ANAKIN, LEIA, AND THE FIVE AGGREGATES OF SELF
“Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different.”
“No! No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.”
—LUKE SKYWALKER AND MASTER YODA IN THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
At the end of Return of the Jedi, a dying Anakin Skywalker looks on his son for the first time with unmasked eyes. “Now…go, my son. Leave me,” he stammers with his remaining strength.
Luke’s shock at his dad’s charred marshmallow face morphs into compassion.
“No,” he insists. “You’re coming with me. I’ll not leave you here. I’ve got to save you.”
“You already have,” Anakin says.
The notion that we are completely separate beings with permanent identities or souls is a false notion that shrouds our understanding of reality. Luke was no longer blinded by such conceptions when he saw his father’s face for the first time in this scene. Where others saw only a man who was evil by nature, Luke recognized the good in his father. He knew that Vader’s destiny wasn’t predetermined.
Buddhism challenges our sense of a permanent, independent self, clearly identifying it as false. From the Buddhist point of view, all beings indivisibly interact with the whole universe and are part of the unified flow of life. What we commonly perceive to be our distinct individuality is in reality an aggregation of physical and mental elements.
An “aggregate” is a collection of various elements that make up a particular formation. Lemonade—a drink that we might expect to find being sold on the lush world of Naboo or refreshing a desert-parched patron in Chalmun’s cantina in Mos Eisley—is a good example of an aggregate. Whether we find it on Tatooine or on our own world, lemonade is always an aggregate comprised of lemon juice, sugar, and water. We perceive lemonade as a discreet, uniform substance, but in reality it is made up of intermingled ingredients, each likewise interdependent. Every sentient creature—human, Wookiee, Jawa, or Mon Cals—is an aggregate of bodily and mental elements. Buddhists further subdivide mental elements, bringing the total number of aggregates that comprise a sentient being to five: (1) physical form or body, (2) feeling, (3) perception, (4) mental formations, and (5) consciousness. Each of these aggregates is of course comprised of various other elements. The physical body, for example, is made up of air, water, hair, bone, blood, skin, and many other things.
Each aggregate is also impermanent: it is never the same from one moment to the next. Because the aggregates do not endure, we cannot cling to any of them as an unchanging self or soul. Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin might’ve been able to retain individual consciousness after death, but that’s an impossible-to-imagine power we’ll never have. The five aggregates are, furthermore, a part of Obi-Wan’s symbiont circle and cannot stand independent from one another.
To better understand this whole five aggregates thing, let’s take a look at Anakin Skywalker. The first thing we notice about Anakin is his body—the aggregate of “form.” Once we’ve seen little, bobblehead Anakin in The Phantom Menace, we wonder why the dude has Sasquatch eyebrows in Return of the Jedi (I’m talking pre-DVD Anakin, when a pair of feather dusters sprout from a head that shouldn’t have a strand of hair on it after being flambéed on Mustafar). The changes that Anakin’s body underwent over his lifetime are quite evident. But these changes were not limited to the process of aging or scars from his duel with Obi-Wan. Anakin’s body, as well as our own, changes continuously throughout its life. Our bodies are sometimes tired, sometimes energetic; healthy today and sick tomorrow; hair grows, teeth fall out, and weight is gained and lost. The body constantly changes, but much of that change is so subtle that we fail to recognize that our body right now is different from our body one second ago.
In his youth, the sunlight from Tatooine’s twin suns lanced through the atmosphere to sear Anakin’s exposed flesh, causing a chemical reaction that altered his skin, damaging some of his cells and infusing his body with vitamins. Years later, as Vader he stalked the halls of Cloud City, breathing its rarefied atmosphere. Each breath brought with it microscopic germs and particles into his withered lungs (hopefully not Ugnaught particles—bleah!), renewing his miserable life for a few seconds more. Anakin changed with the sun and he changed with the air.
