9

The Way of the Intercepting Fist

Using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation.

Stage Four: Jeet Kune Do

The final stage of cultivation for my father was his art of jeet kune do. In our martial arts analogy, this is where a punch is not only a highly skilled yet natural punch as in stage three, but it is entirely your own. It is imbued with your own very real and very unique expression. There will never be another Bruce Lee, and this fourth stage in the progression is why—it requires us to be the quintessential version of ourselves. Only Bruce Lee could be his fourth stage, and only you can be yours.

Bruce Lee was so quintessentially himself that no one else will ever come close to truly imitating him. The way he moved, the sounds he made, the way he spoke, his handwriting, his musculature, it was all artisanal—crafted by his own hand and through his own effort. He didn’t seek to create himself in anyone else’s image. He sought only to be himself. And that he did magnificently. I think this is the thing we sense in him when we see him—that he is somehow this heightened version of what is possible in a human being, and it feels extraordinary and exciting.

My father’s final, fourth stage was so much more than a name for a martial arts system to him. In fact, he recoiled at the notion of calling it a system or a style at all, because those words tend to separate and limit people and artistry. He even went so far as to suggest that if people get too caught up in the name “jeet kune do,” arguing over what it is and what it isn’t, that it is better that it disappear altogether, as it was never meant to confine or separate the practitioners. Rather, jeet kune do is the direct expression of Bruce Lee. It is a reflection of his soul made visible. This was as close to the concretization and physicality of his essence on earth as he could get. It most definitely reflected his expression of the martial arts, but it also encompassed his expression of life. As he said, everything he had learned about life, he learned through his martial arts.

Jeet kune do translates to “the way of the intercepting fist,” and if you have been paying attention, then you may be starting to see why this is the perfect expression of all we have been discussing. To me, this name beautifully and simply reveals the idea of bridging the gap. The fist doesn’t just hit; it intercepts. It responds. It is in relationship to what is. It is alive, ushered forth out of the void and into direct correlation with reality.

The fourth and final plaque my father created to represent this wholly personal and realized stage had the yin yang symbol with the arrows around it as in the fluidity stage, but with his personal maxim in Chinese characters encircling it as well, which translate to: “Using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation.” The very essence of water—ever finding its own path without limit.

You may wonder why his fourth stage has so much form to the design of the plaque when it may seem like emptiness, the formless form, is the ultimate goal. Remember that the living void is the emptiness from which all our personal expression springs forth. Yes, an understanding of it and a collaboration with it is essential, but we are the secret ingredient that makes the void live through us. We are the unique and alive expression in this human realm.

So this fourth stage of cultivation is all you—you as the expression of your life, of your heart, of your soul. If you were to consider what that might be, what do you come up with? For myself, I would have to be honest and say that I don’t totally yet know. I’m a late bloomer. But I hold space for it to become clearer to me, and in the meantime I hold on to the things I know are clear already, and I practice bringing them from the inside out with more and more skill each passing day. This is the process. My father has a quote about enlightenment that speaks to this:

To obtain enlightenment, emphasis should fall NOT on the cultivation of a particular department which then merges into the totality, but rather, on the totality that then enters into and unites the particular departments.

To me this means that to obtain wholeness and full personal potential, we need to work not from the outside in, but from the inside out. We don’t need to spend all our time making the external stuff of our lives look a certain way so that we can then be joyful and peaceful and powerful. Instead we should work on being joyful, peaceful, and powerful and then bring that through into all the things we do and want and manifest in our lives. In other words, don’t put all your focus and energy into your career so that one day you will be content and happy. Work on being content and happy and bring that into your career and the rest of your life.

In this way, our lives become a true reflection of who we really are without artifice. And in this way, when we go to act, we do not have to wrestle with ourselves to know what to do. We are already sure of what’s important and what we want, and we are committed to it no matter what.

So how did Bruce Lee show his commitment to what was important to him?

