In the late 1950s Lee, nicknamed Li Siu Lung ("Little Dragon" Li), was a popular Hong Kong film star who lived up to his on-screen tough guy image by racing around on a motorcycle, wearing toilet chains wrapped around his fists, and using his gung fu (the Cantonese pronunciation of kung fu, a general term for the Chinese martial arts) skills to beat up on white English kids. His parents, opera star Li Hoi-Chuen and his half-German Catholic wife Grace, sent him to the U.S. in 1961, where Bruce Lee—as he now called himself—taught himself perfect English, finished high school, and enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle as a philosophy major. Two years later, Lee had opened kung fu schools—although Japanese karate had been popular in the U.S. since World War II, kung fu was until then a closely guarded secret—up and down the west coast, married a white cheerleader named Linda, and published a book entitled Chinese Gung Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self-Defense.

Impatient with the confines of traditional martial arts styles, Lee dropped out of school and began to develop his own postmodern anti-style, which borrowed freely from fencing, boxing, and any other combat technique he could study. Lee trained 40 hours a week, meditating, lifting weights, sparring, and working out on home-made training devices, until his body was a living weapon. His interest in philosophy deepened at this time also, and he devoured what Linda Lee describes as "hundreds" of books of Eastern and Western philosophy. The end result was a stream-lined, eminently practical fighting style which Lee called Jeet Kune Do, "The Method of the Intercepting Fist." Like some buff Christ figure, Lee began travelling from town to town, ridiculing other martial arts schools, after which (unlike Christ) he would convert people by beating them up; he even "baptized" a few converts by kicking them into swimming pools. Soon Lee was surrounded by a multi-racial gang of disciples, including African-Americans like judoist Jesse Glover, karate star Jim "Kung Fu" Kelly, and basketball star Lew "Kareem Abdul-Jabbar" Alcindor (whom Lee called "Big Louie"); white karate champions like Chuck Norris, Joe Lewis, and Mike Stone; not to mention Japanese-American judoist Taky Kimura, Filipino-American escrimaist Dan Inosanto (Lee's right-hand man), and wrestler Gene La Bell, all of whom in turn spread the gospel of Jeet Kune Do.

In 1964 karateinstructor Ed Parker invited Lee to demonstrate his methods at the first International Karate Championship, in Long Beach, California. One of Parker's students, Jay "Hairdresser to the Stars" Sebring, was so impressed by Lee that he convinced his clients, including actors Steve McQueen and James Coburn, Polish splatter director Roman Polanski (whose girlfriend Sharon Tate was killed five years later, along with Sebring, by the Manson family), and hack screenwriter Stirling (Poseidon Adventure, Shaft in Africa) Silliphant, to take classes with Lee. Sebring also convinced client Bill Dozier to cast Lee as Kato in the Batman-rip-off television series The Green Hornet (Dozier was producer and "Same Bat-time" voice-over for Batman). Although—or because—the show was played straight instead of campy, it flopped, but Kato was so popular in China that Lee, discouraged that Dozier had stolen his idea for the TV show Kung Fu and given the lead role to LSD-addled dancer David Carradine, moved his wife and children back to Hong Kong in 1971.

Between 1971 and 1973, Lee made three movies in conjunction with B-movie king Raymond Chow: The Big Boss (released in the U.S. as Fists of Fury), Fist of Fury (The Chinese Connection), and Way of the Dragon (Return of the Dragon). In each of these films, Lee portrayed a Chinese kung fu artist wiping out Japanese karateschools, which made him a national hero. Embittered by the cartoonish, "chop socky" nature of these films, and at the same time worshipped as a god by his fans, who broke into his house for souvenirs and mobbed him in the street, Lee became an angry, self-destructive man. Beneath his outrageous velour jump-suits and zip-up ankle boots, Lee carried a gun—whether to protect himself from those who still hated him for sharing the martial arts with the West, or simply to be a bad-ass is unclear. He ordered a custom-built gold Rolls-Royce, popped pills for his recurring back pains and headaches, ate hash brownies to relax, drank as much as 20 cups of sake a night, developed partial amnesia, and fought anyone who challenged him. The press called him "The King of Hong Kong."

