by Nancy Reagin
Riding high: both the Samurai and the Jedi were versatile fighters. (Attack of the Clones)
Bunbu itchi means “the pen and the sword in equal measure.” It summarized the samurai’s obligation to balance their mastery of warfare with civilized endeavors, such as classical literature, calligraphy, and Confucian philosophy.31 We see this philosophy in the life of Miyamoto Musashi: a ronin or masterless samurai whose unparalleled swordsmanship helped him survive countless battles and duels. After his only defeat, which came at the hands of a wandering monk armed only with a pair of short staves, he retired to a mountaintop cave. There he penned one of the classics of Zen philosophy and sword fighting, The Book of Five Rings, and produced masterpieces of painting, calligraphy, and even woodcarving.32 Although proficiency with the pen distinguished the samurai from mercenaries and enabled them to perform their civic and administrative duties, their mastery of the sword was even more crucial. The long sword did not only protect the samurai’s life: it was the life, the symbol, and the soul of the samurai. A graceful weapon steeped in spiritual significance, it was “an instrument of life and death, purity and honor, authority and even of divinity.”33 We can compare this to the Jedi’s reverence for the lightsaber.
The pen and the sword in equal measures: seventeenth-century samurai Miyamoto Musashi excelled at both fighting and philosophy.
The Jedi’s “elegant weapon for a more civilized day” also resonates with spiritual and symbolic significance.34 Materially, it consists of a hilt that ignites a blade of pure energy that can slice through almost any substance and, in the hands of a trained user, can reflect blaster fire. Practically, a lightsaber is often the only thing protecting a Jedi from death. When Master Kenobi returns Anakin’s lost lightsaber, he scolds his Padawan, saying, “Anakin, this weapon is your life” (Attack of the Clones). Spiritually, the lightsaber is the Jedi’s soul. One of the final tests facing a Padawan is to assemble his or her own lightsaber. Thus, the lightsaber is not only a sign of the Padawan’s maturity, but is also a unique and deeply personal mode of self-expression.
From their earliest days, the Jedi were mindful of the dangers of the dark side of the Force. To help future adepts along the narrow path to the light side, the Jedi live by the strictures of the Jedi Code. The classical expression of the Code based on the writings of Jedi Master Odan-Urr reads,
There is no emotion; there is peace. There is no ignorance; there is knowledge. There is no passion; there is serenity. There is no chaos; there is harmony. There is no death; there is the Force. A Jedi does not act for personal power or wealth but seeks knowledge and enlightenment. A true Jedi never acts from hatred, anger, fear or aggression but acts when calm and at peace with the Force.35
Just as the Jedi live by and meditate on the Jedi Code, so the samurai lived according to their own arduous code of Bushido, “the way of the warrior.”36 Bushido was not so much a systematic system of ethics as it was a set of guidelines pertaining to dress, deportment, and behavior on the battlefield. Samurai retainers owed absolute obedience to their master, just as Jedi Padawans implicitly obey their Masters and all Jedi are to obey the decrees of the Jedi Council.37 Finally, although Bushido was not a monastic code, it mandated a frugal, sober life marked by the cardinal virtues of loyalty and obedience.38
A later version of the same Zen philosophy taught by Bodhidharma at the Shaolin Monastery guided a samurai’s spiritual life and is the single greatest parallel between the ideals of the samurai and the Jedi. Zen, similar to the teachings of the Jedi Order, teaches that in order to truly understand all things, one must let go of the conscious mind that divides the world according to categories and must cultivate mushin or “no mind.” Zen detachment helped the samurai attend to their various obligations with focus but not anxiety. More important, it enabled them to face death in battle without fear. On this point, Tsunetomo teaches that “[i]f by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.”39 Similarly, all Padawans face the Trial of Courage, the purpose of which is “for a Padawan to persist in the face of fear.”40
