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Bruce Lee Screen Test
Bruce Lee Interview
Bruce Lee Clips

Bruce Lee, a great martial artist? Yes! Bruce Lee, a great martial arts movie star? Yes! Bruce Lee, a great martial arts innovator and philosopher? No!

Bruce Lee’s ideas, theories, and writings have been quoted since his death in 1973 as being examples of his great martial art innovation, insight, and philosophy. However, little, if any, of Bruce Lee’s martial arts thinking was original.

Lee was born in 1940 and died in 1973 at age 33. He was a local martial artist who gained national fame after teaching Jeet Kune Do to movie stars who helped promote him and his ideas. Television and movies made him famous, not his expertise in the ring, not his being a great teacher or trainer, and not his being a great author, and certainly not his innovations in the martial arts.

Lee was an avid reader who collected information on the martial arts from many sources and used this information regularly in interviews and in his writings. After his death, his supporters have quoted his statements and notes as being great original insights from Lee himself. One source of many of these quotes is the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, a collection of Lee’s notes that was published as a book in 1975, after his death. Lee intended to make the notes into a book but he died before the book was written. After his death, Linda Lee, his wife, published the notes as though they were the original thoughts of a great martial arts master.

I have the 1975 first edition of the Tao of Jeet Kune Do which lists no sources, references, or acknowledgements. Over the years people have found that many of Lee's notes in the book were not his original ideas, so later additions of the book list an acknowledgement (a single paragraph in a tiny font in the middle of the title page) as to the source of some of the notes. These acknowledgements were not in the original book because there were no sources listed in the notes as to their origin. If Lee was planning to write a book from these notes, how would he know the original sources of all the notes. In all is interviews where he put forth his philosophy of fighting, he stated his thoughts as if they were his original thoughts. It appears that Lee was claiming all the notes to be his original ideas.

Just because you are charming, witty, a good athlete, and an actor does not mean you are necessarily very bright or insightful. Lee's supporters seem to believe the end justifies the means; that Lee's shortcomings should be overlooked because of all he did to promote the martial arts.

Not only was there little original thinking in Lee’s thoughts on the martial arts, there was probably little original thinking in the sources from which Lee gained his insights. After all, all we are talking about here is hand-to-hand combat between two human beings. Humans have been fighting since Cain fought and killed Able. Does anyone actually believe that, nowadays, anyone can come up with any thoughts on fighting that have not been thought of in the last few thousand years of human conflict?

Lee chronicled ideas he had read or observed that he thought were important. This does no make him a great innovator or philosopher; it just makes him an avid collector of ideas. There have been thousands of “founders” of new martial arts in the years since Lee’s death. Just as Lee did, they have merely repackaged “old” ideas to make something “new.”

Kip Brockett, in his article Bruce Lee Said What?, documented some of the misconceptions about Bruce Lee’s martial arts insight. The following are some of the misconceptions revealed by Brockett.