Shortly after finishing the Warner Brothers' film Enter the Dragon, which was to herald his return to Hollywood and world-wide recognition, Lee collapsed in a mysterious grand mal seizure. He rallied and, like Nietzsche after his collapse, wrote a series of nonsensical letters (including one to Warner Brothers expressing his desire to make "the fuckingest action motion picture that has ever been made"). Three months later, Lee lay down on the couch of actress Betty Ting-Pei and died, his brain swollen like a sponge: he was 33 years old. "Death by misadventure" was the coroner's inconclusive finding. Among the many reasons given for his death, the theory which I find most compelling is that a ninja, dispatched by Lee's enemies, touched him with dim mak, the "Vibrating Palm," which causes the internal organs to vibrate for months before the victim finally dies (I read about it in Dynamite magazine). (I also find it suspicious that the producer of Enter the Dragon, Fred Weintraub, also produced the CIA-backed hoax Woodstock, but the connection escapes me.) Steve McQueen and James Coburn were pall-bearers at Lee's funeral, and Sinatra's version of "My Way" was the theme song.

Although Lee refused to publish any books about Jeet Kune Do, for fear that his practical methods would become as stylized and codified as any other martial art form, after Lee's death Linda Lee published a series of Jeet Kune Do how-to books, and a collection of Lee's philosophical musings, drawings, and fighting instructions entitled The Tao of Jeet Kune Do. To date, the latter book has been republished in 37 editions and nine languages, making it probably the most popular book of philosophy ever.

How Shall We Understand?

An artist's expression is his soul made apparent, his schooling, as well as his "cool" being exhibited. Behind every motion, the music of his soul is made visibleŠ A martial art is an unrestricted athletic expression of the individual soul.—Tao of Jeet Kune Do.

You could certainly make the case that the art of philosophy makes visible the "cool," the schooling, and the soul-music of the philosopher, but what sets Lee apart from every philosopher before and since him is his philosophy's "unrestricted athletic expression." Lee took Eastern philosophy (specifically the teachings of the zen masters and the Tao Te Ching), Western philosophy (Enlightenment scholar Baruch Spinoza was Lee's favorite), the works of '60s self-help and positive thinking gurus, and the spiritualism of Theosophist messiah Jiddu Krishnamurti and Jamaica Plain's Kahlil Gibran, tested these ideas in the muscular actualization of Jeet Kune Do, and wound up with his own philosophy, the Tao (Way) of Jeet Kune Do.

"Jeet Kune Do is a technique for acquiring liberty," Lee writes, "It is a work of enlightenment." The Way—the method—is always central to Lee's philosophy: Echoing the great 13th-century Zen commentator Mumon, Lee writes that "an assertion is Zen only when it is itself an act." As Lee puts it, "The physically bound go for puffing and straining and miss the delicate way; the intellectually bound go for idealism and exotics and lack efficiency and actually seeing realities." The Tao of Jeet Kune Do is, then, both "delicate" and grounded in practicality. Unlike today's navel-pierced aesthetes who sigh things like, "This carp tattoo is so zen," Lee's zen is always in the doing; and unlike today's martial arts fanatics who just want to inflict pain, Lee's fighting style is always informed by his understanding of the nature of the self, truth, and rightful action.

In much the same way that Buber describes the person struggling to balance the worlds of It and Thou as a "wrestler" (Hermenaut #7), Lee the philosopher asks us all to be fighters, physically, existentially, hermeneutically, and in our day-to-day actions.

How Shall We Be?

The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical actionŠPunches and kicks are tools to kill the ego. Jeet Kune Do is directed toward oneself.—Tao of Jeet Kune Do.

