10

My Friend

Do you know how I like to think of myself? As a human being. Because under the sky, under the heavens, there is but one family.

Bruce Lee Remembered

My father died on July 20, 1973, of a cerebral edema—a swelling of the brain. The autopsy report determined that it had occurred as a result of an allergic reaction to a pain medication he had been given for a headache. Many theories have circulated about the cause of his death, from the fantastic (he was killed by ninjas or by the mysterious death touch or by gang lords) to the medical (he died from an allergy or a specific form of epilepsy or heat exhaustion). I can accept that we may never know exactly how he died. To focus on his death rather than his life is to focus on the finger and not the moon, and is, to me, the true loss.

When my father passed away, there was a huge public funeral in Hong Kong. But he was not ultimately buried there. Rather, my mother decided to bring him back to Seattle (the town where they had met and fallen in love) to be laid to rest. It was a controversial decision for the people of Hong Kong, who considered Bruce Lee to be their native son, but for my mother, it was a matter of keeping her children’s father close to them and returning him to a place where he had known great peace, simplicity, and inspiration.

My father always talked about his professional time in Hong Kong as temporary. The idea was to ultimately live and work predominantly in California, but my mother and father often reminisced about retiring one day, in their golden years, to Seattle, a place they both had a great fondness for. And so, when he passed, my mother brought my father to Seattle to lay him to rest.

There was a small, private ceremony for close friends and family at Lake View Cemetery overlooking Lake Washington in Seattle, where many of my father’s first ideas and first loves began. It is as beautiful and picturesque a cemetery as I have seen. And there he remains to this day.

When it came time to create his headstone, a challenging task under any circumstance, much thought and discussion went into it. It was decided that his headstone would have a photo of him on it with all the pertinent, identifying information of his life and death, while at the bottom, parallel with the ground, a platform would hold an open stone book. On one side of the page, the book would bear my father’s core symbol (from stage four)—the yin yang with arrows around it and the Chinese phrase “Using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation.” And on the other side would read the words, “Your inspiration continues to guide us toward our personal liberation.”

You see, back then, in 1973, the people who knew Bruce Lee best knew full well that he was a phenomenal thinker and doer, and they understood that there was much to integrate for themselves through the example of his words and actions. They appreciated fully his genuineness and his aliveness. They absorbed so much from just having spent time with him, learning from him, and being with him. His energy and integrity were palpable, revelatory, and moving. I recently came across a quote that I thought was very applicable to my father’s life. It read, “True mastery is service.” What that means to me is that the energy imparted and expressed through someone’s mastery is in and of itself an act of service because it lifts us up and inspires us to what is possible in life. You shine your own light, and there’s more light, in total, for everyone.

He inspired, if not overwhelmed, anyone who came into contact with him. And he was the model of what it is to be fully creative and expressive, authentically powerful, and personally liberated. He was not bound like we tend to bind ourselves. You could see it, feel it, hear it, and know it. And it’s not to say he was perfect (he most certainly was a human being like you and me), but he was in a process that was leading him toward something that most of us just admire from a distance.

You’ve Got a Friend

I asked my jeet kune do teacher and my father’s close friend Ted Wong one time if he could tell me something people might not know about my father, and he said people may not know that he was very caring and generous. He proceeded to tell me a story of how my dad had helped Ted get himself together so that he could find a girlfriend. He said Bruce took him shopping for clothes, cut his hair, helped him buy a weight set, and gave him personalized workout regimens so he could look his best and hopefully get himself a date. Ted went on to meet and marry the love of his life not too long after.

When my father’s friend and assistant instructor at his Oakland school, James Lee, was ill and struggling with cancer, my father took over his book project for him, finished it, and got it published so James could have the money from the book to help pay his medical bills.

When my father first met Taky Kimura in Seattle, Taky was very shy and introverted, even though he was sixteen years older than my father. He was struggling with low self-esteem and depression, having been imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in the United States during World War II. My father struck up a friendship with him and helped him come out of his shell. The two became the best of friends, with Taky becoming his first assistant instructor in his first gung fu school and the best man at my parents’ wedding. There are many letters of encouragement and advice that my father wrote throughout his life to Taky. To this day, Taky and his students care for my father’s grave in Seattle, and Taky, now ninety-six, still gets tears in his eyes when he thinks about my father’s friendship and support.

