Staring at the Wall: 'The Last Jedi' Meets Zen Buddhism

**Warning: This post contains movie spoilers. If Disney has not yet herded you at gunpoint into seeing the Last Jedi, you might get spoiler juice on your new pantaloons.**

By now, a significant portion of the world has seen Rian Johnson’s fun, rollicking and utterly bizarre Star Wars entry, The Last Jedi. It’s sold over a billion dollars in movie tickets worldwide, and has Star Wars fans bitterly divided over its content. Is it genius? Is it garbage? Personally, I’ve seen it and I don’t really care whether it fits the ‘canon,’ whether Rey is a Mary Sue, or whether Punished Luke Skywalker’s beard is the right shade of grizzled. What I’m more interested in is the movie’s strange, unexpected and seemingly accidental themes of Zen Buddhism.

As an amateur Zen scholar, I can’t promise a balanced and detailed exploration of these themes. But I did want to lay them out, in case people had missed them. And it seems they have. The reigning debates over the movie involve whether a “hyper-spaceram” would work, what Kylo Ren’s pec routine is, and… uh, this. (Trigger warning, for murdered Porgs.)

Was the 'Star Wars' fandom always so full of sociopaths? Damn, guys. Talk to your Patrick Batemans sometime.

So… Yeah, not exactly a movie provoking high-minded philosophical discussion. And yet amongst the pop-culture swill, I sense a great disturbance. As if a thousand Buddhist references cried out, and were silenced by a fan arguments and more goddamn Porgs. Seriously, fuck off with the Porgs! I'm sure the kids in the audience loved them, but they creeped me out! Those black, dead eyes stare into my soul!!!

(Real talk for a second? I didn't like TLJ very much. It's a fun movie that tries to be too many different things, and succeeds at... well, none of them. It's like Rian Johnson crammed every fan-fiction idea he ever had into it, leaving zero time for plot and characters. Or dialogue. I know, I know, Star Wars has never had good dialogue. But at least somebody skimmed the Force Awakens script with a red pencil, once. Did they fire that intern, or something? Is that why we got "I sense the [character] conflict in you, Ben Solo!" Wow, much dialogue, very realism. When the SNL skit for Force Awakens has better writing than a billion-dollar movie, you know something's not right.)

I rest my case.

Moving on. So the entire gist of Luke Skywalker and Rey's arc is one of master and student, right? The transmission of knowledge is a big theme here. Even George Lucas, whose personal 'vision' turned the prequels into nonsense, understood the basic relationship between master and pupil as a part of the hero's journey. And that's great, in theory. But since the OT we've been deluged by Mr. Miyagi types in media, characters who exist simply to pass wisdom to their students, usually right before dying in a noble moment of self-sacrifice. (See: Obi-Wan.) It's become a cliche--a useful storytelling tool, but still a cliche.

Enter The Last Jedi. It's silly, it's weird, its pacing makes a Fast and Furious movie look slow and gentle. But one thing it gets right is Luke's relationship with Rey as a teacher. Namely, that he's a huge jerk about the concept of teaching her. His whole attitude is "Fuck off, kid."

And guess what? That's totally a Zen thing.

Stay with me, now. Let's hop in a time machine and zoom back to the 5th century, in the foothills of Western China. Zen Buddhism was called Chan during this period, and its practitioners were very few. One of them was a guy named Bodhidharma, who I've covered in blog posts before. By all accounts, Bodhidharma was a really grumpy guy. Unlike the peaceful, tranquil Buddhas in popular culture, he was a cranky bastard--he only left his life to become a travelling monk because he was mad people hadn't heard of Chan in other parts of China. I mean, look at this guy! He's basically the original Grumpy Cat!

"The hell is a 'meme'? Buzz off."

Not exactly a cheerful dude, was Bodhidharma. But luckily (or unluckily) for his students, he was also a genius at meditation. Unlike other brands of Buddhism, his version was designed to help "point directly into one's own mind, see into one's true nature, and attain Buddhahood."

Sounds pretty Jedi, huh? Well, it should. The parallels between Star Wars' order of Force monks and real-life Buddhism are so strong that entire books have been written about them. And rightly so--even though Lucas lost his mind since the OT, his original concepts for the Jedi were similar to Buddhist aesthetics. Some of this got toned down for the franchise, but some of it stayed, while other ideas of his were... tastefully edited.