The most valuable effect of the Zen mushin practice was the deep, almost mystical connection with the world that it imparted. The Zen master Takuan Soho wrote a series of letters to the sword master Yagyu-Munenori detailing the importance of mushin for samurai. He claimed that if a fighter both masters the physical techniques of sword-fighting and also develops “no mind,” the perceived separations between mind, body, sword, and opponent will all disappear, and he will strike down his opponent “with the speed of a flash of lightning.”41 In a memorable scene from A New Hope, Obi-Wan teaches the same Zen “no mind” to Luke Skywalker during an early lesson on lightsaber combat. After Luke is frustrated by his inability to defend himself against a practice droid, Kenobi blocks his vision with a flight helmet and tells him to “let go your conscious self and act on instinct,” after which Skywalker is able to defend himself effortlessly.42 How similar this is to Takuan Soho’s admonition “Completely forget about the mind and you will do all things well.”43
Along with the sword, the samurai revered the bow as a holy armament that banished evil spirits with just the sound of the bowstring’s release. We find a wonderful parallel between the samurai’s Zen practice of archery at the very moment that serves as the cardinal point from which time is measured in the Star Wars universe.44 Like a samurai galloping through a crowded battlefield, Luke Skywalker pilots his X-wing fighter toward the one vulnerable point on the Death Star during the Battle of Yavin. He engages his targeting computer, thinking he needs its help to make his all-important shot. Luke then hears the voice of his mentor telling him to “use the Force” and, most important, to “let go.”45 The young pilot turns off his instruments and finds peace in the midst of the chaotic battle. Like a samurai releasing his arrow, Luke clears his mind, fires his weapon, and strikes his target. Luke’s one-in-a-million shot is like the feats of superhuman accuracy by the Zen practitioners of archery who achieve mushin “[b]y letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but purposeless tension.”46
“No mind”: Zen philosophy accords well with Obi-Wan’s training advice for Luke, who must stretch out with his feelings. (A New Hope)
“Some Damned-Fool Idealistic Crusade”: The Jedi and the Knights Templar
Just as the chroniclers of the Clone Wars record the valiant deeds of Jedi leading their outnumbered clone troopers against the vast droid armies of the Separatists in a galactic war that stretches from the Core worlds to the Outer Rim, our own historians preserve tales of remarkable warrior-monks who survived not only battle, while perennially outnumbered, but also starvation, solitude, and ultimately betrayal in a faraway realm they called Outremer. These were “men whose bodies were protected by iron and whose souls were clothed in the breastplate of faith.”47 They are still renowned in history, legend, and myth as the Knights Templar.
These European Christian crusaders were powerful warrior-monks whose aggression was restrained by social codes and spiritual doctrines. They were esteemed above other knights for their austerity, devotion, and moral purity. Like the Jedi, they practiced individual poverty within a military-monastic order that commanded great material resources. Both knightly orders demanded celibacy and obedience from their members, who in turn were revered as paragons of honesty, wisdom, and bravery.
Mighty fortresses: headquarters for the Jedi and Templar orders were sites of training, diplomacy, learning, and defense. (Attack of the Clones)
Although there had been Christian monastic and military orders before the Templars, it was only “[i]n the warrior-brothers of the Temple [that] the meekness and humility of the true monk were united with the courage and noble intent of the virtuous knight.”48 Just as the Jedi evolve out of a spiritual community that originally has no martial aspirations, the French knights who formed the Knights Templ
ar had no interest in starting a military order. After more than ten years of combat in the Holy Land, these war-weary knights wanted to atone for their sins by forming a lay religious community or joining an established monastery. Yet the Christian king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, “persuaded Hugh of Payns and his companions to save their souls by protecting pilgrims on the roads.”49 On Christmas Day 1119, these warriors took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—just the same as any Christian cleric—and created one of the earliest orders of Christian warrior-monks.50 Their formal name was the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ, but they became known as the Knights Templar because their original headquarters, the al-Aqsa mosque of Jerusalem, was believed to occupy the spot where Solomon’s Temple had been built. The Temple served as headquarters, arsenal, fortress, and home for these knights, just as the Jedi Temple does for the Jedi. In time, the Templars created an intercontinental network of fortresses and temples, just as the Jedi archives, academies, and temples span the galaxy.