Enter the Motherf***ing Dragon

One of my father’s students was Ted Ashley, the head of Warner Brothers studio at the time. Warner Brothers had tried to get a TV series starring my father off the ground (that series, Kung Fu, was ultimately made starring a white actor playing a Chinese man), and they had also put some development interest behind a project my father had created with writer (and student) Stirling Silliphant called The Silent Flute, for my father and James Coburn to star in, to no avail. But now that my father had left Hollywood for a detour through Hong Kong and was smashing all the box office records one film after another, his supporters at Warner Brothers finally had the proof they needed to sell the studio on doing a film with Bruce Lee.

Enter the Dragon was the dream opportunity coming true for my father—a Hollywood feature for him to star in. That said, Hollywood billed it as a double lead in case their gamble on my father didn’t pay off, and in part due to the intense prejudice and concern surrounding the xenophobia of audiences of that time. But my father didn’t worry himself with this. He knew he had the goods even if others weren’t sure. He was ready to make the absolute most of this opportunity to accomplish his goal of showing the Western world the glory of Chinese gung fu and to express himself fully in a true, on-screen representation of a Chinese man.

There was only one problem. The script was terrible. So terrible, in fact, that my father was adamant that the writer be fired and sent back to California while he himself feverishly rewrote the majority of the screenplay. Of course, the studio didn’t listen to my father and kept the writer in Hong Kong, making small tweaks to this actioner that was initially entitled Blood and Steel and later the inventive Han’s Island (while lying to my father and telling him they had sent him back to Los Angeles). This original script had none of the iconic scenes that exist today. No “finger pointing at the moon.” No “art of fighting without fighting.” No philosophical scene with the monk discussing the true nature of mastery—“I do not hit. It hits all by itself.”

It was of utmost importance to my father that this film reflect his art and culture accurately and with depth. This was his moment to show the world who he was and what a Chinese gung fu man could do, and he was not going to settle for mediocre. So he rewrote the script and submitted his rewrites to the producers. He also argued back and forth with the studio over the title. His Chinese stage name was Siu Loong, which translates to “Little Dragon,” and this film was to be his introduction to the West. The title Enter the Dragon had a power and a specificity that Han’s Island and Blood and Steel did not. He wrote numerous letters to Warner Brothers petitioning for this name change: “Do consider carefully the title ‘Enter the Dragon.’ I really think this is a good title because Enter the Dragon suggests the emergence of someone that is quality.” That “quality someone” he is referring to is, of course, himself!

The studio finally succumbed to this request and agreed to rename the film. My father trained like he had never trained before and worked continuously on the script to make it as good as possible. His production company, Concord Productions, became the Hong Kong production entity to make the film (though my father is not credited as a producer), and he was also tapped with choreographing the entire movie. He worked night and day to make the most of this opportunity he had been given. He was going to show Bruce Lee to the world.

As he wrote in a letter to Ted Ashley:

I am sure you agree with me that quality, extreme hard work, and professionalism is what cinema is all about. My twenty years of experience, both in martial arts and acting has led to the successful harmony of showmanship and genuine, efficient, artful expression. In short, this is it, and ain’t nobody knows it like I know it. Pardon my bluntness, but that is me! You see, my obsession is to make, pardon the expression, the fuckingest action motion picture that has ever been made. In closing, I will give you my heart, but please do not give me your head only. In return, I, Bruce Lee, will always feel the deepest appreciation for the intensity of your involvement.

The first day of shooting finally arrived, and the Hong Kong crew and the American crew were there and poised to begin, with various translators on set to help the two crews communicate with each other. My father, however, was a no-show—he refused to come to set. You see, the final locked shooting script had been issued, and it did not incorporate the pages he had written. None of his changes had been made.

One could argue that, in this moment, my father should have just done this movie as they wanted it, and then hoped it did well enough to get him the next opportunity, where maybe he could have had more creative control—a way to get his foot in the door and try to inch it open further and further with each subsequent project. But my father had already tried this in Hollywood, and he knew it didn’t work. He knew that if he didn’t take a stand, he would be marginalized over and over again by people who “knew better.”