These are just a few stories of some of his kindnesses, and, of course, there were many people who were kind and supportive of him as well. My mother most of all. I don’t bring these stories up because they are extraordinary, but because they were another side of him. One that is expressed in the words “my friend,” which he used often to refer not just to his real-life friends but to all his human brothers and sisters, too.

Perhaps as a martial artist it would seem that my father would mostly have a very aggressive and tough presentation (and he could, for sure), but I believe that one of the reasons that my father was so accepting of all humans is precisely because of his experience as a martial artist. He understood that as a basic beginning, we as a human family are more alike than we are different. When he broke from the tradition of styles and pursued fluidity and present, honest expression as his way, it was because he felt that styles separated people. He would often say, “There is no Chinese way of fighting or Japanese way of fighting because unless humans are born with three arms and six legs, then there is no other way of fighting.”

Of course, I understand that there are arts that have grown up through particular cultures and masters. He understood this too. And he was into them from an enthusiast point of view. He loved to learn about other masters and arts, especially in his youth. He was fascinated by the ways in which people had created approaches to fighting. But what he means by there’s “no Chinese or Japanese way of fighting” is that these cultures and masters (who just happened to be Chinese or Japanese) came up with their way that they felt was most effective or best for the time and circumstance they found themselves in—and so should we. We shouldn’t be limited by culture or someone else’s ideas. And more important, we shouldn’t be threatened by or scornful of other people’s ideas. Rather we should accept them alongside our own as their own unique expression.

Now, martial arts may not be your jam. It takes a particular and rather dedicated person to want to investigate combat that deeply for themselves. Most of us who take martial arts begin in one style and stay there because we like it, it’s a good workout, or it helps us develop discipline, strength, and confidence, but we aren’t going to go that far into an exploration of our own personal and creative style of fighting. At most we may just realize we can execute one technique better or more effectively if we hold our leg slightly this way versus that way. But the point I’m trying to get at is that you should not only use this “Be Water” approach in whatever discipline or work or career path you are on. The point I’m trying to make is that we can apply these ideas and practices to the living of our everyday lives—all of it—work, home, leisure, family, friendship, romantic partnership, business partnership, etc. The thing to connect with is that we are all engaging in a human process every day. All of us.

We are each a creating and expressing entity with our own unique voice and our own unique signature. And we all exist within one family. One. The quote at the head of this chapter comes from an interview my father sat for in 1971 where the interviewer, Pierre Berton, a Canadian talk show host, had asked if my father thought of himself as Chinese or North American, and my father replied that he preferred, actually, to think of himself as a human being.

And so, within this context, the last two words of our water journey—my friend—suddenly become not just a sweet sign-off, but an extremely important and vital bit of humanity, warmth, encouragement, and unity. My father used the words “my friend” often in his writings. Go bravely on, my friend. Walk on, my friend. Be water, my friend.

“My friend” is an arm around your shoulders. It says that he considers you a person with whom he shares a mutual bond. Someone he wants to make a connection with. We’ve talked a lot about the totality—seeing it all, taking it all in, not judging, not dissecting reality into separate compartments, being in engaged and active relationship, being aligned with nature, going with rather than against an obstacle, changing with change, collaborating rather than competing, creating from the place of nothingness where all options are open and all possibilities available. Well, our fellow humans make up the totality as well. And we want to approach them with the same understanding, care, acceptance, and compassion that we are learning to show ourselves.

This Taoist principle of the integrating whole that cannot be compartmentalized or separated governed my father’s way of thinking from very early on. He may not have been consciously aware of it as a child, but as he grew and matured, he began to wake up to and put more emphasis on these ideas and express them. Maybe his personal experiences with race and culture were the impetus for the equal way he approached everyone, but whatever the case, he was not a person who considered people anything other than uniquely interesting by their class, culture, orientation, or race. Those details were the individual embellishments of a shared humanity. More important to him was, how are you showing up as a human? Are you engaged in life? Do you care about your life and self? Are you kind? Are you trying to be a better person? Do your actions and your words match? To him, these were the important factors, not what color your skin was.

My father said, “If every man would help his neighbor, no man would be without help. I’m not one of those guys that can brush people off. Besides, I feel that if I can just take a second to make someone happy, why not do it?”

We hear the words “compassion” and “empathy” and “unconditional love” a lot, and they are good and noble words, but maybe if we start more simply and with something more common that we all have access to, like the word “friend,” it could be a path that would eventually lead us to those noble qualities more easily.

