A Portrait of the
Dark Side
“Do you think you can
take over the world and improve it?
I do not think it can
be done. The world is sacred.
It you try to change
it, you will ruin it.
If you try to grasp
it, you will lose it.”
- Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching
On
one of the most important days of his fateful life, young Anakin Skywalker has
to decide whether to stay with his beloved mother on Tatooine or travel to the
stars to a new life among the Jedi. Even though she must remain in the Outer
Rim as a slave, his mother Shmi is willing to let him go. When Anakin protests
that he doesn’t want things between them to change, she wisely replies that he
cannot stop change, any more than he can “stop the suns from setting.”
Years
later, Anakin chooses yet another path, one in which he is remade into a dark
lord of the Sith. This path consumes him, as he sets himself the impossible
task of stopping a sunset. The effort ruins him within and without, and his
redemption only comes when he finally accepts his mother’s words as revealed
through the actions of his son. Behind all the mythic drama underlies a basic
struggle forever playing out in every human heart and mind.
The
whispers and promises of the dark side are far more ubiquitous than most
realize. It feasts most thoroughly when unexamined hatreds and haunting fears
rise up in response to life, intensifying anxieties until there seems to be no
choice but to turn to the very dark source generating them and expect help. The
dark side promises power over life but never admits the more power one has to
control life the more power one needs, creating a vicious cycle so
self-consuming and self-defeating it is reputed to forever dominate one’s
destiny.
The
rise and fall and ultimate redemption of Anakin Skywalker illustrates this
perfectly, a path that is seen most clearly and vividly when viewed through the
lens of the Buddhist philosophical tradition. The creation of the ego, the
dangers of attachment, and the importance of compassion all center on this one
character and play out across a grand galactic canvas.
As
a young boy on Tatooine, Anakin is as remarkable for his good nature as he is
for his midichlorian count, especially considering the dark lord he eventually
becomes. As his mother remarks, “he knows nothing of greed,” and as Jedi Master
Qui-Gon Jinn observes, “he gives without any thought of reward.” This is a
being in touch with what is known in Zen as one’s “original nature,” a nature that
is free and open and moves through life “like a ball in a mountain stream.”
Anakin’s willingness to help others ends in him winning not only the Boonta Eve
podrace, but also his own freedom.
Ironically,
a new kind of slavery begins to close around him almost immediately. Despite
his mother Shmi’s warning not to “look back” when he leaves home, he continues
to do so, his mind tentatively making its first attempts to grasp at life and
hold it too closely.
The One and The Many
On
Coruscant, Yoda and the Jedi Council quickly sense this during their initial
evaluation. As ironic as it may be given their Order’s own inability to change
and adapt, the Jedi are correct in assessing the dilemma that will haunt Anakin
the rest of his life. It is a dilemma that they do not fully understand or
relate to. As perfectly innocent and natural as it may be to fear losing one’s
only parent, those closely attuned to the ebb and flow of the Force embrace
another perspective that does much to stifle such anxieties.
For
those deeply immersed in the energies of the Force, the galaxy must be
experienced very differently than it is by most beings. Since the beginning,
the Force is clearly interpreted as a field of energy created and sustained by
life itself. Various individuals have the ability to channel this power and do
astounding feats. Even more importantly, however, the Force exists within and
without, both embracing the galaxy as well as uniting it. From this point of
view, all of existence is fundamentally one, resulting in a wholeness that is
as real as any of the particulars one may grow attached to.
To
use a favorite metaphor of Zen Buddhism, the sea may produce individual waves
that constantly crest and trough, but the water composing the waves is the true
field of existence which is constant. If one becomes too infatuated with a
single wave rather than allowing its natural rising and falling, suffering
inevitably follows. To ignore the oneness of things by fixating on a particular
point is called avidya in Sanskrit, often translated simply as
“delusion.”
There
is considerable evidence that the Jedi feel much the same way.
After
years of being trained by Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin grows into a stubborn and
headstrong adolescent. Raised outside the Jedi Order, the young learner
constantly finds himself chafing under its traditions and dogma. While he
understands that “attachment” and “possession” are “forbidden,” apparently no
one on the Council ever takes the time to express why. Without the average
padawan’s background in the Force since birth, Anakin struggles with his
attachments again and again, particularly as they pertain to his mother and,
later, the love of his life, Padme Amidala.
