Groundhog Day

Interpretations abound as to whether Bill Murray's movie "Groundhog Day" should be seen as a Christian or a Buddhist (or some other) allegory.  I'd go with Buddhist:  the repetitive cycles most obviously dovetail with the notion of samsara, the painful wheel of existence common to almost all forms of Indian religion:  Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.  The movie also seems to imply that Murray's goal, in the story, is to find release from that cycle—which is also true of Indian soteriological thought—and that the way to find release, aside from becoming more compassionate, is to stop worrying about attaining the goal of release.  This latter notion is found in various Eastern traditions:  in Hinduism's Bhagavad Gita, the god Krsna, appearing as a charioteer, tells the warrior Arjuna to "act without thought for the fruits of" his actions; it's also found in the present-orientation of Buddhism:  in Sinitic Mahayana Buddhism, for example, the Chinese character for "mindfulness" is composed of two characters meaning "now" and "mind," i.e., mindfulness means residing fully in the present moment.  Bill Murray's selfish, arrogant weatherman Phil Connors doesn't attain Rita's love (Rita is played by Andie McDowell) until he stops creepily vying for it and simply acts in a natural, unforced way:  striving without striving, like the notion of wu wei (Kor. mu wi, 無為 nonaction, no-effort) in Taoism, which influenced Zen Buddhism.  While there's certainly room for Christian interpretations of "Groundhog Day," I'd say the movie maps better onto an Eastern template.*

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*This is where some wiseass notes that "Christianity is an Eastern religion, you know."  Christianity certainly comes from what we now call the Middle East, and in that geographical sense, it's Eastern.  But thanks to some of the early Church Fathers and to later Scholastic theology (think:  Aquinas), it rapidly fused with the Platonic and Aristotelian roots of the Western tradition and became thoroughly Westernized, so the reductionist claim that "Christianity is an Eastern religion" is now, at most, only partially true.