Ahsoka in the Bardo

Episode 5 of AHSOKA enters some Tibetan territory.

This contains spoilers for Ahsoka episodes four and five.

What happens when you die? According to some Buddhist sects (and there are a lot of Buddhist sects; I feel like Buddhism is likely the most diverse religion in the world) you enter a state known as the bardo, where you exist for 49 days as you prepare to take on your next rebirth. The most famous understanding of the bardo comes from Tibetan Buddhism, whose Bardo Thodol - which you’ll find on the bookshelves as The Tibetan Book of the Dead - became something of a hot property in the West starting in the 60s, when Timothy Leary used it as the basis for his book The Psychedelic Experience.

Tibetans don’t have one bardo, they have six. There’s the bardo of birth and life, and as they used to say in the TV commercials, you’re soaking in it.Then there’s the bardo of dreams, and the bardo of meditation. But we’re not concerned with those; what interests us are the bardos of death and rebirth.

As you die you enter the chikhai bardo, which lasts from the first signs of immediate death and continues until the final breath. During the end phase of this the dying person will experience a bright light within a void, which is the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. For most this light is too bright, and they move away from it. Bummer, because this light is the path to nirvana, the cessation of rebirth. But there’s a second chance! A less bright light makes itself known; if the deceased is able to go into this light they will be reborn one last time as a holy person, and their next death will be their final death.

The problem is that most people are not trained and aware of these things, and they don’t have the karma situation that allows them to enter either light. And so they continue to the next bardo, the chönyi bardo.

At the end of episode four of Ahsoka, Ahsoka Tano is soundly defeated in combat by Baylan Skoll and sent flying off a cliff into a rough sea. We had many assumptions about what might come next, as at the end of the episode we saw that she had entered the mystical and mysterious World Between Worlds, a concept introduced but absolutely not explained in the TV show Rebels. But I will say that the answer to what happened to Ahsoka is simpler than I expected:

She died.

We do not see her confront the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality, but we do catch up with her in chönyi bardo. In this phase the deceased will begin to have experiences. From the Bardo Thodol:

At that time, sounds, lights, and rays-all three-are experienced. These awe, frighten, and terrify, and cause much fatigue…

0 nobly-born, whatever fear and terror may come to thee in the Chonyid Bardo, forget not these words; and, bearing their meaning at heart, go forwards: in them lieth the vital secret of recognition:

Alas! when the Uncertain Experiencing of Reality is dawning upon me here,

With every thought of fear or terror or awe for all [apparitional appearances] set aside, May I recognize whatever [visions] appear, as the reflections of mine own consciousness; May I know them to be of the nature of apparitions in the Bardo: When at this all-important moment [of opportunity] of achieving a great end.

May I not fear the bands of Peaceful and Wrathful [Deities], mine own thought-forms.

Ahsoka experiences this. Within this bardo the deceased begins to have visions and experiences. These are all the result of the actions in their lifetime; they will revisit scenes and moments from their lives and see people and things from their living days. For Ahsoka this takes the form of returning to battles in the Clone Wars, battles that were major moments for her. There’s the Battle of Ryloth, where the young girl gets a sense of the true horror of war, and then there’s the Siege of Mandalore, where she is actively participating in that.

This is all about karma. A small note here about karma: in the West we sometimes think that karma is some kind of tally, with a karma police force keeping track of our good and bad actions. That’s not the case; karma is simply cause and effect. Think not of karma as merits and demerits but as seeds; if you plant a seed from an apple you will get an apple tree. That’s how it is with karma; your actions have impacts, and those impacts are determined by the laws of the world, not by the hand of some being.

Within this bardo the deceased gets a sense of their karma, and it can be terrifying. But it can also be enlightening; experiencing this can prepare the deceased for their next rebirth, which will happen next and will be determined by how they respond and react to these visions.

There’s more - in this bardo the deceased is also visited by gods. Gods in Buddhism work a bit differently than God in the Abrahamic religions; they are entities and beings who have great power but are not usually all-powerful. I’m being really reductive here; Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism, and the cosmology of Hinduism is wild and exciting and I am doing it zero justice. At any rate, the Buddha once said he had been born to deal with the problem of suffering, and all of the stories of the gods showed that they too suffered, so he felt the gods had nothing to offer him.

The first deities met in this bardo are kinder ones. Ahsoka first encounters Anakin in a familiar, friendly way, with him calling her “Snips,” her tweenage nickname. Now, Anakin is Anakin, so he’s a bit intense right off the bat. The recent Tales of the Jedi animated shorts series showed us some of Ahsoka’s early training where Anakin really beat the shit out of her with a continued training exercise where she takes on a whole squad of clones alone. In the story Ahsoka comes to realize that it is this training in particular that allowed her to survive Order 66, when the Emperor commanded the clones to kill all the Jedi.

So Anakin coming at her hard is not outside the realm of a ‘friendly’ deity, at least not when wearing Anakin’s form. This is something she has experienced many times with her master, and he tends to teach lessons with brute force. But as the trip through the bardo continues, Anakin morphs. In the last part of the journey through the Chonyid Bardo the deceased encounters wrathful deities. Anakin becomes exactly that, taking on his form as Darth Vader, both before and after he is encased in a suit of armor.

Here Ahsoka has a moment of understanding, and her time in this bardo is done. Traditionally she would move on to the final bardo, sidpa bardo, where the deceased begins to transmigrate into a new body (by the way, I’m just saying the deceased her because to get into the Buddhist concept that there is no self and then explain the concept of the mindstream as not-self would be too lengthy and honestly I’m not entirely sure I get it). But that’s not what happens here. One of the lessons that she needs to learn in the bardo is that she wants to live. This, of course, flies directly in the face of Buddhist teachings. From the Bardo Thodol:

0 nobly-born, that which is called death hath now come. Thou art departing from this world, but thou art not the only one; [death] cometh to all. Do not cling, in fondness and weakness, to this life. Even though thou clingest out of weakness, thou hast not the power to remain here. Thou wilt gain nothing more than wandering in this Samsara. 9 Be not attached [to this world]; be not weak.

This is one of the interesting things when Western media uses Eastern religion, especially Star Wars. The nature of our storytelling is in direct defiance of the teachings from which the creators are poaching. Audiences have a hard time with this; George Lucas never intended non-attachment, a key Buddhist principal, to be bad in the Jedi Order but you will find many people who are sure that non-attachment is why Anakin turned to the Dark Side (it’s the exact opposite - his intense attachment to Padme made him do bad things). But this is episode five of an eight episode show called Ahsoka, so Ahsoka can’t let go and head to her next rebirth (or whatever awaits on the other side of the Word Between Worlds).

When the World Between Worlds was introduced in Rebels it wasn’t clear what it was. It’s still not clear, and Dave Filoni has said that he has no intention of over-defining the concept. But with this episode of Ahsoka it seems more and more like the World Between Worlds is a bardo, a liminal place between states of being. As Star Wars fans we sometimes like to try and define things, to take measurements and record power levels, but that just isn’t how the Force works. Sometimes the Force is mysterious and bizarre and unknowable, and these are qualities that Buddhism - and especially Tibetan Buddhism - embraces.