Clearly we cannot survive without the sun or air. We also couldn’t exist without a father and mother. If we examine the symbiont circle of Anakin, we find his mother Shmi and his daughter Leia. Leia came from Anakin’s body. Leia cannot be separate from Anakin or her ancestors. She is an extension of them, a continuation of their genetic material. (But should Leia call Emperor Palpatine grandpa? He, along with Darth Plagueis, manipulated the midi-chlorians to create Anakin, right?)
To see the body as an extension of its parents, the food it has ingested, the air, earth, sunlight, and everything else is to understand that it is not separable from everything else. Our bodies existed in our great-great-grandmothers and they hold the presence of our great-great-granddaughters. So our existence is not trapped in our body. When the Buddha looked carefully into his existence he saw that it could not be found solely in the hands, arms, legs, feet, torso, and head of his body, but that it existed in his parents, the air, the sun—everywhere. From that point on he no longer feared death.
We fear death because we feel that we exist apart from the world around us and that our existence depends on our bodies. Fear of death is natural. It vanquishes even the most hardened. Take, for example, the Emperor’s scream of terror as he plummets down the central core shaft of the Death Star to his death or Darth Maul’s cowering mewl when he thought his master would destroy him in The Clone Wars. But while the shroud of the dark side hindered the Sith’s understanding of reality, others were not so blind to the truth. Qui-Gon Jinn met death with no thought at all of himself, only compassionate concern for the galaxy.
Unlike Qui-Gon, we feel that when our body dies we will be reduced to nothing, and this causes a great deal of anxiety. But if we look deeply into our bodies we would see that they die and are reborn with each breath. The beginning of an inhalation is a kind of birth: fresh air enters our lungs and is drawn into the cells of our bodies, making them different in that instant than they were the moment before. By the time the inhalation turns to become an exhalation, we are no longer the same person who breathed the air in. Each cycle of breath is like a brief lifespan in which we are born and die. With each passing thought the mind is born and dies in the same way. When we look deeply at ourselves we realize we have lived through countless births and deaths without even knowing it.
Such insights may be of small comfort when we lose someone near to us. Obi-Wan wept as he held Qui-Gon, clutching his body after he died. (Little did he know that his master’s brogue would be worming into his ear on Mortis and again later in the Star Wars saga. You just can’t escape your teachers, I guess!) It was small comfort to me when I held my grandfather’s hand after he passed, knowing that I would never again prune trees, pick fruit, or listen to seemingly endless stories with him again. Like Qui-Gon, he is gone, and I miss him.
But if we look carefully at Obi-Wan we find qualities of Qui-Gon present in him. Yoda pointed out this fact when he told Obi-Wan, “Qui-Gon’s defiance I sense in you.” Similarly, when I look deeply at myself, I see that my grandfather is not truly gone; he is in me. My grandfather no longer answers the phone when I call his house, but I can hear his voice when I am quiet and attentive, and I can see his presence in my thoughts and actions even now as I type these words.
Feeling, the second aggregate in our list, refers both to bodily sensations, such as hunger or pain, and to mental feelings of happiness, sadness, or indifference. When we observe our feelings, we see that they too are continuously changing. When she was held captive in the Death Star in A New Hope, Princess Leia felt anxious about her future and the hopes of the Rebel Alliance. She had seen Alderaan destroyed and didn’t know what fate might have befallen Obi-Wan Kenobi and R2-D2—the droid who carried information vital to the survival of the rebellion. Her anxiety quickly changes to puzzlement when an undersized Stormtrooper rushes into her cell aboard the Death Star. The “Stormtrooper” removes his helmet and blurts, “I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.”
“You’re who?” the Princess asks, both bemused and annoyed.
“I’m here to rescue you. I’ve got your R2 unit. I’m here with Ben Kenobi.”
Her annoyance turns to guarded elation: “Ben Kenobi! Where is he?”
So in a matter of seconds Leia’s feelings went from anxiety to confusion to irritation to joy.
