An Unauthorized Bibliography
There’s nothing new within this book; there are no secrets. “It’s nothing special,” Bruce used to say. And so it wasn’t.
With over 750,000 copies sold in nine languages, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do is the bestselling martial arts book in modern history. Although Bruce Lee’s name and photo appear on the cover, dedicated fans know that he did actually write Tao of Jeet Kune Do—at least not in its current form. (The book is a compilation of Bruce’s personal notes, organized and published posthumously by Dan Inosanto, Linda Lee and Gilbert Johnson.)
While credit for fighting methods expressed in Tao of JKD is rightfully given to boxer Edwin Haislet, fencers Hugo and James Castello, and others, we are left to infer that Jeet Kune Do’s philosophical underpinnings are Bruce’s unique contribution.
Quite the contrary, Jeet Kune Do is an orthodox expression of Taoist, Buddhist, and Western metaphysical principles. From the poem on the book’s opening page, to the passionate expressions of its final chapter, ideas in Tao of JKD can be traced directly to earlier written works. Here is a sampling of these sources.
Into a soul absolutely free
From thoughts and emotion,
Even the tiger finds no room
To insert its fierce claws.
Inspired by the Tao Te Ching, chapter 50: “It is said that he who knows how to live meets no tigers or buffaloes on the road…for in him, a tiger finds nothing to lay his claws upon.”
Turn into a doll made of wood: it has no ego, it thinks nothing, it is not grasping or sticky. Let the body and limbs work themselves out in accordance with the discipline they have undergone.
Probably inspired by Chuang Tzu’s classic tale of the wooden fighting cock.
If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo. (pg. 7)
Lao Tzu chapter 8 uses a water analogy to describe the highest level of human virtue. Chuang Tzu chapter 7 explains “The mind of the ultimate man functions like a mirror. It neither sends off nor welcomes; it responds but does not retain.”
In Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water and when you’re tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.
This is a direct quotation of Chan (Zen) Buddhist master Linji.
An assertion is Zen only when it is itself an act and does not refer to anything that is asserted in it.
Taken from Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s essay, Practical Methods of Zen Instruction.
Sun Tzu
Author, The Art of War
Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit in with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none, and, likewise, uses any techniques or means which serve its end.
The superiority of formlessness was expressed in The Art of War (chapter 6), written two thousand years ago.
Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.
This is a reference to the famous koan, which can be found in the 101 Zen Stories collection.
Just as yellow leaves may be gold coins to stop the crying children, thus, the so-called secret moves and contorted postures appease the unknowledgeable martial artists.
Presenting yellow leaves as golden coins is a traditional example of the “skillful means” used by Zen teachers. Such acts are intended to be compassionate, rather than cunning or ignorant as Bruce Lee implies here.
The form of an attack is generally dictated by the form of the defense used by the opponent. In other words, between opponents of approximately the same caliber, an attack can rarely be successful unless it deceives or outwits the defense.
“Warfare is the tao of deceit”—Sun Tzu’s most famous quotation.
Prajna [wisdom] immovable doesn’t mean immovability or insensibility. It means that the mind is endowed with capabilities of infinite, instantaneous motion that knows no hindrance.
Takuan Soho, Zen Buddhist master of 17th century Japan, gave this instruction to the Shogun’s fencing teacher. It was subsequently reported by D. T. Suzuki in his essay, Zen and Japanese Culture.
Bruce Lee and Eric Hoffer
Eric Hoffer
We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone and we are not alone when we imitate. It is this with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
Secretiveness can be a source of pride. It is a paradox that secretiveness plays the same role as boasting: both are engaged in the creation of a disguise. Boasting tries to create an imaginary self, while secretiveness gives us the exhilarating feeling of being princes disguised in meekness. Of the two, secretiveness is the more difficult and effective. For the self-observant, boasting breeds self-contempt. Yet, it is as Spinoza said, “Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and they can moderate their desires more than their words.” Humility, however, is not verbal renunciation of pride but the substitution of pride for self-awareness and objectivity.
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. Yet, it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents as well.
