When we were first getting this site up and running, I took a couple old pieces of mine from my defunct blog at StarWars.com and reposted them here—partly to teach myself the ins and outs of WordPress formatting, and partly just to help populate the site in advance of staff writing ramping up. Since our official launch on July 8th, every single piece has been brand-new—with one exception.
A late addition to the site, staffer Tyler Williams came to me in August and asked whether I’d be interested in a piece he’d written for his Religions of China and Japan class a couple years back, in which he extolled the philosophy of the character Vergere and its roots in real-world Daoism:
“In the words of the Jedi Vergere, “Everything I tell you is a lie. Every question I ask is a trick. You will find no truth in me.” In Daoism, there IS no truth that a teacher can simply impart to a student. ANYTHING that a teacher simply “teaches” to a student is a lie. The truth of the Dao is beyond any words that society has created to describe it.”
Vergere’s perspective, Tyler posited, actually cut closer to the root of what the Force—which George Lucas based largely on Daoism—was intended to be than did the modern, proactive Jedi of the post-RotJ era. A newly-written postscript drove this point home further by comparing Vergere to what we’ve since learned about the earliest Jedi philosophy from the Dawn of the Jedi series.
Tyler’s article was also one of the first ones I saw fit to run in multiple pieces; click here for part one and click here for part two.
