Bruce Lee's Tao of Aliveness
Bruce Lee's Tao of Aliveness
Meditations on the thought and influence of Bruce Lee, and the development of aliveness as a training construct.
Here’s an unpopular truth:
As an actual martial artist, Bruce Lee was not much more able than every third hotshot operating out of your local strip mall dojo.
As a martial arts thinker, however, he was a titan of the highest order.
And far, far ahead of his time.
Contact sparring is the closest endeavor to real fighting…this is the most practical way to train today.
from “Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method: The Complete Edition”
Bruce Lee had many rivalries in his Oakland and San Francisco days. One involved a local kung fu teacher by the name of Wong Jack-man, who stepped up to fight Bruce one on one.
After flailing his arms a bit and scratching Bruce, Wong proceeded to run away, where Bruce chased him until Wong finally gave up.
Bruce no doubt had won the match, easily, but he was nevertheless frustrated with his performance.
Bruce Lee’s ethos is plagued by an expansive mythology of apocryphal fights—perpetuated, no doubt, by mall katana-wielding, fedora flipping neckbeards who think fruit ninja is real sword training and Bleach is the best anime ever (it is clearly Evangelion).
The Wong Jack-man fight really happened, though, I think. There are multiple eye witnesses with consistent accounts of what happened, and the description and results are believable.
The Dragon is Stirred from his Sleep
Fanboys look at Bruce Lee’s frustration about his fight with Wong Jack-man and think, “wow he’s so amazing! He’s so excellent that he won and he still didn’t think he’s good enough!”
Their conception of it is as if Lee was some sort of anime character with a larger-than-life ability to fight, where S-Tier combative accomplishments are understated as trash because he’s just that cool and just that good.
I interpret Bruce Lee’s thoughts on this fight in a totally different way. I think Bruce’s discontent with his performance had nothing to do with being an unpleasable martial arts god or perfectionist.
Instead, I think this is the moment he realized the shackles placed upon him by his classical kung fu training.
It was the moment where The Dragon truly became aware of the Matrix that is conventional martial arts training.
Bruce Lee superfans have to pretend about his fighting prowess because, to them, that’s what makes him legendary. It bolsters the legitimacy and mystique of his jeet kune do system. Jeet kune do, as Lee taught it, is the chief artifact of his legacy in the eyes of martial artists who can only see formal systems and styles.
The philosophy stuff is cool to them, sure, but their social conditioning prevents them from appreciating just how legendary this aspect of his legacy truly is.
Among all his ideas, one would come to influence real martial arts practice in a massive way: aliveness. And it’s the very concept his fanboys tend to resist the most.
Foundations of Aliveness
Bruce Lee rises in notoriety in the 60s and into superstardom in the early 70s. During this time, classical karate, kung fu, and other traditional martial arts are exploding in popularity throughout the USA.
The blood and guts era of karate competition is in full swing. Karate tournaments are popular, but karate practice often looked more like kata and one steps than sparring.
Bruce Lee first made a name for himself by enraging half the karate community. He criticized their formal training methods in addition to parallel methods in his own kung fu experience.
It’s against this rigid scriptedness that Lee’s teaching in general, and specifically aliveness, is dialoging against.
Aliveness is a concept to which I have contributed original thought. In this section, I conclude with my own work on this concept, but only as one who stands on the shoulders of two giants: Bruce Lee and Matt Thornton.
Bruce Lee’s Aliveness: Authentic, Self-Expressive Movement
Bruce Lee seems to have coined the term “aliveness” in his own scattered notes, accessible to us through the posthumous collection, the Tao of Jeet Kune Do.
The only four mentions of aliveness in Tao of Jeet Kune Do are reproduced below, with my short commentary beneath each quotation.
Mere repetition of rhythmic, calculated movements robs combat movement of its “aliveness” and “ishness” — its reality. (p. 17)
Here Bruce sets aliveness against rote repetition—implying that aliveness is a feature of realism in combat. I take this to mean a sense of unscripted or self-determined movement.
Individual expression rather than mass product; aliveness rather than classicalism (true relationship). (p. 23)
Setting aliveness opposite “mass product” and “classicalism” supports the connection of aliveness conceptually to both natural (authentic) and unscripted movement. This is supported by the structure of the sentence as well, with the first phrase forming a parallel with the second.
Body Feel in Attack
PHYSICAL:
Consider balance before, during, after.
Consider air-tight defense before, during, after.
Learn to cut into the opponent’s moving tools and limit the ground for this agility.
Consider aliveness. (p. 50)
In this passage, Bruce Lee invites the reader to consider aliveness in the context of body feel during attack.
