Bruce Lee’s “Style of No Style”
The three stages of intellectual development in the martial arts (or any other field)
Bruce Lee (1940-1973) was a legendary, one-of-a-kind martial artist who achieved self-actualization. His teaching on the three stages in pursuing of mastery of the martial arts will be the subject of this article.
Born to Chinese parents in 1940, Bruce spent his first eighteen years on the island of Hong Kong, where he learned—and became highly proficient at—the traditional Chinese kung fu style of Wing Chun. A true fighting prodigy, he later sought out and studied many additional martial arts styles—including other forms of kung fu, American boxing, fencing, karate, and judo—and incorporated many techniques from them into his own style.
Cleanly defeating every martial artist that challenged him, Bruce bragged that his traditional style of Wing Chun—which still formed the base of his fighting technique—was superior to all other styles. At age twenty-seven, however, he renounced the idea of martial art styles entirely, and founded his own martial arts school to which he gave the name Jeet Kune Do, and where he taught what he called “the style of no style.”
When, years later, he was asked which fighting style was the most effective, he answered: “there is no such thing as an effective segment of a totality.”
By that, I mean that I personally do not believe in the word style. Why? Because unless there are human beings with three arms and four legs, unless we have another group of beings on earth that are structurally different from us, there can be no different style of fighting. Why is that? Because we have only two hands and two legs. The most important thing is, how can we use them to the maximum?1
There were, he would teach at his school, “three stages of cultivation” in the martial arts (and any endeavor in general). “The first stage,” he said, “is the primitive stage.”
It is a stage of original ignorance in which a person knows nothing about the art of combat. In a fight, he simply blocks and strikes instinctively without concern for what is right and wrong. Of course, he may not be so-called scientific, but, nevertheless, being himself, his attacks and defenses are fluid.
This was the stage Bruce Lee was at in his youth, when he got into countless street fights—nearly all of which he won—on the streets of Hong Kong, long before he started his training in martial arts. Here, the person fights wholly on instinct, emotion, and split-second judgment, and improves primarily through rote experience in unstructured fighting.
And Bruce Lee continues:
The second stage—the stage of sophistication, or mechanical stage—begins when a person starts his training. He is taught the different ways of blocking, striking, kicking, standing, breathing, and thinking. Unquestionably, he has gained the scientific knowledge of combat, but unfortunately his original self and sense of freedom are lost, and his action no longer flows by itself. His mind tends to freeze at different movements for calculations and analysis, and even worse, he might be called “intellectually bound” and maintain himself outside of actual reality.
This was Bruce Lee’s stage after he began learning Wing Chun from his Chinese kung fu master. It is a stage where, as Bruce Lee said, “you become all of a sudden a mechanical man,” robotically following the formulas taught to you by others. But, as he pointed out, “formulas can only inhibit freedom, externally dictated prescriptions can only squelch creativity and assure mediocrity.”2
Then he described the final stage:
The third stage—the stage of artlessness, or spontaneous stage—occurs when, after years of serious and hard practice, the student realizes that after all, gung fu is nothing special. And instead of trying to impose on his mind, he adjusts himself to his opponent like water pressing on an earthen wall. It flows through the slightest crack. There is nothing to try [to] do but try to be purposeless and formless, like water. All of his classical techniques and standard styles are minimized, if not wiped out, and nothingness prevails. He is no longer confined.
This was the stage Bruce reached after he shucked his reliance on martial arts styles. At this stage, as one Bruce Lee biographer summarized, the person has “thoroughly comprehended the universal principles that regulate all forms of combat.” And these principles are, as Bruce stated, using your two arms and two legs to accomplish “the utmost” with the “minimum movements and energy.”3 Understanding this, the fighter “at the highest level of cultivation” knows that “circumstances must dictate what you do,” and can dynamically adjust to the real situation and his current opponent.4 You “adapt to whatever the object is in front of you,” Bruce said, summarizing the fundamental principles of fighting, “and the clumsier, the more limited the object, the easier it is for you to pot-shot it. That’s what it amounts to!”5
And once a person becomes capable of this, all of the fixed, separate, named categories of technique he learned over the years fall away too. “The best illustration” of this, said Bruce, “is something I borrowed from Ch’an (Zen):”
Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just a punch, a kick was just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I’ve understood the art, a punch is just a punch, a kick is just a kick.6
And it is reaching this third stage of mastery in a discipline that is—as Bruce Lee well knew—a major milestone on the road to self-actualization (a term Bruce was highly familiar with, being as he was a contemporary of Abraham Maslow). It requires, Bruce Lee wrote, “doing one’s best, dedicating one’s self wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an ongoing process.”7 And “in my process,” Bruce continued, describing his own psychological development, “I have changed from self-image actualization”—a term Bruce invented to mean putting on a façade, and choosing your words and your actions to project a false image of how you want others to see you—“to self-actualization, from blindly following propaganda, organized truths, etc., to search[ing] internally for the cause of my ignorance.”8
This article is adapted from my third book, Self-Actualized by Poker: The Path from Categorical Learning to Free-Thinking. The full book can be found here.
The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee, John Little, page 106-107
Ibid, pp 124, 113
Ibid, p 119
Ibid, p 164
Ibid, p 119
Ibid, p 119
Ibid, p 133
Ibid, pp 133, 128