Feelings, like the body, are always shifting. They change based on what our senses encounter and how we are conditioned to experience it. We experience pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feelings whenever we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell something. The Buddha advised his disciples to be aware of their feelings as they arise in one context and fade away in another. Jedi Master Mace Windu advised young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, “Be mindful of your feelings.”
Being mindful of our feelings allows us to see that what we feel are also aggregates rather than distinct entities. Every feeling can be parsed into an object, the sense that encounters it, and consciousness of the encounter. All three of these are necessary for a feeling to arise. For example, to experience the joy of watching Star Wars, the movie must be playing, the eyes and ears must be able to receive information, and the mind must be attentive. Feelings of joy depend not only on objects that can be seen and heard, but on the eyes and ears that see and hear them, and the mind that appreciates them. The images on the screen, our sensation of them, and the mental state with which we encounter them interact with one another to produce the good cheer we feel watching Star Wars.
Understanding this, we know that our feelings are not ourselves. We cannot identify ourselves with our feelings; my love of Star Wars, however strong, is not “me.” These things are products of countless elements in the world coming together one minute and fading away the next.
The Chewbacca that we see running across a TV or movie screen is part of us because he is the object of our perception. Perceptions are images that form in our minds as the result of sensory contact with objects in the world, like Chewie. Usually, whenever a sense organ makes contact with an object, a corresponding perception follows. At the moment of perception, subject and object are one. It’s impossible to have a subject without an object. It’s impossible to remove ourselves and retain Chewbacca. When the scene changes and Palpatine dominates the screen, our perception changes too—then Palpatine is part of us. (Suddenly, I’m feeling a diabolical urge for galactic domination.) And if you want to go crazy deep into the Force, Buddhism also says that we are part of Palpatine—in other words, the image of Ian McDiarmid in cloak and cowl on screen is actually altered by us, the viewer, as we watch him sneer at Luke.
In A New Hope Obi-Wan Kenobi leads his nascent learner, Luke Skywalker, in a training session aboard the Millennium Falcon. Luke uses his lightsaber to defend himself from small laser blasts that emanate from a hovering seeker-droid. Wishing to expand the lesson, Obi-Wan places a helmet on Luke’s head that completely covers his eyes.
Luke is master of the obvious: “With the blast shield down, I can’t even see. How am I supposed to fight?”
“Your eyes can deceive you,” the Jedi explains, “Don’t trust them.”
The Buddhist tradition says, “Where there is perception, there is deception.” In other words, our perceptions are often incongruous with reality. And yet perception forms the basis of our sense of the world. When the Jedi met with Palpatine prior to the Clone Wars, they perceived him to be an honorable, or at least benign, leader. But they weren’t interacting with the real Palpatine. They were deceived by their idea—their perception—of him, informed by his stature and place in the Senate. When they realized the full extent of their misperception, it was too late. The grandfatherly chancellor had played them like a space lute.
We must apply Jedi mindfulness to our perceptions to avoid being deceived by them. Perception can become an insight into the truth if we approach it mindfully. We see things more clearly when we see perception for what it is. Recognizing that perception can act like a blast shield opens our eyes to “a larger world.”
Despite having stepped into a larger world in A New Hope, Luke still struggled with limited perception on Dagobah. Moving small stones around with the Force, he thought, was entirely different from lifting his submerged X-wing. Luke was trapped by dualistic thinking—dividing things into this and that, big and small, heavy and light. He didn’t understand Yoda’s assertion: “Size matters not.”
Luke stands dejected at the edge of the swamp where only a small portion of his X-wing can be seen poking out of the murky water.
“Oh, no. We’ll never get it out now,” he moans.
Yoda, who has been calmly observing the situation, practically rolls his eyes at his obtuse student. “So certain are you. Always with you it cannot be done. Hear you nothing that I say?”
“Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different.”
“No! No different!” Yoda insists. “Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.”
As children our minds are relatively free of presumptions. We experience each thing, each event more as it is, without expectation. The youthful mind has not yet learned to categorize things, people, and feelings into familiar, preconceived packages. As a result a childlike mind is often able to touch life in ways that older, more knowledgeable minds cannot.