Use the feet cleverly to maneuver and combine balanced movement with aggression and protection. Above all, keep cool.
The foundation is sensitivity of aura.
The second is aliveness and naturalness.
Third is instinctive pacing (distance and timing).
The fourth is correct placement of the body.
The fifth is a balanced position at the end. (p. 144)
The fourth and final mention of aliveness relates it to footwork and distancing. He also once again connects it directly to naturalness, although in mentioning both together it would seem he thinks of them in different ways. I get the sense that Lee’s Muhammad Ali style footwork was one of the top things in mind when he talks about aliveness.
It’s not concrete what aliveness is to Bruce Lee in these fragments, but we have good clues that his intention was close to the concept as we understand it today.
One thing that is for sure is that it’s intimately related to authentic self-expression: moving as one feels he should move, naturally, breaking free of the forms and patterns of classical martial arts.
In ecological terms, you can also see glimmers of what we call embodied cognition and embodied perception. That is, being so embedded in your environment, so attuned to it and your body inside of it, that you feel your way through it—skillfully in the way that only bodily intuition can be—rather than think through it like some analyst.
Bruce Lee’s aliveness began practically with removing the constraints around how you must move, and where you learn movements from, but it ends philosophically with something far more fundamental and profound:
the unburdening of oneself from form entirely.
Matt Thornton’s Aliveness: Timing, Energy, and Motion
Matt Thornton is a veteran MMA coach and a lifelong martial artist. He trained across jeet kune do, Filipino martial arts (FMA), boxing, jiu jitsu, and beyond.
During his JKD and FMA training, he noticed a serious problem: most of practice time was taken up by drills where attackers and defenders both engaged in artificial, unrealistic behaviors.
Aliveness is about the freedom to use whatever works in the moment. It’s the right action at right time…A freedom that is only fully felt when one is completely immersed in the present moment of now, and free of the burden of beliefs, which manifest as thoughts. It is a clear mind, fully aware of reality as it is now, and operating with absolute synchronicity within time and space. That is the real beginning of Aliveness.
- Matt Thornton, Why Aliveness?
Matt was trying to reach JKD and FMA people at the time, so he invoked and expanded an idea of Bruce Lee: aliveness. In this iteration, he defines aliveness as practice that embodies timing, energy, and motion.
Thornton further unpacks each part of his aliveness definition:
Timing: not choreographed or scripted
Energy: real effort, force, intention, often applied with a progressive sense of resistance
Motion: movement, footwork, use of space
To Thornton, aliveness is a modality through which the esoteric teachings of martial arts become empirically testable and thus verifiable and falsifiable. No more hypothetical arguments about what is or isn’t effective, and no more fights about the lineage and provenance of techniques.
I think when you do things with such high repetitions without resistance, it tends to actually make you sloppy.
- Matt Thornton
The Limitations of Thornton’s Aliveness: Language and Application
Matt Thornton’s development of the content and meaning of aliveness was probably just as revolutionary as Bruce Lee’s original coining of the term. But Thornton’s work on aliveness is not without drawbacks, in my opinion.
First, Matt Thornton’s definition of aliveness is not properly a definition, in the sense that every constituent element of the definition requires its own specialized definition in order for the top-level definition to be usable as intended.
In other words, if you were to tell, say, a karate instructor, that he needs timing, energy, and motion in his training, he’ll agree with you and insist that he already does. Because, in his mind, he trains all of those things—but according to his own conception of what they are.
This is not a flaw in the concept, please understand. Rather, it is in my opinion a flaw in the delivery of the concept, its communication.
Second, Matt Thornton’s functional application of aliveness leaves too much room for what we in the ecological camp would call uncoupled training methods.
Thornton’s I-Method, for example, sometimes has his training begin with an introduction to a technique. This does, to my understanding, entail some sort of static or rote repetition, even if it’s brief.
Editor’s Note: I originally claimed all SBG trainings this way, but Matt Thornton was kind enough to read this article and offer correction on this point. I-Method classes do not always begin with an introduction phase.
The technique itself is meant to, somehow, impart principles or concepts. As eco dynamics thinkers, however, we understand that this is not how things work. You don’t draw abstractions out of rote movements, even if they involve a partner.
Instead, you develop information control laws that become increasingly higher order in nature: detecting not just individual tactics but the relationship of affordances (or openings) to one another.
Uncoupled methods, such as drills where the movements are dictated by a coach rather than the opponent, are also included in stage 2 of the I-Method, isolation, where most of the aliveness is supposed to take place.