To set the intention and take the energy of “friend,” “neighbor,” or even “acquaintance,” if that’s all you can muster, and let that energy permeate your interactions could be a major shift in the way you approach the world. Of course, it will have its own challenges as you are faced with having to practice that intention of friend or neighbor with everyone and not just the people with whom that is easy to do. But we are here to train ourselves into our fullest potential, so let’s train toward acceptance, compassion, and friendship as well.

How we treat everyone is how we treat everyone. Meaning, you may be a good and kind person in the nucleus of your life. But maybe you just can’t stand that one neighbor and you’re cold to her whenever you see her. Or maybe you despise noisy children and shoot the evil eye at their parents every chance you get. Or maybe you are dismissive of homeless people or talk behind your coworkers’ backs or get annoyed with elderly people who move too slowly in front of you or maybe you just don’t like people who have cats. The point is, if we are willing to treat some people with disdain, then we are willing to treat the people we care about with disdain as well and we will at some point or another—and we will continue to make it all right to classify people into “the good people” and “the bad people,” rather than just “people.”

I’m not saying you have to have a kumbaya attitude toward everyone and excuse people’s bad behavior. Sometimes you need to take a stand against those who promote fear and hate—but you can still do so with a reverence for life and for humanity. Fighting hate with hate only increases the amount of hate in the world.

Perhaps you can consider that the best way to effect change is by loving the people around you, the people you come into contact with on a daily basis. In your everyday life, give people the benefit of the doubt, treat them with compassion, accept them for who they are, and live and let live while being the light and the model for what it is to be strongly and unapologetically kind. You can and should communicate, love, and try to enroll people in the dream of a harmonious existence, but ultimately, you have no control over anyone but yourself—so how will you behave, how will you respond, and how will you show your respect to humanity?

The True Warrior

In 1971, when my father sat for that interview in Hong Kong with Canadian talk show host Pierre Berton, Pierre asked my father about prejudice in Hollywood. Did it exist? Had my father encountered it? My father said that unfortunately such things did exist and that in fact, because of that very thing, a TV show he was supposed to star in was probably not going to happen for him. But then my father goes on to say something very interesting.

Rather than going on a tirade about how unfair life is or how racist the studio structures in Hollywood are or being incensed about his talent not being recognized, he says instead that he understands. He says, “I don’t blame them. It’s the same way in Hong Kong. If a foreigner came to become a star, if I were the man with money, I probably would have my own worry of whether or not the acceptance would be there.” But he goes on to say that understanding as he may be, this is not going to change his trajectory. For in the same interview he continues, “I have already made up my mind that in the United States something about the Oriental, I mean the true Oriental, should be shown.” (The word oriental was still the term used in the seventies.) And in fact, not getting a starring role in a U.S. TV series meant that he went on to make four and a half kick-ass films that traveled the globe and impacted generations of human beings all around the world—something that TV would not have been able to do for him back then. Not getting that show put him on a different and more powerful path because he did not become bitter—he remained centered, expressive, and undeterred from his dream. He flowed around that obstacle. And he took action!

He was in on a secret that the studio execs were not. That he, Bruce Lee, was a force to be reckoned with, and that their fear-based thinking was blinding them, and that they didn’t understand and value individuals as much as they valued money or fear of criticism or what they believed to be the limited capacity of the American people. And that was their shortcoming and not his. So he would go about his business pursuing his dream, expressing his soul, and living his life to the fullest.

Racism and prejudice are traditions passed down from generation to generation. And even if we aren’t passing on personal racist beliefs directly, at the very least we do pass on our fears, our bad habits, and our shortcomings while helping to maintain the limiting structures that have been around for generations. The past can’t be helped. But what can be helped is how to move beyond these patterns and traditions with some guidance on how we can look at the world if we are open to wanting something better for ourselves and for all.

If we can see and understand and admit our faults and shortcomings, then we have hope for transforming ourselves and thereby our lives and the lives around us. All this knowing oneself, creating this immoveable center that is rooted in our beingness, is what allows us to have compassion for one another.

My father said, “Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.” Stop and take that in for a moment. Do you live that way? Do you make the individual humans around you the most important and valuable parts of life? Or are you more interested in what the cultural institutions tell you that you should think about whole groups of unidentified, faceless humans? What would happen for you in your life if you suddenly became truly interested in the individual lives around you and didn’t keep up your barrier of judgment and assumption? What if you got invested in another person’s experience or tried to understand what made them who they are? What if you put a figurative or literal arm around their shoulders and thought of them as a friend?