And so the standoff began.

The crew started filming what shots they could that did not involve my father, and my father stayed in our house and refused to come to set until the changes were made. The producers would come to the house to try to reason with him. They would talk to my mom, who would act as the go-between when my father was fed up and refused to entertain any more of their rationalities about why they couldn’t do what he wanted. And my father continued to put his foot down. He told them they had the script for the movie he wanted to make, and if they used that script, he would happily show up to set.

The producers created cover-up stories about how my father was so nervous about being in a Hollywood movie and being a failure that he was terrified to show up to set. In books that were written many years after my father died, Fred Weintraub spun this tale of paralyzing fear on the part of my father—to the utter disgust and dismay of my mother and my family. Bruce Lee was not afraid of this opportunity. In fact, he was the only person who recognized the full nature of the opportunity and what it could be, and he would have rather blown it up than wasted it by doing something half-assed. He knew he would only get one chance to be introduced to the world. My mom urged the producers and director to pay attention, telling them, “He knows what he’s talking about. You should listen to him.”

The standoff continued for two weeks. As time went on, the crew ran out of shots to grab without their star and choreographer, and ended up sitting around with nothing to do at a substantial cost to the studio. Tensions were running high among the cast and crew. The producers began to get pressure from Warner Brothers to get the production back on track, and there was only one way that was going to happen.

The producers finally gave in to my father’s demands. They implemented the script changes he had made and agreed to shoot the film he envisioned.

When I asked my mom years later if he had really been willing to lose the opportunity rather than submit to their demands, she said without hesitation, “You bet!” Bruce Lee had taken a stand and held to his core. He brought the full force of his expression and his being into play because he knew what was important to his soul. He had stayed true to his center and in so doing, the full force of the tornado that was him changed the landscape around him forever.

Enter the Dragon became a global phenomenon and cemented my father as an icon of martial arts and culture.

In My Own Process

Interestingly, thanks to my father’s diligent writing process, we actually know what was running through his mind a month or two before he started filming his final movie. At the start of 1973, my father was enmeshed in filming his movie Game of Death while at the same time finishing up negotiations to appear in the Hollywood feature he had been seeking for many years. He would have to put Game of Death on hold to pursue his dream of the East-meets-West Hollywood actioner, which ultimately became Enter the Dragon.

It was at this moment, during a time of his life that could not have been more busy, anticipatory, and important (and which also happened to be shortly before the end of his life), that my father attempted to pen an article, which he called “In My Own Process.” The article was never finished. Instead what we have are several handwritten drafts that seem like a manifesto of sorts. He declares his identity, and he seems to be aching to express in writing some essential truths that he has come to know—about himself and about life.

I am in the midst of preparing my next movie Enter the Dragon, a production between Concord and Warner Bros., plus another Concord production, The Game of Death, which is only halfway done. I have been busy and occupied with mixed emotions of late.

He seemed to need to get something off his chest. Maybe it was a result of energy begetting energy. When things are amped up and busy, energy seems to expand and even more creative expression can yearn to be manifested or conveyed. Or maybe he had a cosmic sense that time was running out. Or maybe it was just a natural part of his way of being. In any case, he was a man on the verge of realizing a big dream and feeling a need to center and express himself.

Another striking thing about these drafts is that they are somewhat fevered, marked by a great many cross-outs and inserts. They are actually hard to read. The usually beautiful penmanship is sacrificed here in service to an urgency to say something vital.

What it boils down to is my sincere and honest revelation of a man called Bruce Lee … Just who is Bruce Lee? Where is he heading? What does he hope to discover?… Oh I know I am not called upon to write any true confession, but I do want to be honest—that is the least a human being can do. Basically, I have always been a martial artist by choice and an actor by profession. But, above all, I am hoping to actualize myself to be an artist of life along the way.

