The Way of the Martial Artist

Ki and the Way of the Martial Arts Paperback – August 12, While technical prowess and physical power are essential characteristics of a martial artist, true mastery of the art comes by cultivating one's inner strength. The Zen Way to Martial Arts: A Japanese Master Reveals.
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In practicing the martial arts, the sifu can become great by striving for precision; but the middle-aged businessman, the earnest young mother as well as the distracted teenager, all potentially wise as well, can strive for precision -- and think of perfection. The reach to develop our heroic nature is worked out in the plain everyday details of our daily lives, and its underlying passion central to a person's individual calling.

The greatest gift of self-proficiency is the relaxed, confident feeling it generates inside. That sense of assurance comes from the knowledge that one has prepared properly, and that everything is under control to the extent that any situation can be within one's control. Open-minded, clear-headed common sense is the ready position for any confrontation: The overwhelming majority of those who train diligently in the martial arts never achieve even a modicum of celebrity or wealth, but they do achieve something significant in their own lives.

An obscure martial artist is still a true martial artist, and that intrinsically is a great achievement because the meaning lies in the difficulty of the effort itself. It reflects the oldest and most basic conflict faced by man since the beginning of time -- the conflict of good versus evil. The martial artist and the warrior need to believe in the meaningfulness and importance of his actions.

He believes in the power of goodness and virtue and its ability to eventually triumph over the forces of evil and darkness. He holds the conviction that, somewhere along the line, what he is and does will make a difference in his actual experience.

Bruce Lee The Tao of Gung Fu: A Study in the Way of Chinese Martial Art by Bruce Lee

The warrior exults in the excitement of the battle for a good cause, relishes the joys of victory, and perseveres in the face of defeat. He upholds a faith that his sacrifices will he worth even the ultimate price. At the same time, there is another battle looming internally, inside his mind. The martial Way may involve fighting with others, but fighting against oneself is the more difficult challenge. During a lifetime, an individual will have many opportunities to overcome his imperfections and amoral tendencies. His human nature will at times turn him to thoughts of desire, fame and profit.

These forces threaten to keep him in a cycle of greed, lust and delusion. The average person is all too preoccupied with his cravings for pleasure, wealth and other worldly enjoyments. The vast preponderance of his thinking revolves around his wishes, troubles, and hopes. Such tendencies are an innate part of man's being and are not sinful; but if they remain unchecked, they lead to greed, fear and alienation. If one pursues a virtuous path, worldly success may be a result or by-product to be enjoyed.

However, that is all they represent and nothing more. Attaining A Lasting Inner Peace Without a moral and spiritual context, one cannot attain a lasting, inner peace.

Breathing Is Everything

That is because happiness cannot be fully defined in terms of wealth, power, fame or even posterity. Knowing this, an individual can push back his concern with possessions and status, and raise his lot in life by consciously making direct choices about who he is, what he has, and what he does. The martial artist who trains with discipline and lives with virtue attains an aura of energy, focus and dominance. He feels it in every fiber of his body, and this kind of power becomes self-evident even to his opponent.

When this surge of power occurs, he will overwhelm his opponent. This kind of personal power goes beyond physical strength and technical ability. It is the force of a calm, resolute mind that will not accept fear or failure. Don Juan sums it up this way when he describes how a warrior, as an impeccable hunter who hunts power, becomes a man of knowledge: This is how he becomes a "luminous" being. For each and every person, happiness means using his wealth wisely, knowing that his assets and accomplishments have accumulated without detriment to others, and that he is free of indebtedness to anyone.

Knowing that life is finite, the only viable choice is to relish it day by day, moment by moment. Otherwise, at death's door a man may realize too late that he has not made good use of what he has had.


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The Pursuit of Simplicity vs. Excess When a martial artist practices a kata with care, everyone around him knows it; and when he does it carelessly, that is recognized as well even though nothing may be said. When one sits down to take a meal, a cup of tea is as good as a glass of vintage wine even though the latter may seem far more costly and rare. In the memoirs of Gichin Funakoshi, the founder of modern karate, he followed some daily habits in his adult life. For example, he awoke early in the morning, dressed and combed his hair, a process that sometimes took an hour.

He believed that a samurai must always have an impeccable appearance. Afterwards, he would turn in the direction of the Imperial Palace and bow to the emperor. Only after these rites were completed would he sip his morning tea. The pursuit of simplicity, of restraint over excess, makes a man more attentive to the beauty of the everyday. In life's thousand and one daily details, seeing the value of one thing or another comes down to a matter of choice.


