Dungeons, curses, skeletons and iron maidens. They're all Earth manifestations. Why?

SPOCK: I do not know, Captain, but these things do exist. They are real.

MCCOY: Could this be an Earth parallel development of some sort?

KIRK: None of this parallels any human development. It's more like a human nightmare.

SPOCK: As if someone knew what it was that terrifies man most on an instinctive level.

KIRK: Ghost stories, ogres, demons. The whole …

Another little moment:

INT. DUNGEON

KIRK: Why a cat? 
SPOCK: Racial memories. The cat is the most ruthless, most terrifying of animals, as far back as the saber-toothed tiger.

Similarly, Mara produced a tailor-made fear-assault on Gautama. Sprouting a thousand arms and riding atop war elephant, Mara attacks Gautama with ten squadrons of demon warriors. The warriors assume fearsome forms and make eerie noises to generate maximum fright. Rain, hail, showers of fire, thunder, and an earthquake are also used in the process; his final weapon is his disc which fails to harm the future Buddha, who converts all the weapons into flowers that fall harmlessly to the ground.

Attachment through lust: Kirk is tempted by Sylvia, who offers to fulfill any sexual fantasy, and be any species of sex partner. She tells Kirk,

You fool. Don't you know what you're giving up? Everything that your species finds desirable. Look at me! I am a woman! I am all women!

Kirk rejects her tempting offer, even as she gets on her knees in a suggestive position of immanent oral fulfillment.

Similarly, after his failed aversion attack, Mara then turned to the other matrix-hook: craving. Mara attempts to seduce the bodhisattva by presenting his three beautiful daughters—Lust, Fulfillment, and Regret.

The question of sufficient right (or power)

The climax of the Gautama-Mara interaction is the former’s victory by establishing his permission and entitlement.

Mara insisted that he, not Gautama, had a right to the throne of enlightenment by virtue of his previous meritorious deeds, while all of Mara’s hordes thundered forth their support. In response, the solitary bodhisattva reached down and touched the ground, calling upon the earth goddess to bear witness to his countless past deeds of merit. The earth affirmed Gautama’s right by quaking, the strongest possible YES possible.

Just as Gautama touched the foundation of reality to confirm authorization for leaving the matrix, so Kirk touches Sylvia’s matrix-making wand against a table, smashing it. The whole world explodes and disappears from existence.

Finally, the point of this post

After the world disappears, Korob and Sylvia appear in their true form—as fragile, grotesque, and pitiful flowy wisps. Mara in-himself is no more powerful than a walking flower.

This is the climax of the whole Original Series. The Three Friends find themselves staring at the pitiful remains of their ex-tormenters. The lesson: Your imprisonment is not insurmountable. Liberation is possible. When it happens, you see that the fetters are not omnipotent. Yet their residue remains. Nature continues to support its intrinsic capacity for imprisonment. The monsters have been tamed, but they remain.