Take Obi-Wan Kenobi’s experience in Attack of the Clones for example. Obi-Wan can’t locate the planet Kamino in the Jedi Archives. Confounded, he approaches Yoda while the tiny Jedi master is training a group of Jedi Younglings. Upon presenting his dilemma to the group, a solution to Obi-Wan’s problem becomes apparent: the planet had been erased from the Archive memory. It wasn’t the older, more experienced Jedi that hit upon the solution, but a kid—the Padawan, J. K. Burtola. The child’s mind, unlike Obi-Wan’s, was less clouded by facts, knowledge, and presumption, and could more readily see the truth.
Presumption skews our perception of reality, giving us an impression that is entirely wrong. Luke’s presumptions led him to perceive the rock and the X-wing as substantially different. He didn’t perceive the rock as non-rock, or that the X-wing was in it. Yoda was teaching Luke far more than a feat of the Force; he was teaching him to see past perception limited by presumption to the truth. He was trying to unstick a mind that could only perceive a very small portion of reality.
Had Luke recognized that his perception was obscured, he would have guided the ship out of the water just as his master did. Instead he stood watching, slack-jawed, as Yoda parked his rig. Scooping his chin up off the dirt, he stammered, “I don’t believe it.”
“That is why you fail,” Yoda sighed.
Luke is too wrapped up in what he imagines to be possible. The X-wing was lifted from the swamp and brought onto land, but he couldn’t reconcile that truth of his perception with what he thought should be possible. He believes more in his ideas than he does in reality. Yoda is prodding Luke to drop attachment to his beliefs and see things as they actually are. He should have whacked him with his cane and said, “Your head, get out of and look.” Luke couldn’t believe that lifting a ship with the Force was possible, and yet there it was resting on the loamy shore.
The belief that his wife would die and his desire to save her drove Anakin Skywalker’s transformation into Darth Vader. Anakin’s conviction was so strong that he rationalized turning to the dark side in order to gain the power that he thought would save Padmé. Buddhists refer to the ideas and attitudes that initiate action and direct and shape one’s character as mental formations. These influential ideas make up the fourth of the five aggregates of a living being.
Mental formations like attention, contact, or volition may be operative all the time, but others, like determination, mindfulness, or sleepiness, appear only under specific circumstances. Some mental formations are beneficial and others are harmful, and some are neither. Thinking is a mental formation that can be beneficial when our mind is clear and calm. At such times thinking helps us understand things better.
But at other times, thinking can be unhelpful if our mind is scattered or under a lot of strain—like Anakin’s was in Revenge of the Sith. Unnerved by a dream he had of Padmé’s death, Anakin took his worries to Yoda. Yoda told him, “You must train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”
But Anakin didn’t follow this advice. Instead, Anakin’s fear of loss developed into a determination to do whatever it would take to keep Padmé alive—even if it meant killing innocents and friends in order to attain the power he needed to do so. In Anakin’s case the mental formation of determination became a compulsion.
In The Clone Wars, Anakin’s determination to save his apprentice, Ahsoka Tano, when she was trapped beneath the rubble of the droid factory on Geonosis is also quite intense. It appears as if she is lost, but Anakin will not allow her to perish without a fight.
“Be at ease, Skywalker,” cautions Luminara Unduli, a Jedi master whose apprentice was also trapped with Ahsoka.
“At ease?” an incredulous Anakin snaps. “We need to act now!”
But there was nothing for them to do—an entire mountain lay between them and their Padawans. Despite this fact, Anakin mistook Luminara’s calmness for resignation and accused her of abandoning their apprentices.
“You misjudge me,” she explains. “I, too, care for my apprentice, but…if my Padawan has perished, I will mourn her. But I will celebrate her as well through her memory.”
