Maybe some of you don’t know him as Bruce Lee. But I do believe you know his Chinese name Li Xiaolong, who promoted and popularised our Chinese martial arts to the world, and named it, Kungfu.
I prefer to write down a timeline mostly like this. When he was a teenager, he followed a master of Wing Chun, Ye wen, to formally start his life of Kungfu, which laid a solid fundamental of his basic skills. And later he moved to America, where he had chances to get in touch with a bunch of different fighting techniques. Eventually, his own Kungfu theory, Jeet-kune-do came into existence.
To further learn Bruce Lee and Kungfu, let’s start with Wing Chun. Serving as close quarters combat, Wing Chun has its great advantage of speed. Since when you are close to your opponents, say less than one body away, the moving distance to get him down is very short. Another typical characteristic of Wing Chun is called “defend while attacking”. Let’s refer to this figure, this guy’s left hand is sort of shoving aside his opponent’s fist. Meanwhile, his right fist just goes straight to the other guy’s body. Two things done at the same time. Unfortunately, due to its property of close fighting, Wing Chun players mostly do low kicking, like low side kicking or low front kicking, which only aims at the lower part of their opponents’ body.
Two or three years later, Bruce Lee’s family suffered from things. His parents sent him to America. His enthusiasm about Kungfu never calmed down. During his college, he devoted himself learning varieties of fighting techniques. Fencing, jujitsu, tae-kwon-do, boxing, and so on. After all these, it occurred to Bruce, why not just put them all in one, sort of, model? And Jeet-kune-do was born. Living with Jeet-kune-do, Bruce Lee went through the climax of his life. What is Jeet-kune-do like apart from Wing Chun? Actually, Bruce Lee claimed Jeet-kune-do is no fighting technique. It is philosophy, which only contains one point: simple and direct. To realise this only but actually ultimate purpose, Bruce Lee learned a lot from previous experience. For example, fencing. Bruce took its gaits, which means the way or the pace you move your body. While normally walking, we bring our back leg forward in turn to move on. But in fencing, and which is taken into Jeet-kune-do, we put strength on our back leg but move forward our front leg to, kinda, jump on. And Bruce had developed a very powerful side kicking. This is a figure Jeet-kune-do’s side kicking versus tae-kwon-do’s side kicking. Guess what’s the difference. Actually, you should see no difference from this picture. So…let’s see…why don’t I just show you in person? Suppose, you are a right-hander. A right-hander’s right leg is usually much stronger. In Tae-kwon-do, you start like this, putting your stronger leg back behind. Then lift the right leg, moving forward, rotate, finally kick out. By contrast, in Jeet-kune-do, the same guy would put his stronger leg in front of him and just do it. You see what I mean? The second move costs less time and shorter distance.
Sadly, Bruce Lee died in his early thirties, gone with his craziness about Kungfu. And I am now luckily a practitioner of Jeet-kune-do. Best wished to me and all the fans of Bruce Lee. Hope our passion about Kungfu would never die out.
Thank you all.