Haunted
by dreams of his mother’s death, Anakin eventually seeks her out on Tatooine.
After taking vengeance on the Tusken Raiders who abducted and finally killed
her, he returns to the homestead where Padme is waiting for him. Before
breaking down completely, he tinkers with a broken shifter, remarking, “Life
seems so much simpler when you’re fixing things. I’m good at fixing things …
always was.” This is one of his most telling statements, as it foreshadows an
outlook that views life as something mechanical, a malfunctioning machine one
can stand aside from and arbitrarily “fix” to one’s liking.
As
Cheri Huber, an American Zen teacher for over thirty years, once lectured, “We
are taught to believe life should be a certain way. When it isn't and we
aren't, we assume there's something wrong and something should be done to fix
things. Suffering happens when we want life to be other than the way it
is." And the dilemma of Anakin Skywalker is really no more complicated
than that.
Interpreting
his mother’s passing as a personal failure, Anakin begins to build up and
harden his ego, proclaiming he will one day “learn to stop people from dying.”
In Buddhism, life is seen as a flowing pattern, a flux of elements known as
aggregates. At its root this pattern is understood to be impermanent, and
all suffering arises from our refusal to accept this impermanence. Like Anakin,
we develop an ego, a kind of fictional construct, to protect us from changes we
don’t like. Particularly death. However, this false persona is a wrong move,
creating yet another source of tension by strengthening the illusion that we
are separate from life and can somehow control it.
Throughout
his life, Anakin’s other mentor, Chancellor Palpatine, plays a key role in the
development of his ego. From childhood onward, Palpatine has crafted and shaped
his protégé’s attitude, constantly whispering in his ear, telling him that life
should indeed “be a certain way.” He points out that the Jedi don’t trust him,
admonishes the Council when they don’t select him for special missions, and
assures him he’s going to be greater and more powerful than all of them. He
even positions Anakin on the Council knowing full well they will use him as
bait to lure his true agenda into the open. As he sows the seeds of fear and paranoia,
the Sith Lord perfectly acts the role of what is called “conditioned mind” in
Zen.
This
conditioning ripens when Anakin receives more dreams of an ominous future which
ripple backwards in the Force. Now married to Padme in secret, he learns that not
only is her life threatened, but the life of their unborn child as well. And in
classic mythological fashion, he vows to save her “from [his] nightmares,” only
to set in motion the karmic chain of events that ultimately ends in her death.
In
his final attempt to reconcile with the Jedi Council, though, Anakin does seek
out help from Yoda. The centuries-old sage fails to understand his student,
vaguely instructing him not to “mourn” or “miss” those who die and “transform
into the Force.” The reality of a unified energy field that lives and breathes
a greater whole escapes Anakin, and an important opportunity is lost. Still,
Yoda is philosophically correct when he states, “Fear of loss is a path to the
dark side.”
Punk
rocker, monster movie marketer, and Soto Zen priest, Brad Warner does a
formidable Yoda impression as well. He also helpfully lays out the fundamental
paradox of attachment in his colorfully titled Zen tome, Sit Down and Shut
Up. Many have taken issue with the Jedi mandate forbidding attachment,
arguing that one should be attached to the people they care about. From a
Buddhist perspective, however, this conditioned impulse arises from a mistaken
view of life and the universe.
As
Warner explains, “Love, or desire, leads to taking. You try and make that which
is separate from yourself ‘yours’.” The problem with this position is that it
is based on a dualistic idea where what is regarded as “self” and what is
regarded as “other” are two forever opposite and disconnected realities with no
relation whatsoever. Everything gets utterly confused, Warner says, when we
“make those things we desire into our possessions” because “that which you
desire to incorporate into yourself was never apart from you to begin with.”
Again, it’s like a wave refusing to acknowledge its unity with the rest of the
water, and then straining to make itself crest forever.
When
Palpatine claims the Sith have mastered the power of life over death, Anakin
cannot resist the temptation because at that point he sees himself as something
cut off and divorced from life, and has no choice but to turn back on the
galaxy and attempt to control it. Warner sums this up by saying, “I suspect
that much, perhaps even all, of the ‘evil’ that is done in the world is a kind
of test, as a way for the ‘evil-doer’ to try and prove to him- or herself that
he or she really is separate from the rest of creation.”