The hip '70s—and now '90s—euphemism for feces is "dookie," which derives etymologically from dukkha (Pali, "suffering"). Dukkha refers not merely to suffering itself, but to everything material and psychological to which we attempt to hold on, in vain—which causes us to suffer; dukkha-nirodha, the path of liberation, is the "annihilation" of our attachment to these shitty things. Lee, a notorious clean freak who went so far as to have his armpit sweat glands removed, was obsessed with the filthiness of the self: "Scratch away all the dirt your being has accumulated and reveal reality in its isness, or in its suchness, or in its nakedness, which corresponds to the Buddhist notion of emptiness," he counsels. Further associating the state of emptiness with cleanliness, Lee writes, "Turn into a doll made of wood: it has no ego, it thinks nothing, it is not grasping or sticky."

What does emptiness—or the nature of the self in general—have to do with fighting? "There must be a being instead of a doing in fighting," writes Lee, "Be empty; have no style or form for the opponent to work on." According to legend, Lee's great moment of enlightenment came when he punched at a reflection of the moon in the San Francisco Bay. The fact that the reflection broke apart when he hit it, but immediately re-formed, told Lee that the self is—like the moon's reflection—simultaneously real and un-real... and that the fighter who knows that becomes untouchable. Like the moon's reflection, Lee's not-self is complex. When you watch Lee fight in his movies, you can't help noticing his curious facial expressions: He seems simultaneously detached and enraged, unlike (for instance) David Carradine in Kung Fu, whose face retains its lobotomized deadpan no matter what the situation. Lee's emptiness isn't a sterile vacuum, it's a "living void," as he describes it, "and whoever realizes that void is filled with life and power and the love of all beings." The empty self, the "doll made of wood," the "fighter without abode" is a self in flux, which is existentially liberating... and deadly for that self's opponent.

Lee's concept of the self starts from the central Buddhist concept of nonself (anatman), but although the Buddha taught that belief in a self (atman) must be "overcome" before a person can attain liberation (nirvana), this was not the same as saying that there is no self. There is a self, but it is always "a flux of rising and passing away," and any attempt to "grasp" it leads only to suffering (dukkha). The Buddha's teachings have been misinterpreted over the centuries by overzealous pedants who insist that there is no self, period, but through the practice of Jeet Kune Do, Lee's understanding of anatman approaches that of the Buddha's himself. According to James Coburn, Lee taught a mode of fighting which he called "bridging the gap," in which "you and your opponent are one—not divided." But this oneness is not without some internal differentiation. Lee describes "fighting like sound and echo," in which one is always already receiving (not being inflicted with) a blow before it arrives; the "intercepting fist" of Jeet Kune Do refers to Lee's fabled ability to always already be striking back before his opponent had even finished throwing a punch.

Like the yin/yang symbol which Lee took as the emblem for his school, "bridging the gap" is about two selves becoming so intertwined that although they remain distinct, they depend on each other for their being. "To know oneself," writes Lee, "is to study oneself in action with another person."

What Shall We Believe?

Because one does not want to be disturbed, to be made uncertain, he establishes a pattern of conduct, of thought, a pattern of relationships to man. He then becomes a slave to the pattern and takes the pattern to be the real thingŠ Let it be understood once and for all, I have not developed a new style!—Tao of Jeet Kune Do.

Reading The Tao of Jeet Kune Doit becomes very clear that, for Lee, one's fighting style is one's worldview, one's Weltanschaaung. Lee's understanding of truth and meaning, like his style, is a fluid and ever-changing one; the "way" of Jeet Kune Do is "no way"—this was the motto of Lee's school. But far from being without form or style, Lee's "no way" problematizes the notions of form, style, truth, and meaning altogether.

Lee, who devotes many of his most eloquent aphorisms to debunking "classical" fighting styles (which he describes less eloquently as "baloney" and "fancy jazz"), insists that they only lead to "clogginess" and "organized despair." "How often are we told by different sensei or masters that the martial arts are life itself?" asks Lee in his landmark essay "Liberate Yourself From Classical Karate," "But how many of them truly understand what they are saying? Life is a constant movement—rhythmic as well as random. Life is constant change, not stagnation." Lee was so opposed to the idea of fixed fighting styles that he erected a tombstone in his school which read, "In memory of the once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess." "Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage," he writes in The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, "Truth is outside of all patterns."

