Totally agree that there is only the slimmest, barely-understood veneer of Buddhist trappings papered over what Lucas was actually trying to build and convey in his stories. Scratch the surface and it really, really doesn't hold up at all. To be fair, I think a decent chunk of the confusion in fandom may come from Lucas' own use of terms interchangeably in contexts they weren't really meant for. He wanted to tell a particular story, and focused on the aspects of it that he was interested in, but glossed over a lot of the rest.
"I wanted to have this mythological footing because I was basing the films on the idea that the Force has two sides, the good side, the evil side, and they both need to be there. Most religions are built on that, whether it's called yin and yang, God and the devil—everything is built on the push-pull tension created by two sides of the equation. Right from the very beginning, that was the key issue in Star Wars." -George Lucas, Times Magazine, 2002
Overall, the movies duality of morality absolutely aligns far more with Western religious traditions and moral views, and is even designed to smack the audience across the face with it; Lucas was trying to make his message clear enough for the children's audience he was primarily aiming these movies at. That there is a good side and a bad side in life, and you have the ability to choose one or the other, but life is better when you are making good choices.
Simplistic, for sure, but deliberate on his part.
Oh, and just my two cents, and people are of course free to form their own opinions about the Jedi, but I will say where narrative intention is concerned, I think folks misrepresent it in terms of what the creator was actually TRYING to convey about the Jedi Order. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't recall hearing Lucas condemning them for their attitudes or philosophy; I haven't run into a quote from him that particularly aligns with the popular fandom sport of Jedi-bashing. Instead you have stuff like:
“No human can let go,” Lucas says of [the Yoda-Anakin scene]. “It’s very hard. Ultimately, we do let go because it’s inevitable; you do die and you do lose your loved ones. But while you’re alive, you can’t be obsessed with holding on. As Yoda says in this one, ‘You must learn to let go of everything you’re afraid to let go of.’ Because holding on is in the same category and the precursor to greed. And that’s what a Sith is. A Sith is somebody that is absolutely obsessed with gaining more and more power - but for what? Nothing, except that it becomes an obsession to get more.” “The Jedi are trained to let go. They’re trained from birth,” he continues, “They’re not supposed to form attachments. They can love people- in fact, they should love everybody. They should love their enemies; they should love the Sith. But they can’t form attachments. So what all these movies are about is: greed. Greed is a source of pain and suffering for everybody. And the ultimate state of greed is the desire to cheat death.” (The Making of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith)
and in the Attack of the Clones commentary track: "The fact that everything must change and that things come and go through his life and that [Anakin] can’t hold onto things, which is a basic Jedi philosophy that he isn’t willing to accept emotionally and the reason for that is because he was raised by his mother rather than the Jedi. If he’d have been taken in his first year and started to study to be a Jedi, he wouldn’t have this particular connection as strong as it is and he’d have been trained to love people but not to become attached to them."
Lucas doesn't seem to share or have intended to convey the views that have been popularly picked up by a lot of the fans that the Jedi's focus on promoting compassionate love while enforcing restrictions against possessive attachment is wrong/bad, or that their practice of adopting children young into their Order and training them in seclusion is inherently evil.
I know I'm just asking for the firehose of personal opinions on that one, just wanted to throw a quick flag down where the narrative intention piece was concerned.
no subject
"I wanted to have this mythological footing because I was basing the films on the idea that the Force has two sides, the good side, the evil side, and they both need to be there. Most religions are built on that, whether it's called yin and yang, God and the devil—everything is built on the push-pull tension created by two sides of the equation. Right from the very beginning, that was the key issue in Star Wars." -George Lucas, Times Magazine, 2002
Overall, the movies duality of morality absolutely aligns far more with Western religious traditions and moral views, and is even designed to smack the audience across the face with it; Lucas was trying to make his message clear enough for the children's audience he was primarily aiming these movies at. That there is a good side and a bad side in life, and you have the ability to choose one or the other, but life is better when you are making good choices.
Simplistic, for sure, but deliberate on his part.
Oh, and just my two cents, and people are of course free to form their own opinions about the Jedi, but I will say where narrative intention is concerned, I think folks misrepresent it in terms of what the creator was actually TRYING to convey about the Jedi Order. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't recall hearing Lucas condemning them for their attitudes or philosophy; I haven't run into a quote from him that particularly aligns with the popular fandom sport of Jedi-bashing. Instead you have stuff like:
“No human can let go,” Lucas says of [the Yoda-Anakin scene]. “It’s very hard. Ultimately, we do let go because it’s inevitable; you do die and you do lose your loved ones. But while you’re alive, you can’t be obsessed with holding on. As Yoda says in this one, ‘You must learn to let go of everything you’re afraid to let go of.’ Because holding on is in the same category and the precursor to greed. And that’s what a Sith is. A Sith is somebody that is absolutely obsessed with gaining more and more power - but for what? Nothing, except that it becomes an obsession to get more.”
“The Jedi are trained to let go. They’re trained from birth,” he continues, “They’re not supposed to form attachments. They can love people- in fact, they should love everybody. They should love their enemies; they should love the Sith. But they can’t form attachments. So what all these movies are about is: greed. Greed is a source of pain and suffering for everybody. And the ultimate state of greed is the desire to cheat death.” (The Making of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith)
and in the Attack of the Clones commentary track:
"The fact that everything must change and that things come and go through his life and that [Anakin] can’t hold onto things, which is a basic Jedi philosophy that he isn’t willing to accept emotionally and the reason for that is because he was raised by his mother rather than the Jedi. If he’d have been taken in his first year and started to study to be a Jedi, he wouldn’t have this particular connection as strong as it is and he’d have been trained to love people but not to become attached to them."
Lucas doesn't seem to share or have intended to convey the views that have been popularly picked up by a lot of the fans that the Jedi's focus on promoting compassionate love while enforcing restrictions against possessive attachment is wrong/bad, or that their practice of adopting children young into their Order and training them in seclusion is inherently evil.
I know I'm just asking for the firehose of personal opinions on that one, just wanted to throw a quick flag down where the narrative intention piece was concerned.