These drafts are rich with insight and desire, but I bring them up because they also served, at a very crucial point in his life, as a very timely reminder and grounding device. He seems to be prompting himself to remember who he is, what he wants, and what is important so that he could hold true to himself, the root of his being, in the moments that were to come. “Above all,” he said, “I am hoping to actualize myself to be an artist of life.” Above all.

This is what our journey is leading toward: the understanding that the greatest possible expression we can have, and the greatest growth and impact, stems from the very root of our being. Stage four. When we are rooted, when we have absolute faith and trust in our purpose and ourselves, then we are free. Free to choose. Free to create. Free to make a stand. Free to be—no matter the circumstances or the situation. And though this may not come easily, when we directly choose to undertake difficulty, it is in order to be free.

Enter the Dragon is a feat of filmmaking not because it’s a great piece of cinema. The plot is pretty unremarkable and predictable and the seventies kitsch is in full effect (though the kitsch is pretty great!). Enter the Dragon is iconic because Bruce Lee got to be Bruce Lee in it and to realize his vision in a vehicle that had the capacity to travel around the world. In the “In My Own Process” drafts just a few months before, my father said, “I am happy because I am growing daily and honestly, and I don’t know where my ultimate limit lies. To be certain, every day there can be a revelation or a new discovery that I can obtain. However, the most gratification is yet to come; to hear another human being say, ‘Hey, now here is someone real.’”

And when you watch Enter the Dragon, that is what you see. It is the experience of seeing a self-actualized, self-expressed, confident, lights-turned-all-the-way-on human being beaming off the screen and into your imagination. Suddenly the possibility of what a person can be becomes real, and it is mesmerizing. Kung fu flick aside, watching Bruce Lee is like watching a real-life dragon fly.

How Can I Be Me?

This may seem like a paradox, but to be able to fly, truly free and expressed, you need to be truly rooted and grounded. Remember, my father said, “The root is the fulcrum on which will rest the expression of your soul; the root is the ‘starting point’ of all natural manifestation. It cannot be, when the root is neglected, that what should spring from it will be well-ordered.”

All this talk about knowing yourself and practicing and developing your skills is to get you to the place of understanding and realizing your potential, to get you to the place where you know both when it’s time to make your stand and hold your ground with purpose and without malice, and when it’s time to yield your will to the natural unfolding of things and follow or move on. The root of who you are is the essential ingredient to your specific unfolding. Without you, there is no direction for your flow. You must practice to gain this—and what you gain is nothing less than yourself.

My father said, “When I look around, I always learn something and that is to be always yourself, and to express yourself, to have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it. Start from the very root of your being, which is ‘how can I be me?’” He believed that this achieving center, being grounded in oneself, was about the highest state a human being could achieve.

And it is from this place of grounding and knowing and embodying that we can stand in our confidence, our doing, our strength, and our calm like the eye of a powerful storm that we get to direct.

We are vortices whose center is a point that is motionless and eternal but which appears as motion that increases in velocity in the manner of a whirlpool or tornado (whose epicenter is still). The nucleus is in reality whereas the vortex is phenomenon in the form of a multidimensional force field. HOLD TO THE CORE!!!

It was this sentiment that led my father to stand his ground and risk it all for the integrity of his being in 1973.

Being wholly ourselves is freedom—not being under the control or power of anyone else mentally, emotionally, spiritually, but rather, personally permitted to act on behalf of ourselves. If you are afraid you will lose too much in this undertaking, then consider it a loss of all that is not you to the gain of all that is. And the only way to find out if what I’m saying is true is to try it on for yourself.

The Moon in the Stream

We have spoken a lot now about being powerful, fully expressed, and free, but I’d like to give you one more benefit to consider about our water journey. I’d like to make a case for the idea that the deepest root of all of this glorious personal unfolding is a deep peacefulness. Remember my father’s “Definite Chief Aim” (from chapter five), where he lays out his goal to be a successful actor and martial artist? Well, at the end of that document he says that the aim of all that achieving is to live in inner harmony and happiness. This inner peace is the true depth of power.