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Whether a martial artist is fighting for his life or grooming himself, there are no ordinary moments. If he transforms everything he does into an act of training, then everything he does becomes important. Anything that is important is worthy of his thought, effort and attention. Understanding the difference between knowing and not knowing lets him walk down the path with a peaceful heart.

Then he may find that all the power, grace and beauty that he seeks is already within his reach. But he must open his eyes and his mind to see them. It was Socrates in the West who first taught us that the most important convergence occurs within our selves. This kind of education has many by-products -- some good, some bad -- all of them disturbing. Only much later does the student know that the "splinter of Socratic irony" has entered his spirit, an occurrence for which he will be always grateful.

For the ways in which a person understands the reality of our world are via his mind, body, and spirit. Until all three aspects are integrated, a person is not yet whole and therefore, not fully capable of seeing the whole world. In particular, the convergent capacities of the mind not only determine what one knows but also how one evaluates what one knows. It expands the imagination and engenders clarity of thought and action. The objective is no less than the Socratic ideal of an individual who thinks for himself, uses independent judgment, and acts with deliberate choice.

Can a martial artist be virtuous if he feels satisfaction in harming someone else? What good is knowledge of something if that knowledge is not infused with a sense of virtue? Can an immoral person really understand the truth? Can reality be perceived by an unjust mind? Finally and perhaps most importantly, can one really know and believe in something and then fail to implement it?

An individual can only contemplate the ideal human character from the perspective of personal transcendence. There is a deep affinity between personal transformation and the external world. Modern Western philosophy has long proposed the concept that the emergence of reason and order reveals itself gradually through the long dialectic of historical events.

In particular, the German philosopher Hegel, in his seminal work The Phenomenology of Mind published in , described how the adoption of intellect and organization leads both individuals and societies onto progressively higher forms of spirituality or geist. However, the belief that human beings are moving inexorably, if however haphazardly, towards higher forms of consciousness has been seriously challenged by the events of the last hundred years.

The skeptics point to the layers of racism, dogmatism and material deprivation that still envelops much of the world. The victims of recurring wars, genocide, disease and ignorance in the twentieth century gave credence to the pessimistic dictum that the dark side of human nature has changed very little over the last 40, years. Can we blame them for holding the view that life offers a cyclical or static existence to which time provides very little that is new? For those who care about such questions, which worldview -- sustained progress or recurring cyclicality -- does one embrace?

Martial arts practice teaches students to take a larger view of life. The fusion of cognition and action is the ultimate test for the martial artist. For the individual, the ultimate convergence is the marriage of a disciplined, physical force and a spiritual, moral force.

To be a true martial artist, one must train hard. But one must also be a good citizen, be a good parent, do good deeds, and think good thoughts. It is important and useful to have a powerful punch and a fast kick, but the value of living a virtuous life is the most essential aspect of training. Only then can a martial artist put into practice the Way of goodness and thereby discard the Way of violence and aggression. In Heidegger's terms, the martial arts can increase our power over oneself and others, but it is for naught if a person does not retain a direct connection to humanity, to his relatedness with others.

No matter how brilliant and powerful, an individual is but a link in the chain of humanity and cannot exist as an isolated point in time and space. An individual can attain a mastery over other beings but lose the sense of Being itself. How does the intelligent individual break free from his isolated thinking? How does he maintain a connection with his physical presence and his emotional depth? Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Jul 16, Vaishali rated it it was amazing Shelves: Each line in this book is a precious drop of cool water on a sweltering summer day Few pages, but so packed with jewels you want to stay with each sentence forever.

Long live the great, mighty Bruce Lee. A simple life is one of plainness in which profit is discarded, cleverness abandoned, selfishness eliminated, and desires reduced. A life of hamony, unity, contentment, tranquility, constancy, enlight Absolutely blown away. A life of hamony, unity, contentment, tranquility, constancy, enlightenment, peace, and long life. One should do nothing that is not natural or spontaneous; the important thing is not to strain in any way. When activity yang reaches the extreme point, it become inactivity; and inactivity forms yin.

Extreme inactivity returns to become activity, which is yang. Activity is the cause of inactivity and visa versa. Contrary to popular belief, the yin principle, as softness and pliableness, is to be associated with life and survival. Because he can yield, a man can survive. The mind is trained to direct the movement of the body.

