#and commentary stretching across multiple countries and contexts

[stuffedeggplants]

These tags by @clonecumber​ on this post about Jedi reminded me of something about the concept of “attachment” in Buddhism that might be interesting and helpful for thinking about it in Star Wars, especially with regard to Anakin.

So, for the Buddhist concept, the word that’s being translated in English as “attachment” is upadana. The literal meaning of upadana in the Pali language is “fuel,” but in an abstract sense you’ll see it translated as “clinging” or “grasping.” 

Buddhism says that there’s a set of factors that goes into how a person experiences and interacts with the world, or part of how they construct their identity and the idea of ‘self.’ In Pali this is kandha and translated with words like “aggregate” or “bundle,” coming from the sense of a bundle of stems/branches or the trunk as the union/aggregate of all branches of a tree. 

There are five of these aggregates/kandhas. One kind of kandha is physical, sensual things. If you think of material wealth as a bundle of branches, being greedy and clinging to/grasping for it is like pouring gasoline over the wood and throwing down a match, creating fire (suffering) when you steal from people, exploit them, etc. Each factor/kandha is something that upadana--clinging or attachment--is directed towards, and eliminating attachment/clinging/upadana is part of how you can stop creating suffering. 

Material things are the only purely physical kandha. The others include emotions (where fear gets a special mention), states of mind, and even things like how you view yourself and what you believe about the world. When Yoda talks about how fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering, he’s echoing the idea that fear of loss and change in a world where the nature of things is to constantly change is what spurs people to cling to things, to form attachments. 

When Anakin’s mom is kidnapped and beaten by Tuskens, he’s ultimately unable to save her and must confront a very sharp, painful loss. His worst fear from his nightmare has been realized. Instead of reaching out and trying to process/deal with his grief and pain in a healthy way, he lets anger get the better of him and he massacres all the Tuskens in the encampment. All he’s done is spread suffering and murder. This does nothing to help his mother, the Lars family, or victims of literally any party of ongoing land/water disputes on Tatooine. Everything that happened here was purely about Anakin and his impulse to take revenge, jumping down the fear->anger->hate->suffering train like a slip-n-slide. 

Anakin routinely has a really hard time undercutting his own upadana, his grasping at and attachment to things that must and will change, must pass. Whenever Obi-wan tells him to “be mindful of [his] feelings,” he doesn’t mean that Anakin just needs to check himself and do some introspection whenever he’s angry or feeling a negative emotion. He’s reminding Anakin that he needs to do some consideration and introspection for all feelings, negative and positive, to think about the relationship between kandhas and upadana. 

Anakin doesn’t need to learn that anger and hate are bad. He needs to learn that even positive things like love can be the objects of attachment/upadana, and that’s the clinging demonstrated in his inability to accept death and loss--however shocking and painful--as a natural process, setting him down Yoda’s cycle of fear, anger, hate, and suffering, unable to walk way.