Groundhog Day

"Bill Murray is the bodhisattva." And a god. Not the God..

Some background (and some more) for those who've not seen it repeatedely:

In the movie, which enjoys its own seemingly endless cycle of rebirth on cable television, the character played by Mr. Murray is in Punxsutawney, Pa., covering Groundhog Day, Feb. 2, for the fourth year in a row. Frustrated because his career is stalled and by the fact that he can't seduce his producer, played by Andie MacDowell, he sees his assignment -- waiting for a groundhog (or a rat, as Mr. Murray's character calls it) to see if there will be six more weeks of winter -- as the final indignity.

But it isn't quite. The next day he awakens in the same bed in the same bed-and-breakfast, to the sound of the same tinny clock radio with Sonny and Cher singing ''I Got You Babe'' and the babblings of the frighteningly cheerful local D.J., to discover that it is Feb. 2 again.

At first, he uses the repetition to his advantage -- he learns French poetry, for example, as part of his scheme to seduce the producer. Then he realizes that he is doomed to spend eternity locked in the same place, seeing the same people do the same things every day. It is not until he accepts his fate and sets about helping people (saving a homeless man from freezing to death, for example) that he is released from the eternal cycle of repetition.

Of course, this being an American film, he not only attains spiritual release but also gets the producer into bed.

Angela Zito, a co-director of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University, screens the film for students in her Buddhism class. She said that ''Groundhog Day'' perfectly illustrates the Buddhist notion of samsara, the continuing cycle of rebirth that Buddhists regard as suffering that humans must try to escape...

''Groundhog Day,'' Dr. Zito said, is a cinematic version of the teachings in Mahayana Buddhism, known as ''the greater vehicle.''

''In Mahayana,'' she said, ''nobody ever imagines they are going to escape samsara until everybody else does. That is why you have bodhisattvas, who reach the brink of nirvana, and stop and come back and save the rest of us. Bill Murray is the bodhisattva..."

A bodisattva. Not the.