That we pursue something passionately does not always mean that we really want it or have a special aptitude for it. Often, the thing we pursue most passionately is but a substitute for the one thing we really want and cannot have. It is usually safe to predict that the fulfillment of an excessively cherished desire is not likely to still our nagging anxiety. In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.
The entire contents of Tao of JKD pages 205-207 were copied verbatim from Eric Hoffer’s book, A Passionate State of Mind! Hoffer’s name is not mentioned anywhere in Tao of JKD.
Bruce Lee, Plagiarist?
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. (T.S. Eliot)
In this semi-biographical movie Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Lee is portrayed as a noble teacher of all who would learn the martial way, regardless of race or nationality. And The Tao of Jeet Kune Do exhorts the martial artist to investigate the root of martial arts, rather than focusing on its various branches and leaves.
Ironically, by neglecting to acknowledge its many sources, the book makes such an investigation needlessly difficult—especially for non-Chinese who lack the relevant cultural literacy. Perhaps this is why Jesse Glover, one of Lee’s first students, derided Tao of JKD as “…at best a poor joke on a great martial artist.”
To mistake Bruce Lee for a rebel or a radical would be a mistake. Wisely, he built his Jeet Kune Do on the shoulders of giants; their names are Lao Tzu, Eric Hoffer, Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Sun Tzu and Fritz Perls.
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14 responses so far ↓
1 Master Art Mason // Jun 30, 2008
Excellent Blog. Keep it up!
2 Alvin // Jun 30, 2008
Hi Chris,
I’ve responded to your post and comment back on my original post. I’ve enjoyed your blog and respect what you do here, at the same time I feel that your title ‘Bruce Lee, Plagiarist?’ is misleading.
It’s true that The Tao of JKD is pulled from various sources, but let’s not forget that it was a publication of Lee’s notes after his death by his widow Linda Lee, and so it’s a stretch to lay the blame on Lee on this one (I go into more detail on my blog’s comment).
Reading your conclusion, I don’t think that’s where you’re going with this post, but I hope you can clarify that one.
3 jon // Jul 1, 2008
Calling Lee a plagiarist will certainly get you lots of web traffic, unfortunately at the cost of your integrity and credibility. What was put together as a book were Lee’s notes, only a small portion of which were meant to be notes for a potential book. Lee kept so many notes, diaries, sketches and ideas jotted down that his estate is still putting them together in a cogent way. Much of this non-scandal would have been avoided if the “Tao” had been put together by a martial artist or someone with a background in philosophy, and eastern culture and literature. Inosanto was unfortunately not involved, and while Mrs. Lee-Cadwell gave some insight, she herself did not have the background to put much of the material in perspective. If you had done a tad bit more research, you would have found that many of the same quotes, passages and ideas are found in many repeated instances in Lee’s journals and notes, often with author citations and page numbers. A person who copies material repeatedly for their personal use does not usually cite it’s author every single time they add it to their notes. As someone who is a compulsive note-taker, I do this myself. You make the veiled assumption, somehow, that Lee’s handwritten notes, compiled after he died, are exactly as he would have wanted an organized, typed, proofed and edited manuscript to appear. And unfortunately, you have nothing to suggest why that would be. Lee was a philosophy student, he would have known any cribbed notes would have easily been discovered. Why would he have risked his reputation for lack of citing an authors name, as he had done at UW again and again as a basic rule?
Again, if a MA, a philosophy student and expert in eastern culture and lit. had organized his personal notes, he would have added the citations as he saw them. If a non-martial arts publishing company had published the book, they would have put it through a much more thorough proofing process, and the lack of citations would have been caught.
How many of us martial artists and self-improvement junkies have a box of journals filled with notes from seminars, Taoist quotes, bits of the Hagakure and the Book of Five Rings? All of us? Well, you better get out out your MLA guidebook and get in and edit that book of notes, because if a bus hits you tomorrow and your aunt throws your notes into a book, some kid in the coffee shop down the street may jump on his little blog and accuse your corpse of being a dishonest, fraudulent plagiarist. And increase his page hits, of course, there has to be an upside to defaming the dead, right?
