I always assumed the Jedi were loosely based on the Shaolin Monks. In The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, it's clear the monks are studying traditional weapons and martial arts not to fight, but as a path to enlightenment. That would explain why the Jedi Order was studying light saber combat despite being more interested in better understanding the force than in actual combat. I mean, even Tarkin describes it as a religion.
You assumed incorrectly. The Jedi Knights, from their very first inception of the first SW draft,
Journal of the Whills, was that they were rooted in the sensibilities of Japanese Samurai...who have historically tethered a spiritual component to their warrior culture, even to the point of flanderization in their own recounts of historical battles and pivotal events. Everything from the Jedi Order's manner of dress, their ritualistic behavior in and out of Temple surroundings, and their discipline of "defend first, attack second" (which fans routinely misconstrue as a form of pacifism, when it's literally a principle of martial arts, and a fairly basic one at that, loudly emphasized in works such as Miyamoto Musashi's
Book of Five Rings which repeatedly emphasizes the tactical importance of watching and reacting to enemy movements--"from one thing, learn a thousand things").
The big giveaway, besides the aesthetic similarities and the countless nods to Kurosawa films throughout the films, is in their name: "Jedi" is a purposeful nod to the word
jidai-geki, which is a catch all Japanese term for historical genre pieces, of which classic samurai cinema like
Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and
The Hidden Fortress all belong.
This is one of the reasons I find the routinely-uttered complaint against the PT about "Anakin and the Jedi talk weird, nobody talks like that in real life" hilarious, because it just loudly signifies that any asshat who makes that argument wouldn't possibly be able to sit through one episode of a historical
Taiga drama or some costume piece like
Ran without falling asleep in the near
twenty minute sequences of flowery court dialogue or stiff tactical discussions, or shut it off after complaining that the characters "act like robots, not people."
Because that stiff, formal, and ritualized behavior that the Jedi have in the Prequels?
Yeah, that's how fucking samurai behave in Japanese television and movies.
Y'know, those things OT Purists claim the prequels deviated from, but haven't actually fucking seen.