This
is the basic schizophrenia of the dark side. All the Sith Lords suffer from a
split psyche, so much so that they have to literally create a second dark side
persona that begins with “darth.” Rarely has the impossible duality of the
conditioned mind been more eloquently expressed than when Anakin is gazing
across the Coruscant cityscape toward Padme and she towards him, trapped between
the hellish choice of letting her die or turning to the dark side.
Cause and Effect
When
Anakin charges into the Chancellor’s office and is forced to (literally) disarm
Council leader Mace Windu to save Palpatine, he sets in motion a horrible chain
of cause-and-effect, his karmic destiny set by the events of that night. Karma
is often thought of as “action,” specifically the actions the ego takes in
order to manipulate people and events to its liking. More often than not, it
stirs up so much confusion one can no longer see, this action of running faster
and faster yet staying in the same place.
In
the classic The Way of Zen, Alan Watts defines karma as a kind of action
that always requires yet more action, eloquently outlining the path Anakin sets
for himself:
Man
is involved in karma when he interferes with the world in such a way that he is
compelled to go on interfering, when the solution of a problem creates still
more problems to be solved, when the control of one thing creates the need to
control several others. Karma is thus the fate of everyone who “tries to be
God.” He lays a trap for the world in which he himself eventually gets caught.
Anakin
desperately needs to control Padme’s fate, which causes him to interfere with
Mace Windu’s arrest of Palpatine. This subsequently sets in motion Order 66,
where all the Jedi across the galaxy are slaughtered. In an attempt to gain
more and more power, Anakin has to march into the Jedi Temple and kill even the
younglings, which is symbolic of him killing off the good, innocent parts of
himself. This requires still more action when Palpatine orders him to the
lava-saturated planet of Mustafar to take care of the Separatist Council.
After
his murder of the Separatist leaders, Anakin pauses on a walkway to stare into
a black sun, a single tear running down his face as his path is now set (George
Lucas himself remarked in a commentary that after the death of Mace Windu, he
has no choice but to continue his dark side journey, regardless of whether he
wants to or not). Founder of the Buddhist Lodge in London, Christmas Humphries
once noted that in Buddhism, “We are not punished because of what we do, but by
it,” as Anakin’s tear clearly shows.
By
the time Padme confronts Anakin about his actions, though his ego has already
crystallized into Darth Vader, building itself up into the biggest and baddest
thing in the galaxy, all in an attempt to mask the fears eating away at it.
Horrified, Padme tries to get Anakin to leave the newly formed Empire behind,
but now he is equally infatuated with power. He even admits he wants to
overthrow Emperor Palpatine, saying, “And together, you and I can rule the
galaxy. Make things the way we want them to be.” Again, the galaxy is broken,
and he wants to fix it.
Yet
all of this was born from a desire to shield Padme from an imagined future. His
attempt to become more powerful than any Jedi was for her, “to protect [her].”
Unfortunately, he never listened to Brad Warner, who candidly wrote,
“Ultimately, you can’t ever save anybody from anything but you.”
Anakin
fails to see the basic paradox here, which is that the more protection one has,
the more one needs. To be completely protected from life is to be completely isolated
from life. The only way to insure Padme’s continued safety is to encase
her in carbonite and lock her away in a vault somewhere, which would obviously
defeat the purpose of keeping her alive. Life in its very essence is insecurity
and impermanence, and that is precisely what gives it its rhythm, spontaneity,
and joy.
When
Obi-Wan arrives on that platform on Mustafar, Anakin’s conditioned ego has
totally consumed him. Fearful and paranoid, he shouts to his former master,
“You will not take her from me!” His ego can only see Padme as an object now,
which is the only way an ego can see things. He angrily paces back and forth,
proclaiming that I have a new Empire, and I have brought peace
and security to it. Obi-Wan observes he has become the very thing he once
fought against, which is a theme of Buddhism as well as Star Wars.
One
of the signature moves of the Sith is the Force choke, which is really symbolic
of their need to grasp and hold on to life, as opposed to allowing it to flow
freely and naturally. During a talk, Alan Watts once likened the ego to “an
invisible hand grasping at smoke,” and the Force choke is a nice visual
metaphor for those who take seriously the universe’s illusory permanence.