4 Chris // Jul 1, 2008
Alvin,
Plagiarism is a fair question, and I do not apologize for posing it, even as I answer with a qualified No. Obviously, someone is responsible.
jon,
Here is another quote from Tao of JKD: “The book’s organization, however, could not have been justly done were it not for the patient attention of Danny Inosanto…”
You expect the reader to consult some other resource for proper attributions? You would send us to inspect Lee’s journals ourselves, while excusing the publisher from doing the same? Absurd. This book is in its forty-seventh printing.
You want to claim defamation, but your finger is pointing in the wrong direction.
P.S. I write here under my real, full name. Consider that while you sip your coffee.
5 Martial Arts Mom // Jul 1, 2008
I could be mistaken, or maybe the movie “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story was mistaken, but didn’t his wife, Linda, help him write the book when he was injured so severely in the fight? (And I apologize if this was just artistic license that the movie producers took.)
6 jon // Jul 1, 2008
You carefully avoided any point made in the post regarding the fact that none of Lee’s notes were prepared for publication, and the majority were not even intended for publication. You have to ignore this, or it exposes your insinuations of dishonesty for what they are; a publicity-seeking defamation based on a guess. You are right about the publisher being responsible for printing uncredited source material, a point I had already made. And seriously, an author, even a blog-level writer, actually attempting to mock the idea of a journalist going to source material before they published their opinions on it? Are you kidding? I understand you are not a real journalist, but seriously. Inosanto has said he had almost no input into the book, another googled tidbit a writer would know how to look up.
Listen, I am not defending a infallible myth of man who had, like all of us, many failings. I am annoyed at your re-hash of a non-story for the purpose of getting attention for yourself.
You have merely made a guess you are unable to back up with new new information, have failed to provide motivation or reasoning for the supposed actions, have ignored readily-found data that defeats your thesis, can’t defend the piece from reasonable arguments, ignore these points rather than counter them, and you mock the idea of reading the source material itself you make your claims about.
When you post this type of attack, you should expect people to respond. If you cannot counter the arguments, it exposes the fact that the piece was never of a level of quality to begin with, and should never have left your house.
And my name? What difference would my name make to what I did to your work? I rarely post a whole name online. Basic internet safety.
7 Alvin // Jul 2, 2008
Chris,
If you don’t mean to call Lee out as a plagiarist, perhaps you can think of amending that title and make it clearer.
8 Chris // Jul 2, 2008
Martial Arts Mom,
According to biographer Tom Bleecker:
jon,
It is you who has carefully avoided the point, that the reader should not have to purchase a second book to discover who actually wrote the first! And you carelessly ignored the very first paragraph above, where I acknowledge the source as Lee’s personal notes, published after his untimely death.
I don’t presume to know his original intentions, sir, while you presume to know mine. Putting aside the ad hominems, you haven’t done much to my thesis, which is: martial artists would benefit from knowing Lee’s own sources.
Alvin,
Duly noted.
9 Thomas // Jul 3, 2008
“If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” - Newton, who failed to attribute it to it’s originator, Bernard of Chartres. I didn’t know Lee, but I give him the benefit of the doubt that he was well-read enough to know he didn’t get where he was on his own, both philosophically and martially.
10 Richard // Aug 5, 2008
Hi, amongst all the mystery that appears to be surrounding this book, and sadly also all the insults flying around to each other; the book itself has been a great teaching aid to my young sons who often refer to it. It has been an inspiration to them and has taught them a lot whilst striving towards their black belts. Amongst many other things, it has helped me to teach them respect for life, knives and other weapons & discipline; so important, especially these days when we hear so many horror stories involving our youth. So for me, regardless of who wrote it, it’s a winner. Finally, does anyone know the biographical details of the book, i.e. 1st edition date/year, name of publisher etc? I’d be grateful for a reply.
Thanks - Richard - London
11 Chris // Aug 5, 2008
First edition published in 1975, by Ohara Publications Incorporated.
12 Richard A // Aug 6, 2008
Thanks Chris. It’s appreciated.
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