I’m always being asked: “What’s best, this style or that style? Why don’t you drill anymore? Why do you say this doesn’t work but this works?”
All these questions become answered immediately once the person understands for themselves what aliveness means…one thousand questions are answered. [Aliveness] is everything.
- Matt Thornton, What is Aliveness
Pursuing formlessness
Despite the widespread adoption of the term aliveness across the martial arts world, dead training still clogs up practice time across modern and traditional martial arts alike.
By raw force of philosophy and a little empiricism, thinkers like Lee and Thornton were able to conclude that live, combative, authentic practice environments are the single most important aspect of martial arts training.
But without firm theoretical foundation in domain-specific sciences, they ultimately could not weed out ineffective and/or suboptimal training methods inherited from the old way of doing things.
Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.
- Bruce Lee
Moreover, they could not quite liberate themselves from the technique-based shackles of tradition.
Therefore, the principles of ecological dynamics and CLA compelled me to greater language precision and clearer methodological differentiation. It’s for this reason I built upon both Lee and Thornton to develop my own definition of aliveness.
Josh Peacock’s Aliveness: Unscripted and Uncooperative Interaction
While down a YouTube wormhole many years ago, I noticed something very troubling about “practical” karate and taekwondo videos.
I’ve come to learn two iron laws about how my traditional martial arts (TMA) brethren think and operate: they adopt popular language (like aliveness) and then they “karate-fy” it and pretend that their new abomination is what the thing was all along.
Aliveness is no exception. Here’s an example of a practice exercise that’s touted as live but is not alive by any definition of the term:
The uke here is totally cooperative and does not offer any intelligent interaction. He doesn’t even maintain a sparring stance but sort of fumbles and shuffles around.
It’s embarrassing to those of us who love karate and taekwondo—and very telling—that the most resistant and unreachable group of martial artists to ecological concepts is the same group that set itself most intensely against Bruce Lee’s ideas during his time.
So what is to be done about this?
An Iron Definition of Aliveness
Bruce Lee never ceased trying to reach the traditional martial arts community with his teachings on aliveness and formlessness, and neither will I.
Here’s my gameplan to manage and mitigate the pitfalls of reaching out to the traditional martial arts community:
Define terms in a way that is immediately precise and does not leave room for creative reinterpretation.
Give zero inches.
Why give zero inches? Because I know these people. If you give an inch, they’ll take three miles and create a shanty town.
If they’re going to learn, everything needs to be precisely defined to a razor’s edge, no wiggle room, and in stark unambiguous opposition to their worst sacred cows. Trust me.
So:
After torturing for years over the most fundamental aspects of aliveness, I finally boiled everything down as precisely as possible to these two elements:
Unscripted and uncooperative interaction.
Alternatively, you could describe it as in-sport tactical behavior that’s self-determined and genuinely antagonistic.
I use “and” in my definition as a strict logical operator: it cannot be unscripted or uncooperative or else the aliveness is broken. It is always “and.” The two must exist in tandem or they do not matter.
Put another way, the training is dead. Behavior will not be realistic enough to provide the most useful information and feedback to learners.
Your training is either alive or it is not, and that is that.
The Master’s Legacy
Bruce Lee was not a fighter, but his thinking and philosophy on training were far ahead of his time.
Unlike many traditional martial arts masters of his era, he stressed the value of sparring and strove to move away from idealized technique toward authenticity and practical function.
A fighter who trains without sparring is like a swimmer who hasn’t immersed in water.
- Bruce Lee,
Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method (2008)
It’s for this reason that I think of Bruce Lee as the master of the past 50 years of development in martial arts training philosophy.
“If You Focus on the Finger…”
The foundational philosophy of jeet kune do tells me Bruce Lee’s mind was already transcending techniques, but he did not know yet how to get away from it in practice.
Look no further than this famous quote of his:
I do not fear the man who does 10,000 kicks once, but the man that does one kick 10,000 times.
Context matters—technique repetitions do not. It doesn’t matter if you get 10,000 reps of one kick because that’s not how you actually develop functional skill in kicking. And, as a taekwondo master, I feel confident authoritatively declaring at least one thing: there are not 10,000 different kicks. So that’s DOA.
Deep down, I think Bruce Lee would have agreed.
So where do we go from here?
Nonlinear pedagogy, also known as the constraints-led approach, perfects Bruce Lee’s philosophy by offering a framework whereby practice can truly transcend form and instead focus on function and individuality.
“…You’ll Miss all that Heavenly Glory”
I can’t fault Lee for not independently reaching my very particular and complex ecological pedagogy from his standpoint way back in the 70s.
