Star Wars - The Oriental Connection

ASidCast discusses Star Wars and the Asian mythologies and philosophies that inspired it. Thanks again, Couch.

The movies were not my introduction to Star Wars, though. That would be Knights of the Old Republic, which I had played shortly before watching the movies on STAR Movies. Knights was one of the first RPGs I ever played, and it blew me away. I knew the game was based on the lore of the movies, and it made me want to watch them. I played the sequel Sith Lords shortly afterwards, and against all my expectations, I loved it even more than the original (except the ending, which was later fixed by the cut content patch). I still prefer Sith Lords more, because (among other reasons) it is not your typical Star Wars story, but it deals with the underlying concepts- especially the Force and morality- in a much deeper way.

Both of the games made me very curious to know about the concept of the Force. It was perhaps mostly due to studying in what can be described as a Hindu missionary school, where we had to study a lot of religious texts and Indian myths, but I found something very familiar in how the Force was handled in Star Wars lore.

The Force has been described as an all-encompassing field of energy that connects every living thing to each other. When I first came across the description, I immediately thought of the concept of what we studied about Brahman. Brahman (not to be confused with Brahmin or Brahma) is a Vedic concept of the ultimate reality or truth, which has been adopted by Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and other religions. It is also said to be an ever-present energy or entity or concept that connects all life. The concept of Qi is also somewhat similar.

More information.

More information.

The force came out of Lucas' studies of theosophy, which uses as a basis the ideas of one of America's most successful con-men, John Ernst Worrell Keely



His "Force" was different from electricity as it worked off ""vibratory sympathy".

The original Star Wars "scripts" were inspired by the (second) movie script for Dune that had been floating around hollywood since the early 70's. The Jedi, like the Vulcans, were inspired by the Bene Gesserit. I believe Luke is concerned about the great the worms that live in the desert of [os]Arrakis[/os] Tatoine. One of them appeared in Return. Other References to Dune made it to the final film as 3PO worries about being sent to the spice mines and Han is a spice smuggler.

Han Pritchard, btw, is a character in Asimov's Foundation series, which first gave us a Galactic Empire in space. The Droids are widely regarded to be inspired by his Robot novels.

Of course, the plot itself is Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress and you will see lot's of parallels with the characters of the film. Lucas and Francis Ford Coppala would later become distributers of his film and backed the making of Kagemusha.

But Yoda's quote is a famous Indian proverb.

Cool…I actually clicked this thread hoping to be able to turn people on to Hidden Fortress (which I think even Lucas said he got the idea from). But instead I learned a bunch of other stuff I had not known before.

So, TY LD.

Hidden Fortress is an amazing film and if you are a Star Wars fan you owe it to yourself to see the original Obi Wan, Leia and C3PO, R2D2 and Death Star.

One of cool things I liked about some of the original SW ideas was the Death Star's power was supposed to be the cause of turning Tattoine into the desert it is. Dantoine I think was a later mispronunciation by the princess and the Empire was supposed to have targeted the wrong planet based on their interrogation of her.

Cool article, more of this please