Grabbing at one thing inevitably leads to grabbing at another, and it never
stops until one is on a platform on Mustafar, choking the life out of the very
person they love more than anyone in the galaxy.
Realizing
the threat his former padawan has become, Obi-Wan has no choice but to engage
him in a ferocious lightsaber duel. The two battle across the structure built
to mine the fiery landscape, even as the shields fail and it begins to
disintegrate in the lava. Obi-Wan of course gets the upper hand and the higher
ground, leaving his limbless opponent burning beside a river of fire. Finally,
Vader’s body is wrecked, reflecting the tortured psyche within.
The Self in the
Castle
Pieced
back together by machines, Vader endures a gruesome resurrection at the hands
of Palpatine. Now encased in a menacing black suit, he has literally become the
fictional armored ego, the fearsome persona, which he adopted earlier.
Imprisoned in this making of himself, he is protected by his life support
systems but entombed by them as well.
Breath
is of great importance to Buddhist philosophy and practice, as it is our most
basic unity with the rest of life. When we breathe in oxygen and breathe out
carbon dioxide, we are engaged in reciprocity with the organic world, a kind of
giving and receiving that forms the simplest of all symbiotic circles. That
Vader’s breathing is mechanical and artificial demonstrates how utterly
corrupted and disconnected he has become.
This
begins Vader’s time of exile from his original nature. As a young man, his home
had once been wherever his mom was and, later, wherever his wife was. With both
of them dead, Vader is literally and figuratively homeless, spending decades on
Star Destroyers which wander space imposing Imperial law on the citizens of the
galaxy.
In
his first book, The Spirit of Zen, Alan Watts describes what Vader has
become and why he has become it with almost uncanny accuracy:
Briefly,
[the Buddha’s] doctrine is that man suffers because of his craving to possess
and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent. Chief among these
things is his own person, for this is his means of isolating himself from the
rest of life, his castle into which he can retreat and from which he can assert
himself against external forces. He believes that this fortified and isolated
position is the best means of obtaining happiness; it enables him to fight
against change, to strive to keep pleasing things for himself, to shut
out suffering and to shape circumstances as he wills.
Darth
Vader is the perfect visual metaphor of the “self” in the “castle.”
Yet
when he transforms his “self” into a fortified castle, there is an enormous
price to be paid. It goes beyond never being able to see the world with his own
eyes, hear it with his own ears, and touch it with his own skin. It is a
walling off of himself, a refusal to be hurt again, that results in a total
disconnection from life, light, and love.
Great
significance is often attached to facing hard facts, and as he strides about
the galaxy in an armored shell, choking Rebel officers during the Empire’s
reign of terror, Darth Vader could be said to be the ultimate hard fact. This
toughened attitude may work, but with every increase in hardness comes a
subsequent loss of sensitivity. Being sensitive does open one up to pain, but
it also opens one up to experience in general. As protected as Vader may be in
his black armor, it would be impossible for him to enjoy a simple kiss from
Padme, or enjoy the feel of the warm sun and cool breezes of Naboo’s Lake
Country. His younger self reveled in the “soft” and “smooth” green world, his
stilted dialogue nonetheless telling and ironic.
The
Taoist sage Lao-Tzu eloquently sums this paradox up nicely, “When people are
born they are gentle and soft. At death they are hard and stiff. Suppleness and
tenderness are therefore the characteristics of life. Rigidity and hardness are
the characteristics of death.”
And
death is certainly what Vader deals out, even to his own subordinates. To him,
the Imperial officers are merely cogs in the machine that is the Empire. If one
malfunctions, it is discarded and replaced much like a broken part. Ironically,
he often dispatches his officers by Force choking them, as if karma dooms him
to continually enact Padme's demise. Likewise, it could be argued that when he
freezes Han Solo in carbonite in Cloud City, he is also acting out what he has
done to himself.
After
all, until the realization that Luke Skywalker is his son, Vader is spiritually
and emotionally frozen too. After Luke’s destruction of the Death Star, he
becomes obsessed with finding him, no doubt anxious to turn him into another
possession. There are many parallels here that demonstrate Vader is still bound
in the chains of karma he forged for himself. He tortures Han Solo and Leia
Organa, sending ripples in the Force of Luke’s attachments being threatened, as
well as again extending the offer to overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy
with someone.
