THE PHILOSOPHY OF BRUCE LEE

Bruce Lee's martial art could not have been as successful and complete without the deep philosophical base he gave it. Martial arts, by nature, are a reflective practice where the practitioner must not only examine the issues of life or death but the nature of the self.

One of the most important influences on Bruce was his exposure to Taoist philosophy. Taoist philosophy is the development of the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, who in the sixth century BC wrote the definitive work on the subject, the Tao Te Ching.

 

Bruce, at the age of seventeen, had been training in gung fu for four years with Sifu Yip Man, yet had reached an impasse. When engaged in sparring Bruce found that his body would become tense, his mind perturbed. Such instability worked against his goal of efficiency in combat.

 

Sifu Yip Man sensed his trouble, and approached him. "Lee," he said, "relax and calm your mind. Forget about yourself and follow the opponent's movements. Let your mind, the basic reality, do the counter-movement without any interfering deliberation. Above all, learn the art of detachment."

 

Bruce Lee believed he had the answer to his problem. He must relax! Yet there was a paradox: the effort in trying to relax was inconsistent with the effortlessness in relaxing, and Bruce found himself back in the same situation.

 

Again Sifu Yip Man came to Bruce and said, "Lee, preserve yourself by following the natural bends of things and don't interfere. Remember never to assert yourself: never be in frontal opposition to any problem, but control it by swinging with it."
 

Sifu Yip Man told Bruce to go home for a week and think about his words. Bruce spent many hours in meditation and practice, with nothing coming of it. Finally, Bruce decided to go sailing in a junk (boat). Bruce would have a great epiphany. "On the sea, I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water. Right then at that moment, a thought suddenly struck me. Wasn't this water the essence of gung fu? I struck it, but it did not suffer hurt. I then tried to grasp a handful of it but it was impossible. This water, the softest substance, could fit into any container. Although it seemed weak, it could penetrate the hardest substance. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.

"Therefore, in order to control myself I must accept myself by going with, and not against, my nature. I lay on the boat and felt that I had untied with Tao; I had become one with nature."

Bruce lay back in the boat and let it drift of its own accord. He was, at that moment, at peace with himself and his environment.

Bruce had not only discovered the state of wu-shin, or no-mindedness; he had come to see his unity with the Tao itself. The Tao would become a great influence in his later life when he developed his art of Jeet Kune Do.

 

"When he was in Seattle Bruce used to quote Confucius and Lao Tzu and all those people like that, and he believed it," says Taky Kimura, Bruce's senior student and best friend. "But pretty soon he made that transition himself and he became the philosopher."

In 1963 Bruce published a book titled Chinese Gung Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self-Defense. The book expressed his views on gung fu as well as his deep interest in the philosophical aspects of martial arts training.

 

Another big influence on Bruce Lee, philosophically, was the Brahmin philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Bruce found that Krishnamurti's viewpoints on life ran parallel to his own. In his book Freedom from the Know, Krishnamurti writes: "You cannot look through an ideology, through a screen of words, through hopes and fears. The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is has no concept at all. He lives only in what is." Bruce adapted this idea in forming his martial art philosophy: "You cannot express and be alive through static put-together form, through stylized movement. The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is."

 

"A classicist or traditionalist will only do what the teacher tells him and that's it. The teacher is pedestalized and you do what he says and you don't question him," says John Little, the historian of the Bruce Lee Estate, "but Bruce was drawing from some very diverse sources, such as gestalt therapy, Krishnamurti, etc. Not that these people were necessarily creators either, but they saw a certain truth that they wrote about. Bruce saw that same truth."