Wise knights: both the Jedi and the Templars were governed by a council of high-ranking members. (The Phantom Menace)
The Templars “quickly became the fighting arm of the Church, having allegiance only to the pope and the grand master.”51 Similarly, Jedi are the peacekeepers of the Republic who obey the chancellor and the Jedi Council. The Jedi are governed by a Jedi Council of twelve senior members, headed by a Grand Master, just as all of the major decisions of the Templars were made by the twelve members of the Grand Chapter headed by the grand master. As membership in the Jedi Order requires strict adherence to their code, so the Rule that governed the Templars “stipulated attendance at services together with the canons, communal meals, plain clothing, simple appearance and no contact with women.”52 Templars “were to dress in white, symbolizing that they had put the dark life behind them and had entered a state of perpetual chastity.”53 Although their white robes were emblazoned with a red cross after 1143, their hooded mantles bore a great resemblance to Jedi attire.
Due to their exceptional training and zealous devotion, the Templars were both commanders and elite combatants. This matches the Jedi’s dual capacity as either front-line fighter or commander of a military unit. The most famous instance of Templars serving as unit commanders was during the Second Crusade in 1148, when the Christian army of King Louis was in danger of disintegration after a harrowing passage through the Cadmus Mountains. Louis couldn’t lead his heavily armored knights through unfamiliar terrain, so he turned over his command to the Templar master Everard des Barres. The army survived the ordeal only because des Barres “divided the force into units, each under the command of a Templar knight whom they swore to obey absolutely.”54
More important than their dual roles in war was that the Jedi and the Templars fought simultaneous battles on two very different planes: the physical and the spiritual. Both groups saw themselves as crusaders in an ancient war between the forces of light and the armies of evil.55 The Templars believed that they were sanctified warriors protecting God’s land and faithful flock against heretics in league with Lucifer. Of course, the Muslim Seljuks and Mameluks with whom they clashed also saw themselves as the faithful servants of God and his one true faith: Islam. Consequently, the Muslim warriors waged battle with every bit as much moral conviction and certitude as the Crusaders. History teaches that “there were heroes and villains on both sides” (to quote the opening crawl from Revenge of the Sith), and each army committed horrifying atrocities. Christians, for their part, saw their armed crusade in Outremer as an echo of a deeper spiritual struggle against the forces of evil, because they were called to a “dual vocation of battling physical enemies as well as spiritual ones.”56 Their patron Bernard of Clairvaux emphasized this dual struggle when he described the Templars as “a new kind of knight . . . who devotes all of his energies to the struggle on both fronts, against flesh and blood and against the evil spirits in the air.”57 More deadly than the armed warriors beyond the walls of their fortresses were the inner spiritual demons that threatened to damn their souls through temptations of selfishness and sinful errors, greed born out of fear.
Where the Templars saw themselves as fighting evil on two fronts, the Jedi undeniably fight evil in body and spirit. From the time of the Force Wars of Tython, the Jedi are for millennia the final bulwark protecting the galaxy from Sith domination. Their struggle against the Sith is such a defining feature of the Jedi Order that the Jedi nearly slip into oblivion when they delude themselves into thinking that the Sith have been extinguished at the Battle of Ruusan. Without their evil opposites, the Jedi lapse into complacency and are caught unawares by the Sith’s brilliant revenge under Darth Sidious in Revenge of the Sith. Every Jedi’s soul is also a battlefield in the contest between passion and compassion, anger and peace. As warriors, as well as monks, Jedi have to walk a razor’s edge by being fierce enough to vanquish their foes without being pulled to the dark side by anger.58 Many of the most gifted Jedi—including Count Dooku and Anakin Skywalker—lose their balance and succumb to the allure of the quick but corrosive path to the power of the dark side.
The power of the dark side: Luke’s struggle with his fears mirrors medieval admonitions to fight spiritual evils. (The Empire Strikes Back)
Compassion and killing: twelfth-century Bernard of Clairvaux excused the Templars’ warlike ways, despite conflicts with Church ideals.