What is truth, for Lee? "Truth," expressed in terms of Jeet Kune Do, "is relationship with the opponent; constantly moving, living, never static." "It is the artistic process that is reality," writes Lee, echoing Nietzsche, "and reality is truth." The art in question here is the martial arts, and like Lee's fancy footwork, in making meaning "springiness and alertness is the key theme. You are never set or tensed, but are ready and flexible." Lee approaches meaning like a fighter entering the ring: cautious, alert, ready for anything... which precludes any rigid belief system ("style"). "Styles require adjustment, partiality, denials, condensation, and a lot of self-justification... 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," writes Lee.

But Lee's hermeneutics is not relativistic or nihilistic—it is pluralistic. "Consider the subtle difference between having no form and having no-form," he writes, "Having 'no form' does not mean having no 'form.' Having 'no form' evolves from having form. 'No form' is the higher, individual expression." It is important to note here that in the early days Lee wouldn't teach just anyone, only fighters already masters of their chosen form, because enlightenment is always a second naïveté , never naïveté itself. Having no 'form' is for amateurs, but the expert karateist or judoist or philosopher who learns to have "no form" becomes unbeatable.

"Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms," writes Lee, "and, since it has no style, Jeet Kune Do fits in with all styles. Jeet Kune Do uses all ways and is bound by none." The "way" of Jeet Kune Do is "all ways," or "any way," and this is Lee's understanding of truth and meaning: not a rejection of truth and meaning, but a disciplined pursuit of these things resulting in a liberation from the 'form' of the questions themselves.

What Shall We Do?

My will to do springs from the fact that I can do.—Lee, letter, 1962.

Although the "Kung Fu Man" has become stereotyped as a passive-agressive nut thanks to Kung Fu and the slew of kung fu-oriented dance hits which followed, Lee's description of the "Gung Fu Man," as set forth in "Liberate Yourself From Classical Karate"—and later expanded upon in The Tao of Jeet Kune Doas the "Jeet Kune Do Man"—gives us a clear idea of Lee's philosophy of rightful action. The Jeet Kune Do Man's (or Woman's) actions in the world are characterized by the following qualities: simplicity, practicality, concentration, awareness, spontaneity, balance, and integration, building one upon the other in more or less that order.

Simplicity and practicality "Just be ordinary and nothing special," writes Lee, "Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie down." I hasten to add that Lee does not advocate Carradine-like renunciation of the world; his own lifestyle testifies to that. But Lee, who refused to assign ranks ("belts") to his students, does suggest that we practice restraint and modesty: "The art of Jeet Kune Do is simply to simplify." Also, unlike Carradine's fancy "crane-style" fighting techniques, Lee stresses practicality: "Use the attacker's momentum to turn him over so you can stomp his face," read the instructions in one of his how-to books. In other words, like Elvis always said, TCB.

Concentration, awareness, and spontaneity "Nirvana," writes Lee, "is to be consciously unconscious or to be unconsciously conscious. That is its secret. The act [in fighting] is so direct and immediate that intellectualization finds no room to insert itself and cut the act to pieces." Too often we are led to believe that liberation from dukkha involves shutting down the senses, "freeing your mind" in a negative sense. Lee, knowing full well that shutting down the senses is the last thing you'd want to do in a fight, distinguishes what he calls "classical concentration" ("classical" being Lee's blanket term for all ways of being and acting which bind us, rather than free us), which "focuses on one thing and excludes all others," from "awareness," which is "total and excludes nothing." This goes back to Lee's idea that the fighter be an unthinking "automaton," because "concentration is a form of exclusion and where there is exclusion, there is a thinker who excludes. It is the thinker, the excluder, the one who concetrates, who creates contradiction because he forms a center from which there is distraction." Writing long before the idea of the "decentered subject" came into vogue in the U.S., Lee suggests that we "be at the center of an undifferentiated circle that has no circumference, moving and yet not moving, in tension and yet relaxed, seeing everything happening and yet not at all anxious about its outcome, with nothing purposely designed, nothing consciously calculated, no anticipation, no expectation—in short, standing innocently like a baby and yet with all the cunning, subterfuge and keen intelligence of a fully mature mind." This hard-won, tension-filled state of being allows us to act spontaneously—freely—without just being undisciplined spazzes.