Letting Go
After
their first lightsaber duel, Luke is battered and broken as well. Learning from
Yoda that Vader is his father, he quickly echoes Padme’s last insight that
“There is still good in him.” Armed with this faith, he allows himself to be
captured on Endor. When Luke confronts Vader, he tells the dark lord he has
accepted that he was once Anakin Skywalker, his father. When Vader dismisses
the name, Luke tells him, “It’s the name of your true self. You’ve only
forgotten.” This “true self” that he speaks of is not the ego, of course, but
rather the enlightened buddha consciousness which everyone is originally born
into.
Even
when Vader presents him to the Emperor as a prize ripe for conversion, Luke
still does not give up hope, sensing the “good” in him, the “conflict.” The
importance of karuna, or compassion, is central to the Buddhist insight
that all life is connected and interdependent. In The Power of Myth,
Joseph Campbell translates com-passion as “suffering with,” citing the
bodhisattva as one who attains enlightenment but comes back to the world of
suffering for all beings anyway.
Very
much like a bodhisattva, Luke somehow understands that while his father may be
an evil that needs to be destroyed, he is also a person suffering terribly who
needs compassion. Thanks to his experience in the cave on Dagobah, he also
understands his father is - on some level - himself. Campbell points out that
the mythic theme of “atonement with the father” also means at-one-ment with the
father. Contrary to his father, though, Luke is so open to life that he
realizes he must also accept the possibility of death. It is only by
surrendering to the vicious lightning attack of the Emperor that he fittingly
finds the cracks in the armor of his long lost father.
Finally
opening his heart to someone else again and taking his pain as his own, Vader
spectacularly lifts the Emperor up into the air and mightily hurls him down a
deep reactor shaft (best moment ever). This act is a totally focused example of
one-pointed meditation, an understanding of what needs to be done, and a doing
of it.
As
Warner describes it in Sit Down and Shut Up, “He isn’t concerned with
some future state of enlightenment. He isn’t concerned with addressing whatever
wrongs we may have committed in the past. We cannot act in the past or future.
We can only act right now.” No longer trapped in the past or attempting to
control the future, Vader opens himself to the present moment, and rids the
galaxy of the monster ego that wants to rule it forever.
Afterwards,
even in the hangar of a Death Star that’s under attack, all Vader cares about
is seeing his son “with [his] own eyes.” When Luke protests that he’ll die
without the life support of his mask and armor, he calmly replies, “Nothing can
stop that now.” Finally, Anakin has made peace with impermanence. He realizes
that just as one can only breathe properly by letting go of the breath as
opposed to simply holding it in, he can only live again by dying.
Luke
carefully takes off his mask, revealing an older, surprisingly frail man.
Deathly pale, Anakin nonetheless manages a faint smile for his son. When Luke
tells him he has to save him, Anakin assures him he already has. Freed from his
armored shell at last, he finally surrenders his ego, lets the suns set, and dies.
His
body consumed in a ceremonial pyre, Anakin appears to Luke one final time
during the celebration on Endor. No longer imprisoned as Vader, he is a young
Jedi knight once more. As his shimmering blue apparition stands beside Yoda and
Obi-Wan, it is very difficult not to recall the timeless words of William
Blake –
He who binds to
himself a joy
Does the winged life
destroy
But he who kisses the
joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s
sunrise.
* Now available at TheForceCast
["Without the average padawan’s background in the Force since birth, Anakin struggles with his attachments again and again, particularly as they pertain to his mother and, later, the love of his life, Padme Amidala."]
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I completely agree with you on this matter. I believe that whether Anakin had been with the Order since birth or not, he would have struggled with attachments. I think everyone struggled with attachments, regardless.
Look at the Jedi characters like Obi-Wan, Yoda, Mace and Ki-Adi. Look at the mistakes they made in their efforts to maintain the Order and the latter's position within the Republic. And aside from Anakin, those characters made some serious mistakes in their suggestions and decisions, based upon their own attachment to the Order.
Even if Anakin had been raised in the traditional Jedi way . . . even if he had never fallen in love with Padme, he would have ended up forming attachments. And I'm not saying this was just his nature. I'm saying that this was natural for all of the characters.
Perhaps one of the reasons the Jedi failed to adequately teach Anakin about attachments was because it was a problem they failed to see within themselves.