These dualisms—warrior and monk, good and evil, physical and spiritual—lead to a number of tensions and contradictions in the lives of these virtuous warriors. The Knights Templars’ existence posed a theological paradox for the Church. As Christians, they were required to obey the imperative to turn the other cheek and love their neighbor and practice nonviolence. Yet as warriors, their primary function was to kill any of their Muslim neighbors who opposed Christian conquest of the Holy Land. This theological conundrum was resolved by the venerable Bernard of Clairvaux, who “announced the Templars as the champions of a higher struggle in which homicide, which was evil in Christian eyes, was really malecide, that is the killing of evil itself, which was good.”59 Bernard thus offered the rationalization that the Templars were not violating Jesus’s clear edicts against violence because they were not actually killing people. They were killing evil that just happened to be inside people.60
The Jedi also struggle to reconcile the ideals of the Jedi Code, which requires that Jedi show compassion and use their powers only to defend, and the realistic demands of their war against the Sith, which sometimes require that the Jedi show no mercy. When Mace Windu confronts Supreme Chancellor Palpatine after he learns that he is the Sith Lord Darth Sidious, Windu disarms his opponent and has Sidious apparently at his mercy. Anakin urges Windu to follow the Code by showing mercy and allowing Sidious to stand trial. Windu protests that Sidious is too evil to let live, even though killing an unarmed combatant violates the Jedi Code. Like Bernard, he sees his opponent less as a man who has done evil than as evil itself residing within a man. Unfortunately, Windu has no idea how right he is: Sidious has orchestrated the entire encounter so that his apparently pathetic position beneath Windu’s lightsaber, combined with Anakin’s fear of losing Padmé, will overwhelm the young Jedi, causing him to strike Mace Windu and turn against the Jedi.
No mercy: Mace Windu’s refusal to grant Chancellor Palpatine mercy is a technical violation of the Jedi Code. (Revenge of the Sith)
Jedi and Templars alike struggled to balance monastic virtues with martial ones. As monks, they needed to humbly resign themselves to fate and renounce the mundane world. Yet as warriors, they were called to change the world by force of arms and proudly turn the tides of fate. Templars feared the sin of pride, not only as Original Sin of Christian theology but as “[t]he biggest stumbling block on the path to this new religious knighthood [and] an attitude long encouraged and reinforced within the military aristocracy.”61 As warriors, the Templars were required to develop exceptional physical abilities, which sometimes led to knightly arrogance. The Tem
plars eventually resolved this problem through a kind of compromise: “a Templar had to maintain the utmost humility as an individual while feeling intense pride in belonging to the Temple.”62 They seemed to have learned this lesson too well, because it was the Templars’ uncritical obedience to authority—and not their pride—that proved to be their undoing.
The Jedi also struggle to balance the selflessness required of them as members of a monastic Order with the fear, pride, and other passions that come naturally to normal creatures. It is easy to recall a number of Jedi who show excessive greed, arrogance, and fear: Anakin laughing as he plummets his airspeeder through the skylanes of Coruscant, Obi-Wan confronting General Grievous and a huge force of droids on Utapau by himself, Luke setting off to rescue his friends from Vader’s grasp before completing his training. Yet it is in the life of the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn—the tall, aloof, and curt paragon of compassion—that we best see how the warrior’s virtue of fearlessness becomes his greatest weapon: from his bravado in his rescue of Queen Amidala from Naboo, even though the planet has been occupied by the massive Droid Army of the Trade Federation, to the moment when he and his Padawan casually saunter into a hangar guarded by dozens of droids and promptly reduce them to scrap. Moreover, his faith in the Force and its prophecy is demonstrated in his response to the Jedi Council’s decision that Anakin is too old and fearful to be trained as a Jedi. He is tenacious in his commitment to train the boy, with or without their assent. By placing incredible power in the hands of a person whom he believes to be the one who will bring balance to the Force, Qui-Gon Jinn sets in motion a chain of events that ends with the destruction of the Sith Order and the return of balance between good and evil in the galaxy under Luke Skywalker and the New Republic.