Balance "Balance is the all-important factor in a fighter's attitude or stance," writes Lee, "Without balance at all times, you can never be effective." Harmony, balance, wholeness: these pleasant-sounding states are eagerly sought after by zen wannabees, but for Lee they are anything but pleasant. Lee even adopted for his school's logo a yin/yang symbol with arrows drawn around it, indicating that even this representation of harmony is always in revolution. Perhaps Lee's greatest contribution to philosophy is his refutation of the idea that anger and passion are wrongful states which hold us back from liberation. In a college paper, Lee writes, "People imagine that Zen and Taoism are soft and passive modes of being. [On the contrary,] anger, emotion, everything is part of the whole." Like those many zen masters who famously whacked their students—furiously—with sticks, brooms, frying pans, and swords (the latter cutting off fingers, noses, even heads!), Lee's brand of enlightenment encompasses the extremes of passion. This tense completeness, not Carradinesque slack-jawed "peacefulness," is true balance in Jeet Kune Do.

Integration As a half-breed among Chinese, a Chinese in a British colony, a hyphenated-American immigrant, and the father of half-Chinese children in both the U.S. and China, Lee was forced to integrate in one way or another his entire life. It should come as no surprise, then, that The Tao of Jeet Kune Dostresses, perhaps above all else, integration. Unlike Carradine's character on Kung Fu, a monk who wanders in the desert alone, Lee insists that the enlightened person engage—be integrated—in day-to-day life. "Leave sagehood behind and enter once more into ordinary humanity," he writes, "After coming to understand the other side, come back and live on this side. After the cultivation of no-cultivation, one's thoughts continue to be detached from phenomenal things and one still remains amid the phenomenal, yet devoid of the phenomenal." Living in, but not of the world requires in us the properties of simplicity, practicality, concentration, awareness, spontaneity, and balance... the qualities of the Jeet Kune Do Man.

So what shall we do? "Wisdom does not consist in trying to wrest the good from the evil, but in learning to 'ride' them as a surfer [my translationJeet Kune Do, questions of "right" and "wrong" become moot. "Action is our relationship to everything," writes Lee, "Action is not a matter of right and wrong. It is only when action is partial that there is a right and wrong." Total, or as Lee might describe it, "fuckingest" action is made possible by total balance and total awareness, which do not exclude anything, but instead encompass both "good" and "evil." This is the way of Jeet Kune Do.

Bruce Lee Notes

Bruce Lee and Elvis: Elvis was a major martial arts aficionado (his karate nickname was "Tiger") whose instructor was Ed Parker, the man who introduced Lee to Jay Sebring, who in turn introduced Lee to Hollywood. Elvis's spiritual guru Larry Geller—whose book The Truth About Elvis is by far the best Elvis bio—was an employee of Jay Sebring (Geller met Elvis while giving him a haircut in Hollywood). Finally, Lee's disciple Mike Stone was Priscilla Presley's karate instructor, with whom she eventually ran off, sending Elvis into the downward spiral of one-night stands, over-eating, and drug abuse which eventually resulted in his death. Although MGM asked the King of Kung Fu to co-star with the King of Rock and Roll, Lee and Elvis never met.

Bruce Lee and slacking: Lee was fond of saying, "I never wanted to become a kung fu instructor, but it sure beat washing dishes."