Many people who protest against certain groups of people suddenly change their tune when they discover a personal connection with someone who may be different from them, or when they come to know and love someone who is different from them—gay, black, poor, immigrant, Muslim, whatever it may be. The experience of individual care and attention dissolves the barriers to love. And suddenly love is possible where before only fear existed.

Traditions and institutions can have their benefits, but they do and always will have their limitations, too. An organization or system of belief that has its rules and traditions will always not include someone. Someone will be pushed outside of the boundaries and made “other.”

When my father was a teenager at Yip Man’s wing chun gung fu school, he was kicked out. Not for bad behavior, but for not being 100 percent Chinese. It was found out that my father’s mother was half European, making my father only three-quarters Chinese. The tradition of the time made it such that he could not be considered fully Chinese and thereby he was not allowed to learn Chinese gung fu—and so an uproar ensued. Yip Man did not want to expel my father. In fact, my father was one of his best students, but he could not keep the peace within his school without throwing my father out because the other students threatened to quit if he stayed. This was his livelihood, so Yip Man complied with tradition.

In a work-around, Yip Man continued to train my father in private and have one of his most senior students, Wong Shun Leung, train him as well. But he could not keep him in class. Maybe it was partly this experience that cemented in my father his later policy of taking in anyone to his schools who had a sincere desire to learn, regardless of their race, gender, or background. Maybe it was being a kid growing up in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong during World War II. Maybe it was his commitment to his Taoist philosophical understandings. But the “human first” policy is one I feel we can and really need to all adopt as our barrier to entry for humanity.

My mother always said about my father that he looked straight across at people. Meaning, he looked them in the eye rather than at the embellishments of their outside packaging. His upbringing was such that there were many factors that contributed to this attitude. First of all, he was born in America but raised in Hong Kong. His mother was part European and so he was too. He lived in a primarily Chinese city, but it was governed by the British. He worked in the acting industry as a child, so he spent time around many adults and people with a more creatively open disposition. He experienced racism and prejudice often throughout his life—for being too Chinese in Hollywood and for being too Western in Hong Kong. He often didn’t have a tribe to call his own other than his nuclear family, and so he had to make the conscious choice of being exclusive or inclusive. And being inclusive gave him access to many more people, ideas, experiences, friendships, and possibilities. It made his world bigger and more interesting.

Many people are still bound by tradition; when the elder generations say “no” to something, then these people will strongly disapprove of it as well. If the elders say that something is wrong, then they also will believe that it is wrong. They seldom use their mind to find out the truth and seldom express sincerely their real feeling. The simple truth is that these opinions on such things as racism are traditions, which are nothing more than a “formula” laid down by these elder people’s experience. As we progress and time changes, it is necessary to reform this formula. I, Bruce Lee, am a man who never follows the formulas of these fear-mongers. So no matter if your color is black or white, red or blue, I can still make friends with you without any barrier. In saying that “everyone under the sun is a member of a universal family,” you may think that I am idealistic. But if anyone still believes in things like racial differences, I think they are too narrow. Perhaps they still do not understand love.

When the Student Is Ready, the Teacher Appears

Remember our principles of yin yang? We talked about how these so called “opposites” are actually related expressions of a totality. And remember the quote about the answer never being apart from the problem, how the answer is the problem? Here’s one more shift in perspective for you to consider.

We’ve talked about making mistakes your friends—cozying up to obstacles until they become opportunities or solutions. We’ve talked about cultivating mindsets and tools of positivity, enthusiasm, willpower, and more. Now let’s talk about making these setbacks your teachers. What does suffering teach? If we really sit with our soul pain, with our constricting ideas and thoughts and ways of being, suffering teaches freedom from suffering. Suffering is such a good teacher because when we are suffering, we want so desperately to stop suffering that we become motivated to try to make it stop. If we want to transmute suffering, if we want to release it, we need to look closely at all the ways in which we cause ourselves suffering, in which we cause others suffering, and learn to move in the other direction back across the scale. We can learn to slide the balance back to a more equitable place. It takes determination and hypervigilance, but the teacher is there and the class is in session if you want to attend. We’ve seen this through the lens of being the eternal student, and now we have a framework for finding the lesson.