Remember that, in the void, from which springs everything, resides nothing. It is emptiness, space. It is stillness. Where is the hurricane its most calm? At its center. As my father said, “The real stillness is stillness in movement.” To me, this means that when we know ourselves and accept ourselves, we have attained a certain peace with ourselves. We harbor no qualms; we are being real. There is peace to that security, and the authentic power we generate stems from this. We are able to act and encounter the unknowns of life from this place of absoluteness, from the vast quiet and infinity of space.

Think about it. How much does it take to face a challenge with calm and grace? It’s easy to fly off the handle and get riled up and combative. But when you can stand ready to face an opponent (or face yourself) and feel prepared for whatever may come, that requires a certain quiet strength. This is an immovable peacefulness, a deep stillness, a powerful knowing.

I like to visualize a small but brilliant spiral galaxy surrounded by the star-studded blackness of space at the center of my solar plexus. It helps me to remember that the void is part of me and that I have access to the infinite. Whenever I feel limited or overly reactionary, I just try to tap back into that tiny vastness at the center of my will and remind myself that, whatever my outward circumstance, I am not trapped inwardly. I am, in fact, boundless.

My father called this being “the moon in the stream.” Picture a full moon shining down and reflected in a running stream. The stream is in motion all the time, but the moon retains its serenity even as the waters flow and churn.

The waters are in motion all the time, but the moon retains its serenity. The mind moves in response to the ten thousand situations but remains ever the same.

The Secret to Nirvana

My father loved the goddess Kwan Yin. We had more than one representation of her in our house—a big stone head of the goddess that resided in the garden and a full, life-size wooden carving of her seated with one leg casually bent at an angle over the other in the posture of repose.

When I was a little girl in Hong Kong, I used to sit in the lap of the goddess. She had the perfect-size lap for my toddler body. She felt to me like a place of refuge, this goddess of compassion and mercy. She holds a special place in my heart still. In Eastern religions she is one goddess who permeates across multiple cultures. She is celebrated in India, China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, and perhaps many other places as well. She is oftentimes associated with the qualities of the Western world’s Mother Mary.

My father liked to use Kwan Yin as an example of the fluid mind or the moon in the stream—free to move with the stream while also retaining its serenity and wholeness. He illustrates this with his portrait of the goddess below.

Kwan Yin, the goddess of Mercy, is sometimes represented with one thousand arms, each holding a different instrument. If her mind stops with the use, for instance, of a spear, all the other arms (999) will be of no use whatsoever. It is only because of her mind not stopping with the use of one arm, but moving from one instrument to the other, that all her arms prove useful with the utmost degree of efficiency. Thus the figure is meant to demonstrate that, when the ultimate truth is realized, even as many as one thousand arms on one body may each be serviceable in one way or another.

The idea then is that this unperturbed freedom we’ve been discussing is a character of mind that we need to possess—a mind endowed with infinite mobility. It can think anything, dream anything, believe anything, imagine anything, see anything, inspire anything, hold anything. Fluidity of mind is a mind that can direct as many as one thousand arms but does not get in the way of any of it—the mind follows its course like the many currents in the stream. Our practice is in taking everything in and not allowing our attention to be arrested. The mind does not stop at one object that is perceived, but rather perceives all.

Moving and yet not moving, in tension and yet relaxed, seeing everything that is going on and yet not at all anxious about the way it may turn, with nothing purposely designed, nothing consciously calculated, no anticipation, no expectation—in short, standing innocently like a baby and yet with all the cunning of the keenest intelligence of a fully matured mind.

