When movement and energy are intentionally brought under one’s awareness, then not only do martial art techniques become more efficient, but the whole of life is similarly affected. The levels of the practitioner’s outer skill and inner state reflect each other. Understood like this, every art and skill can be the way to inner development. There is a Japanese saying: “Archery and dancing, flower-arranging and singing, tea drinking and wrestling – it is all the same.” From the ordinary point of view, this makes no sense, but once the underlying significance is grasped, the meaning is clear.
Quoting Tim Tackett – “There are different aspects to it – sensitivity, trapping, grappling, boxing, kicking, kickboxing- and putting all those together. Once you have experienced it all then you have a core. This core is the thing that is going to come out of you when the guy steps out of a truck because you just had an accident with him, and he’s just had twelve beers, he’s 260 pounds and couldn’t care less if you’re a black belt when he comes out of the truck after you! Whatever comes out of you then has to be automatic.
…one must have practiced enough so that one can act despite oneself in an automatic and spontaneous flow of action that overrides any other consideration. The “freeze” or “flail” response has to change in to the “no-mind” fighting state of reflex action.
Quoting Bruce Lee – “Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.”
It is clear that Bruce Lee began his martial artistry with wing chun and then went on to study other methods. Yet this was not so much a process of adding and accumulating techniques but of incorporating them in to simple techniques.
…none of us drives the way we originally learned in order to pass our driving test. Through experience we have all made our own personal modifications, so that we can now steer with one hand and operate the radio with the other instead of having t steer with both hands.
Anyone who attempts to define jeet kune do runs the attempt of being like those in the fable of the blind men attempting to describe the elephant; one felt the tail and though the elephant was like a snake, another felt its leg and thought it was like a tree, and so on. Human nature, being what it is, means that each person can only relate to what he or she understands. Naturally, a wing chun practitioner will see the foundation of Bruce’s art as wing chun.
Bruce’s jeet kune do was the blossom on a tree with very deep roots.
It was only because the awareness they developed had become so embodied in him – so that he didn’t merely “know“ it but was it…
Bira Almeida, a master of the Brazilian art of capoira, recalls his own experience:
“After I reached the limits of my physical skills I went into a depression. I had such good skills and a strong attitude that I could not easily find challenging opponents. I had no motivation and little possibility of improvement.”
He went three years without training, until he realised that he had missed something, and returned to training as a means of exploring the very roots of his being:
“Then I didn’t care anymore about strength, speed or any other physical skill. I simply began trying to read my opponent’s mind. At the same time, I began to write and study music as an extension of this art. There eventually came a transformation to a further level, where the opponent now has to do what your own mind orders him to do.
Such control has no other purpose than to help your opponent, even your enemy, to reach a universal harmony. There is a rhythm to life and the universe. In doing a martial art you play to find it, to attune to it. As long as you tune to this rhythm you cannot fight a false fight. This rhythm’s is filled with life’s balances, but it transforms them.
Angry people want to fight to injure and kill. The martial arts do not deny this teaching, but the true inner art turns this anger and alienation back on itself so that the challenge in simply being alive is recognised in the artist himself.
Many people are unable to see a martial art as a means of spiritual unfoldment or inner work. In the West, we tend to think of “winners” and “losers”, with no other possibilities. In a fight, in martial arts training, the process of confrontation is absorbed by the participants so that each learns something. Neither the “winner” nor the “loser” will live forever in a permanent form. In a fight, as in life, both engage in a process of learning and change. The opponent is not the enemy, he is just “I” in another form.
At the moment you are fighting, your opponent becomes yourself. You confront your fears, your strengths and weaknesses, your life itself. I have been involved in thousands of fights, so I know what it is like to feel this kind of thing inside. You know you must win – but to win, is to win with yourself.
A martial art is a mirror in which you look at yourself, before you wash your face in the morning. You see yourself, simply, the way that you are.
Quoting Zen master Genpo Merzel Sensei:
“The Void is no mere emptiness but is real, free and existing. It is the Source from which all things arise and return. It cannot be seen, touched or known – yet it exists and is freely used. It has no shape, size, colour of form, and yet all that we see, hear, feel and touch is “it”.
It is beyond intellectual knowing and cannot be grasped by the ordinary mind. When we suddenly awake to the realisation that there is no barrier, and never has been, one realises that one is all things – mountains rivers, grasses, trees, sun, moon, stars, universe are all oneself. There is no longer any division or barrier between myself and others, no longer any feeling of alienation or fear – there is nothing apart from oneself and therefore nothing to fear. Realising this results in true compassion. Other people and things are not seen as apart from oneself but, on the contrary, as one’s own body.”
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