Bruce Lee Artist of Life. Bruce Lee
choreographing, directing, and starring in films; and writing philosophical treatises, psychology papers, poetic musings, and personal essays. He told interviewer Ted Thomas: “My life… seems to me to be a life of self-examination, a peeling of my self bit by bit, day by day.”3 This is most evident in Lee’s writing. No matter what the topic, from Chinese martial culture to heartfelt poetry, here, was a “real man” who was laying bare his soul.
Although he attended the University of Washington, the bulk of Lee’s education was gained informally from his voracious reading. As he lived before the age of home computers and photocopiers, Lee wrote notes, often verbatim transcriptions in longhand, from passages he found both true and helpful. Reviewing them would inspire him to further writing. These were his private journals, where Lee contemplated the thoughts of men and women of like mind. Many of his entries (the excerpts from Eric Hoffer’s The Passionate State of Mind and Frederick S. Perls’ books on Gestalt therapy, for example) have been included, to share some of Lee’s influences and the attitudes and worldviews he found congenial.
Ideas encountered in his reading often surfaced in his private moments. For example, in his essays on acting, he explores Perls’ tenets regarding self-actualization versus self-image actualization. Finding a truth in one discipline and then applying that truth to an entirely unrelated discipline is a hallmark of Lee’s genius: he saw the connections where others did not. Lee read Krishnamurti and Alan Watts on spirituality and saw a direct application to a divergent activity, martial arts. He also examined Perls’ work in psychology and saw an application, not for the treatment of neuroses and depression, but for truer and more dynamic acting.
Even though these were Lee’s private papers never intended for publication, they are important documents that allow us to see the evolution of Lee’s beliefs and art in context. In addition to his journal entries, this volume also includes Lee’s personal essays, poems, and philosophic writings on a wide range of subjects. It is therefore ironic that for over a quarter of a century Lee has been recognized primarily for his physical skills and tactical principles in the art of unarmed combat. But as Bruce Lee, Artist of Life reveals, such a shallow perspective is completely inaccurate.
Lee was equal parts poet, philosopher, scientist, actor, producer, director, author, choreographer, martial artist, husband, father, and friend. He sought out life in all of its wondrous aspects and was enthralled by the process of what he was experiencing. Always a thinker, Lee was fascinated by the insights into spiritual truths that could be garnered through adjusting the focus of human awareness. This is not to suggest that in reading Artist of Life you need to first “empty your cup” entirely of the notion of Bruce Lee the martial artist, but you do need to prepare room to meet the complete Bruce Lee, the “artist of life.”
In the future, all who wish to represent themselves as torchbearers of Lee’s art and philosophy will need to know ALL aspects of the man. They will as much need to know, understand, and, most importantly, feel the meaning underlying Lee’s various drafts of the essay “In My Own Process,” along with the deeper message inherent in the eight drafts of “Toward Personal Liberation (Jeet Kune Do),” for example, as they are now able to physically recite his combative techniques and repeat his martial maxims.
A great artist communicates through art. Looking at a painting, one can instantly know what the artist was feeling and thinking when he painted it. Time has no place here, as the emotion is as clear and distinct as if you were the artist yourself. Similarly, in looking at the broad and colorful strokes that Lee painted across life’s canvas, we are able to intuit his personality, his passion, his heartfelt convictions, his very soul. If, as Lee once said of art, it is the “music of the soul made visible,”4 then surely this book is his symphony.
If you read Artist of Life with what Lee liked to call “quiet, choiceless awareness,” you will find that you are not so much reading a book as you are visiting with an old friend. And while Bruce Lee may no longer be with us physically, he is still able to communicate with us via the printed page in a manner that transcends the limits of human mortality. While appreciating his company, we should also note his counsel: become “artists of life” ourselves. We would be doing our friend and ourselves the gravest of disservices if we simply put him on a pedestal and adopted his words and beliefs as our own. In his letter (included in Part 8 of this book) to “John,” Lee states as much:
You see, John,…that your way of thinking is definitely not the same as mine. Art, after all, is a means of acquiring “personal” liberty. Your way is not my way; nor mine yours. So whether or not we can get together, remember well that art “LIVES” where absolute freedom is.5
There is considerable danger in standing too close to the river of another’s thoughts—the faster the current, the easier it is to fall in and be swept away from ourselves. Instead, let us simply enjoy watching Bruce Lee’s thought as it courses through these pages, noting where it bends and turns and where it rages, froths, and bubbles with greatest energy. If we pull back and look at these thoughts from our own vantage, from where we each stand upon life’s bank, we can see the bigger picture—what Lee’s “finger” is pointing at. And it is at this point—where the river of one man’s thoughts meets the sea of human understanding—that we will finally be able to see “all that heavenly glory” that Lee first told us about over a quarter of a century ago, and we can directly experience the awe of being fully conscious, fully human, fully alive, and fully ourselves. For, as Lee wisely observed, it is only in the process of coming to know ourselves that we can come to know anything.
—John Little
I cannot teach you; only help you to explore yourself. Nothing more.6
—Bruce Lee
Part 1
GUNG FU
When Bruce Lee returned to the land of his birth (America) from Hong Kong at the age of eighteen, be brought with him a vision of introducing the then little-known cultural art of Chinese gung fu to America.
Lee had at one time actually envisioned establishing chains of gung fu institutes all across America. However, as his knowledge expanded with age, and with it his philosophic and martial experiences, he no longer felt the need to extol the virtues of tradition—however venerated.
This is not to suggest that Lee ever abandoned his Chinese heritage and philosophy; he simply over time came to look for the common root of humanity, as opposed to nationality, to justify his belief system and actions. Even so, it is interesting to note that when he began to take control over the philosophy content of his films in 1972, the lessons he revealed were gleaned from the Eastern traditions.
These essays, dealing extensively with Chinese philosophy and martial art were written in the early 1960s. There are a wonderful reflection of a young Bruce Lee’s driving passion to introduce and share with Westerners the beauty of his Chinese culture.
1-A
THE TAO OF GUNG FU: A STUDY IN THE WAY OF THE CHINESE MARTIAL ART
Gung fu is a special kind of skill, a fine art rather than just a physical exercise or self-defense. To the Chinese, gung fu is the subtle art of matching the essence of the mind to that of the techniques in which it has to work. The principle of gung fu is not a thing that can be learned, like a science, by fact-finding or instruction in facts. It has to grow spontaneously, like a flower, in a mind free from desires and emotions. The core of this principle of gung fu is Tao—the spontaneity of the universe.
The word Tao has no exact equivalent in the English language. To render it into the Way, or the “principle” or the “law” is to give it too narrow an interpretation. Lao-tzu, the founder of Taosim, described Tao in the following words:
The Way that can be expressed in words is not the eternal Way; the Name that can be uttered is not the eternal Name. Conceived of as nameless