My father said that the delusive mind (the mind that misleads itself) is the mind intellectually and effectively burdened (too clever for its own good). It cannot move on from one moment to another without reflecting on itself, and this obstructs its native fluidity and therefore its creativity, its authentic expression, and its freedom. A wheel cannot revolve when it is too tightly attached to the axle. When the mind is tied up, the focus too narrow or obsessed, it feels inhibited in every move it makes (like trudging through the stickiest mud), and nothing will be accomplished with any sense of spontaneity.

“Spontaneity” may seem frivolous, like deciding to jump in the pool with your clothes on, or even irresponsible, like dropping everything and flying off to Cancún on a whim. But my father held spontaneity sacred because, to him, it reflected a state where inspiration is mixed with instinct and the confidence to execute this immediate calling in the moment of its occurrence. Spontaneity was real magic that could usher through him like a flash of lightning, or like a punch that catches your opponent before he can even make a move.

I am reminded of the scene in Enter the Dragon where Lee squares off with one of the villains, named O’Hara, at the tournament. They set hands to prepare to fight, and before O’Hara even knows what’s happening, Lee has struck him and he’s down on the ground. It is one immediate movement. It is intuited spontaneity of the most effective order, and it was so lightning fast that in reality, it was hard to even catch on film.

To be consciously unconscious or to be unconsciously conscious is the secret to nirvana. The act is so direct and immediate that no intellection finds room to insert itself and cut it to pieces.

Why is this the secret to nirvana? Because all the doubt, second-guessing, worry, analysis, judging, neediness, mask-wearing, and perfectionism that takes so much of our energy doesn’t exist here. Everything is immediate in this active emptiness, and it springs from the total sincerity of who we are. When we train to know ourselves, then we gain assuredness and confidence. In becoming our quintessential selves, we reach our fourth stage of cultivation, which feels phenomenal. Perhaps it even feels like nirvana.

Think about when you’ve ever had a terrible pain, like a toothache or a migraine, or maybe even a bad cough that went on for weeks. Remember when it went away, and your whole body could just relax? Your shoulders stopped being hunched up by your ears, you felt like you could breathe, your jaw and your intestines stopped gripping. You had clarity, you could focus. This is the same feeling of living in your truth. Relaxed yet strong. Peaceful yet enthusiastic. Ready to meet (or intercept!) every moment as it unfolds no matter what it may bring your way. Sounds like nirvana to me.

Recognize and use the spiritual power of the infinite. The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible. It is living void because all forms come out of it, and whosoever realizes the void is filled with life and power and the love of all beings.

What Is Essentially Your Own

Remember when my father said in the letter to Pearl in 1962 that he could feel this great power inside him? Hold that thought—because this power, this creative tide, also exists within you, and it is yours for the using.

Now take a moment to really feel that power. Close your eyes (or don’t) and sit and breathe, and instead of concentrating, consciously loosen. Spread your perception throughout your whole body. What can you feel? Can you feel the aliveness and energy inside your whole being? Can you feel yourself expand? Can you feel the life-giving force that animates your cells? Can you feel that this essence radiates through and exists for you to use?

This is your essence. This is your untapped power that you hold in the palm of your hand. And the stoking and freeing of this essence is what we are after.

When man comes to a conscious realization of those great spiritual forces within himself and begins to use those forces in life, his progress in the future will be unparalleled. To raise our potential is to live every second refreshed. Trust the life-giving force within.

Remember what my father said in the “In My Own Process” drafts? He wanted above all to be an “artist of life.” An artist is a creator. He takes raw materials, takes his environment, and creates something that comes from within his soul. An artist of life creates his own life, creates himself, moment by moment. And in his ability to choose and create, he is powerful and free.

Remember that my father’s recipe when it came to his art of jeet kune do was to research your own experience, reject what is useless, accept what is useful, and “add what is essentially your own.”

To live is to express oneself freely in creation. Creation, I must say, is not a fixed something. At best, Bruce Lee presents a possible direction, and nothing more. You are free to make your own choice and express your instinctive potentiality. I am actualizing myself daily to be an artist of life! In life, what can you ask for but to fulfill your potential and be real!