HxH (Extended) - The Legend of the Martial Artist

The mind wills and the body behaves. To perform the right technique, physical loosening must be continued in a mental and spiritual loosening, so as to make the mind not only agile, but free. A gung fu man has to remain calm and quiet, and practice no-mindedness. No-mindedness is not a blank mind that excludes all emotions.

The gung fu man employs his mind as a mirror: It receives but does not keep. No mindedness, then, is not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked. It is a mind immune to emotional influences. No mindedness is to employ the whole mind as we use the eyes when we rest them upon various objects but make no special effort to take anything in.

These are the principles of mental hygiene. Concentration in gung fu does not have the usual sense of restricting the attention to a single sense object, but is simply a quiet awareness of whatever happens to be here and now. When dealing with many opponents, as soon as one is disposed of, he will move on to another without permitting the mind to stop with any. This is only possible when the mind moves from one object to another without being stopped or arrested by anything. The mind is present everywhere because it is nowhere attached to any particular object. The flow of thought is like water filling a pond, which is always ready to flow off again.

A gung fu man aims at harmony with himself and his opponent. In other words, a gung fu man promotes the spontaneous development of his opponent and does not venture to interfere by his own action. Wu wei means the governing action or spirit action, in the sense that the governing force is the mind and not the senses. During sparring, a gung fu man learns to forget about himself… he lets his mind remain spontaneous and ungrasped. As soon as he stops to think, his flow of movement will be disturbed and he is immediately struck by his opponent.

Placidly free from anxiety, one acts with the opportune time; one moves and revolves in the line of creation. A gung fu man, if he is really good, is not proud at all. So in order to realize his true self, a gung fu man lives without being dependent upon the opinions of others. A gung fu master, unlike the beginner, holds himself in reserve, is quiet and unassuming, without the least desire to show off. To him, fame and status mean nothing.

Bruce Lee The Tao of Gung Fu: A Study in the Way of Chinese Martial Art

Let the mind think what it wants without interference by the separate thinker or ego within oneself. When his private ego and conscious efforts yield to a power not his own, he then achieves the supreme action: Establish nothing in regard to oneself. Let things be what they are, move like water, rest like a mirror, respond like an echo, pass quickly like the nonexistent and be quiet as purity. Those who gain, lose. Those who speak do not know. The heart is humble, but the work is forceful. The highest skill operates on an almost unconscious level.

Who can make muddy water clear? But if allowed to remain still, it will become clear itself. He wins because he cannot choose. In the waist, not the limbs, lies the mainspring of the movements of the body. One turning of a big axis is equivalent to hundreds of turnings of small axes. Attain complete vacuity, and sedulously preserve a state of repose. Mighty is he who conquers himself. Inside your energy must not stop, your mind being ahead of your opponent all the time. He who knows it not will be blasted and withered by misfortune.

That man in whom truth is bright has no anger. Jan 28, Dan rated it really liked it. Great beginning guide to Wing-Chun. May 24, Jason Langley rated it it was amazing.


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    • I truly believe Bruce Lee is one of the greatest martial arts of all time. This book is a glimpse into the mind of genius. Feb 07, Josiah added it. A good explanation of the more metaphysical aspects of "hard work". The Art of Fighting Without Fighting. The work is a mirror of the classic TV series Kung Fu and is a more in-depth teaching of the lessons given to James Franciscus' character in the short lived TV series Longstreet. The follow-up Jeet Kune Do is much easier to understand after reading this book. In order to understand both books they must be read in the aforementioned order.

    The author teaches the basics from good posture and simple self-defense to reacting without thinking during combat situations. The author explains how in situations where a person's life is in jeopardy certain thoughts can slow the reaction time like a poison injected into the body leading to that person's physical harm or death.

    The author also imbues his essays with the important knowledge that a teacher should not be afraid to learn from their students while imparting knowledge to the student. I should consider a reboot of Kung Fu with up and coming Asian martial artists as Caine and the Shoalin priests that teach him. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. My husband recommended this book to me. It is one of his favorites, but I honestly knew nothing about it when he left it on my pillow one night, in exchange for the first volume of Harry Potter which I'd left on his office chair.

    I did not ask him about it and I still haven't yet , because I wanted to go into the book with an open mind. I am not a martial artist nor am I a philosopher, so I didn't want to make an assumption that I would not understand it or be interested in it. What was great w My husband recommended this book to me.