Intolerance can teach tolerance. Judgment can teach acceptance. War can teach peace. Fear can teach love. Shadow can teach light. Open your mind. Rebalance the scale. Look where you’ve not looked before. When you’re on a treasure hunt, you don’t just keep looking in the same place over and over if you already know the treasure isn’t there. When you can’t find your car keys in all the usual places, what do you do? You look in places you can’t imagine you would have put them. And sometimes your car keys are in the refrigerator next to the eggs you bought last night. And sometimes they’re right where you usually leave them, but for whatever reason you didn’t see them the first time. And sometimes you have to tow your car to the dealership and get all new keys because, goddammit, I don’t know what happened to those keys!

How much do you want to live a peaceful, alive, joyful life? Enough to tow your car to the dealership? Enough to consider something you never thought you would consider? What’s so terrifying about a shift in perspective? It is a change, and I know change can feel risky. But it seems more risky to live an unfulfilling, stuck life that accepts suffering as the norm. Instead why not take on the challenge of choosing to learn from your setbacks, to find the lessons in these teachable moments?

And above all, let’s do it in an atmosphere of kindness. Kindness to others who are on their path, but, most important, kindness to ourselves as we find our way. Put that friendly arm around your own shoulders and let go of the shortcomings of the past while you take these lessons forward with you. So many of you have already overcome and lived through some really challenging things. Think of yourselves as superheroes in training. If you’re still stuck, that’s okay—but beating yourself up over it only makes you feel bad, makes the process unenjoyable, and slows your progress. How would you look upon a friend who was struggling like you are? What can your struggles teach you? How can you show up as both student and teacher? How wide are you willing to open your mind, my friend?

The Key to Immortality

A quote that is often attributed to my dad (because it was placed on the bench that sits across from his grave), but which is in fact not his quote is, “The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.” And so, even though his life was not long in the traditional sense, it has in fact been a very long life—one that we are still sitting here feeling the influence of all these decades later. And though I have spent a good deal of my energy to continue to promote and preserve his legacy, he would have gone on being remembered without me because he did indeed model a life full of inspiration and possibility all on his own.

He was our teacher, our entertainer, our friend, and our family. And his spirit contains the energy of unity and brightness. If I stop to assign an image to the feeling of him for me, it is of golden sunlight shimmering across the rippling ocean waves like a thousand radiant suns. Dazzling you, filling you with wonder, and inviting you forward.

In 2005, a statue was erected of my father in Mostar, Bosnia. It came as much as a surprise to me as it may to you. After the terrible civil war that tore across the region had ended, during which most of the town centers had had their monuments destroyed, the different factions came together to try to decide what monuments to put back. Of course, there was much debate over the various symbols and their meanings, and for a long time they could not reach an agreement.

Until someone suggested that they could erect a statue of Bruce Lee. Yep, that’s right. Bruce Lee.

The organizers said of their decision, “One thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.” To them, Bruce Lee represented the fight against ethnic divisions. He was seen as a symbol of someone who bridged cultures and brought people together and made them feel uplifted.

As for my father, he was never specifically trying for this. In fact, he said of his life and career that he had no idea that what he was practicing would lead to all this. And I’m quite sure he never foresaw a statue in Bosnia. He just lived his life fully and to the highest level of quality and honesty that he could. And we all said, “Wow. Now there is someone real.”

As for my father, he did accomplish what he set out to do.

I don’t know what is the meaning of death, but I am not afraid to die. And I go on, non-stop, going forward, even though I, Bruce Lee, may die some day without fulfilling all of my ambitions, I will have no regrets. I did what I wanted to do and what I’ve done, I’ve done with sincerity and to the best of my ability. You can’t expect much more from life.

Live your life as if this is the life you are living right now—not the life where you will handle stuff one of these days or be happy when this or that happens. This is it. With every moment and every day that passes, this is your life. Remember, you are not striving to be Bruce Lee. Maybe, in the cultivation of you, you become someone who does what they say they are going to do, someone who is real and fully present, someone who is skilled because they have put time and effort into practicing something important to them, someone who has great energy that uplifts everyone they come into contact with. It doesn’t have to come with a name attached—such as greatest martial artist of all time, Nobel prize winner for literature, employee of the month, best mom ever. Remember, names create limitations. Those labels only describe one aspect of your total humanity. But if we have to have a name, then perhaps it can be “human, fully expressed.”