Luminara was not dismissing the hope of rescue, as Anakin seems to think. She is ready to act to save her Padawan, but at the same time accepts that some things are beyond her control—she has trained herself to let go of the things she fears to lose. In her case, acceptance and patience have become mental formations that guide her thinking and actions. Anakin has not cultivated those particular mental formations. Instead, his actions are still compelled by fear of loss and failure. Without having properly trained his mind he’s still struggling to make “things the way [he wants] them to be,” as he said in Revenge of the Sith.
Unlike Anakin, Luminara has cultivated wise and measured acceptance in place of blind determination that becomes compulsion. She makes this clear after the Padawans are rescued when she says, “It’s not that I gave up on them, Skywalker. But unlike you, when the time comes, I am prepared to let my student go. Can you say the same?”
Luminara is unafraid of loss. Anakin is terrified of it. His annoyance and surly behavior during the rescue effort is an indication of how truly afraid of losing Ahsoka he is. This fear, fear of things turning out different from how he wants them to be, is the germ of the dark side. This type of mental habit is what compels us to seek power over the way things naturally are and to manipulate people, things, and events that we dislike. Anakin does not understand that accepting that some things are beyond his control is different from abandoning his friends. (This is the same mistake that Luke made when he left Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back.) Luminara, on the other hand, is humble and realistic. She will do what she can, but, at the same time, accept what she cannot control.
Mental formations are the product of our upbringing, education, environment, and experience. Anakin’s life as a slave, his “failure” to rescue his mother, and the Clone Wars all contributed to the mental formations that drove him to the dark side. Similarly, Luke’s colorless life on a moisture farm, his massacred guardians, and the rebellion all contributed to the mental formations that drove him to an entirely different decision—a decision born of compassion rather than fear. Mental formations comprise an integral part of who we are as people, but nowhere in them can we find the real “self” that we innately feel we are. Like all of the other aggregates, mental formations can be further reduced into constituent parts and are subject to change, and thus cannot be relied upon as a foundational element of the self.
Consciousness, the last of the five aggregates in our list, is the fundamental basis for our sense of being. It is the ground upon which all of our mental formations rest. Like feeling, perception, and mental formations, consciousness is also influenced by contact with the world of phenomena. When the senses come in contact with something in the world, unless we are distracted or impaired, we are normally conscious of it. Once your eyes have seen these words you become aware of them. When your ears hear the ominous breathing of Darth Vader you become aware of his respiration (and no doubt fearful that some great evil is about to befall you). When a thought or memory sparks in the mind, you are aware of it. Consciousness is always aware of something.
In some philosophies and religions consciousness is considered to be the true self, distinct from form and everlasting. This seems to be the case for the Jedi in the Star Wars universe. Yoda pinches Luke and tells him, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” But this is not so for Buddhists, who consider consciousness to be conditioned, just like form, feeling, perception, and mental formations. Our eyes and what they see are conditions without which visual consciousness would not occur. Our ears and what they hear are the conditions without which auditory consciousness would not occur. The imprints, impressions, and memories in our minds and the preceding moment of consciousness are conditions without which mental consciousness would not occur. Consciousness depends upon the world as much as it does upon the mind and body. And because it is conditioned, consciousness changes from moment to moment. Consciousness is thus a dependent and impermanent phenomenon, just as all the other aggregates are, and cannot be a reliable basis of the self.
Yoda implies that we can transcend death and live on, untethered to the body. A good deal of the Star Wars mythos rests on this notion that individual consciousnesses can carry on after death, teaching disciples, watching over and influencing events as they unfold. It seems that way, anyway, until Qui-Gon, as a ghostly, postmortem presence explains in The Clone Wars that his presence is a “manifestation of the Force.” He is not separate from the Force, but part of it. “All energy from the living Force, from all things that have ever lived, feeds into the cosmic Force, binding everything and communicating to us through the midi-chlorians.” he says, “Because of this, I can speak to you now.” Consciousness, even in the galaxy far, far away, is an aggregate, a constitute part of the greater whole. It is not a reliable basis for the self—even hazy-blue Jedi selves.