Rather, I must acknowledge that I am indebted to him, because reading his work as a much younger man prepared me to adopt eco dynamics as a theory and the constraints-led approach as a methodology.
In fact, in the early days of my exploration of motor learning and skill acquisition, I explicitly related what I was reading to the teachings of Bruce Lee about adaptability and self-expression. Coming from such a traditional background, this undoubtedly facilitated such a radical change in philosophy for me.
These few paragraphs are, at best, a “finger pointing to the moon.” Please do not take the finger to be the moon or fix your gaze so intently on the finger as to miss all the beautiful sights of heaven. After all, the usefulness of the finger is in pointing away from itself to the light which illumines finger and all.
- Bruce Lee, “Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate,” Black Belt Magazine
The majority of Lee’s followers, however, became fixated on the finger, as it were…and in the process, missed all the glory of what the JKD philosophy could have done for their own practice as martial artists.
It’s amazing that every jeet kune do instructor obsessed with the every jot and tiddle of what Lee taught—and the lineage of transmission—could almost certainly quote the above scene from Enter the Dragon…
Yet they universally fail to understand it.
They look at exactly what Lee did, freeze it in time, and try to teach and replicate that. They search for techniques across martial arts not to help themselves move the way their bodies really want to move but to collect more distinct, discrete ways to move, to absorb more styles and patterns.
All this is the pursuit of form, not formlessness.
Jeet Kune Do is just a name used, a boat to get one across, and once across it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one’s back.
- Bruce Lee, “Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate,” Black Belt Magazine
Bruce Lee, of course, corresponds to the finger in this analogy. He generated the jeet kune do philosophy, popularized it, and taught it. But he meant for it—and himself—merely to be a vehicle to something greater, something which transcends form or technique.
His disciples, so to speak, have largely done the exact opposite.
I remember over a decade ago stumbling across a website by an individual purely dedicated to explaining what he called his “personal jeet kune do.” According to him, it consisted of a blend of techniques and tactics from aikido, karate, ninjutsu (snort), and some other things.
But this is the exact thing Bruce Lee taught against:
I have not invented a "new style," composite, modified or otherwise that is set within distinct form as apart from "this" method or "that" method. On the contrary, I hope to free my followers from clinging to styles, patterns, or molds. Remember that Jeet Kune Do is merely a name used, a mirror in which to see "ourselves". . .Either you understand or you don't, and that is that.
- Bruce Lee, “Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate,” Black Belt Magazine
Sadly, it is clear, from what I’ve seen, most supposed followers of Bruce Lee’s teachings in fact do not understand it. And that’s that.
Bruce Lee Belongs to Eco Now
Shawn Myszka and Tyler Yearby published an academic paper synthesizing Bruce Lee’s thought with the ecological approach to sports training.
In a landmark follow-up paper, they take the concept of aliveness and apply it to understanding how to set up better training exercises across all sports. They recast it as framework for facilitating practice environments that promote problem-solving under realistic game conditions.
This is a big deal to me because it formally and academically links Bruce Lee, a thinker who I admire, to the theory and practice methodology to which I’ve devoted the last 8 years of my life understanding and communicating.
Unlike coaches from other sports, martial arts coaches of nearly every style have some influence from Bruce Lee, directly or indirectly. This includes coaches who have adopted the ecological approach to training.
I’m not the only one whose affinity for ecological thinking was primed and calibrated by prior exposure to the philosophy of Bruce Lee. I’m sure an army of others, upon slogging through the dense academic literature on eco and CLA, eventually realized, “hey, some of this is very similar to what Bruce Lee said.”
Jeet Kune Do is about freeing your mind.
- Bruce Lee
It’s on these grounds, then, that we can add Bruce Lee to the prestigious ranks of Nicholai Bernstein, Brunswik, Keith Davids, Duarte Araujo, Ian Renshaw, and others as key influences on the ecological approach.
Not ecological dynamics proper, but the ecological approach to martial arts, uniquely for martial artists. Us. Our thing.
While Bruce Lee did not teach and practice the exact principles we do, he created and influenced the categories and language we used to help us adopt the ecological approach. Further, he helped us contextualize it into a practice unique to us.
Today, martial artists are increasingly leading the way in the practical application of the constraints-led approach, garnering attention from major ecological researchers.
Today, aliveness is being adopted as a way to understand ecological practice even in other sports, far outside the purview of what Bruce Lee affectionately called martial art.
So here’s a big ecological thank you to Bruce Lee, the Dragon, who first pointed the way to aliveness.