"No George, we can't make C-3PO 'sexy.' Stop asking."

When Rey tries to get Luke to teach her, he repeatedly tells her that she has no idea what she's asking for. He slams the door in her face, over and over. He drinks weird alien milk and scowls at her, a gesture designed to mock her and probably the audience as well. In short, he acts pissy, short-tempered and mortal... just like Bodhidharma.

And like Bodhidharma, he forces his student to wait. And wait, and wait, until the student is forced to reach inside herself and find the patience and focus needed to deal with the blank wall that is their teacher. That focus helps them, on their journey towards enlightenment. In practical terms, it's a great way to teach the student how this whole "mentor" thing is actually going to work. The teacher is not your friend, they're not your surrogate father figure or your wise happy-Buddha idol. They're here to do a job. And if you don't like it, you can GIT AWT.

Learning isn't easy, it usually isn't fun, and quite often it hurts. Just like when Luke gets zapped by training droids in A New Hope, learning to master yourself is painful. And scary, and frequently depressing. Speaking of scary...

Let's talk about the Spooky Hole. Oooh, spooky!

"So it's a hole full of evil?" "Yep." "What do you do with it?" "I throw beer cans in it."

The Spooky Hole is a creepy gulf at the bottom of Luke's monastery-island. It's intentionally similar to the dark-side cave in Empire Strikes Back, and Rey gets a similar scene as she faces her internal fears there. Except while Luke faced the specter of Darth Vader, Rey faces... herself.

There's no Buddhist cliche older than "defeating yourself." But Last Jedi does it in a novel and kind of disturbing way: the cave traps Rey in a line of clones of herself. (Almost an "Attack of the Clones" amirite? Too soon, huh? Yeah, too soon.) They all act as one, and she has no way of knowing whether she's the real Rey, or just a copy of a copy of a copy. The scene's pretty hokey, but it stuck with me, because at the end of this confrontation she reaches a wall.

Beyond that wall, she's hoping to see the faces of her parents. But in the end, she just sees herself. Bodhidharma famously meditated in a cave for nine years, and when his student asked to join him, he pretty much responded like this:

 

"ALSO THIS CAVE IS OUT OF TOILET PAPER! PLEASE BRING ME SOME!"

 To him, the act of gazing at a wall was the greatest act of enlightenment one could do. One of his successors, the Buddhist writer Tanlin, quoted him as saying: "Those who turn from delusion back to reality, who meditate on walls, the absence of self and other, the oneness of mortal and sage, and who remain unmoved even by scriptures are in complete and unspoken agreement with reason."

Heavy stuff! Which is why it's so surprising to see themes like that, in a movie full of silly pop-culture space battles. There are Buddhist themes all over TLJ, even when Luke pokes Rey's hand with grass as she's meditating and says "There's the Force! Do you feel it?" When she says yes, he smacks her hand for being a dumb-ass, much like instructors in a Zen monastery use a "warning stick" to get their students to focus. Themes of facing yourself, and non-violent resistance, even show up in the final scenes: when Kylo Ren goes after the seemingly invincible Luke Skywalker on Krayt, he discovers he was only fighting an illusion--the real Luke was Jedi-mind-tricking everyone from light-years away. What a tweest! Kylo Ren was slashing and chopping at his own issues, his own anger and his own delusions. The only one he was harming was himself.

I don't know what the next Star Wars is going to look like. It's possible the non-Zen, non-mindful leaders of our world will reduce us to nuclear ash before then. But I'm excited to see if these themes continue--maybe even excited enough to buy a 3-D ticket, next time.

You're never going to get me to see SOLO, though. Don't even try it.

You blow up my Extended Universe, and give me THIS? Fuck off, Mickey. Fuck straight off.

Until next time, in a galaxy far, far away!!

Tired of scrolling Facebook at the office, or in class? Looking for more of my weird stuff to read, or just a distraction from our weekly political crisis? Well, feast your eyes on this! I've crafted an elaborate video game meta-narrative that might get me sued by Guy Fieri! Read it quickly, before I'm destroyed by copright lawyers!!