Today martial artists acknowledge Bruce Lee as the force for popularizing the art of kicking ass rooted in China’s Shaolin Temple, source of Far East fighting arts. Yet the original force behind the Shaolin legacy is Bodhidharma. The blue eyed, bearded monk from India founded Shaolin kung fu. He was a monk, not a warrior. More importantly, Bodhidharma is the founder of Zen (Chan in Chinese) – a way of awakening based on sitting meditation.

Meditation improves our martial skills. The focused mind, emotionally calm,  and mentally clear liberates our fighting responses; they become natural, spontaneous and efficient. This is especially important during a fearful situation. True power is rooted in the mind not the body. The old masters teach meditation as a potent way to help control our body’s reactions. We learn to recover from panic. Breathe. We become more intuitive. If we think of the mind as a muscle, then meditation is push ups for the mind. After consistent practice, the mind gets stronger, flexible and concentrated. And we discover secrets of the body, subtleties in executing technique that we once thought we knew.

Beyond Bruce Lee and kicking ass, the true value of regularly sitting cross legged will enhance our daily lives by reducing stress and finding a discipline of stillness. There are further benefits for those who delve deeper into Bodhidharma’s teachings to become inner warriors who seek awakening.

The Evolving Martial Artist works to get the edge. You want it? Meditate.

Lawrence Tan

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There are life lessons everywhere, even in the most unlikely of places. For the Evolving Martial Artist, fighting is a metaphor for life. Engaging a daunting adversary who hits and inflicts pain is like entering the every day battles of life. Hell, it hurts.

Tough lessons are often employed by Shaolin kung fu masters to teach the tough demands of combat. And life. In American history, the Gold Rush brought people to the Black Hills of South Dakota and as the camp grew, a town sprung up around the prospecting. David Milch’s ground breaking Western HBO series Deadwood, based on real characters and events in the Old West, was a study in human evolution and our struggle to bring chaos to order.

In this scene from Deadwood, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) the complex protagonist, ruthless and brutal, yet with his own morals, loyalties,and even, at times, kindness, imparts a life lesson to the Deadwood’s newspaper publisher, A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones) who is demoralized by violent misfortune, after being threatened, finds his office and printing press vandalized and in ruin. In Swearengen we see a classic example of the Eastern zen slap or as we say in the West, a kick in the ass.

However crude, it is wisdom for martial artists and non-martial artists alike.

Lawrence Tan & Toni Josephson

One of our evolving martial artists, Arnuld, commented in response to our Bruce Lee Mythology post. He asked if Bruce Lee invented the ideas of having no style and formless technique. Here are some thoughts:

Lee’s Influence

Bruce Lee was influential in modernizing traditional martial arts through his Jeet Kune Do philosophy. He was innovative, though not original, in his modern expression of ancient Chinese thoughts. As an iconoclast, Lee was critical of orthodox secrecy and exclusiveness, anachronistic training methods, forms and lack of realistic sparring. While he popularized martial arts, Lee used more creative rearrangement than invention.

Wu Men, Wu Pai: No Style

Bruce Lee was an avid reader of Chinese martial art pop fiction, known as knight errant tales (wu xia xiao xuo).  A common theme is a mysterious swordsman who appears out of nowhere to save the day, with unorthodox fighting  referred to as “wu men, wu pai.” This translates as “no style, no system”. The master is expressing the Daoist idea of the martial art zenith, beyond form, system and technique. It is the ability to move naturally and spontaneously in the way (the Dao) of movement. This may have influenced Lee.

Wu Xing: Formlessness

All of Bruce Lee’s “modern” ideas are rooted in ancient tradition. They are taken from Zen Buddhism and in particular, his ideas echo Daoism, China’s spiritual philosophy of nature. The motto of JKD, “use no way as your way and to use no limitation as your limitation” is classic Daoist thought. When Lee expounds on being shapeless and formless (wu xing) and to “become like water” as a metaphor for expressing technique and strategy, he is paraphrasing famous verses from Lao Tzu’s 2,500 year old text, the Dao De Jing.

Dao – The Way

Daoism teaches mastery of life and all of its disciplines through the discovery of, and adherence to, the Way (Dao). The Way means taking a path that follows natural laws. According to Lee’s interpretation of the Dao, this meant that both forms and styles are unnatural and unnecessary. While traditionalists would agree that the ultimate goal is transcendence of form, forms are first taught as an essential foundation — believing that you cannot transcend what you have not experienced.

To Lee, this ultimate stage of having no style justified his rejection of classical systems and form training, the very methodology of kung fu. Lee’s philosophy, though subjective, has liberated the arcane elements of classical martial arts. It brings to mind that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Or in this case, under the Dao.

What do you think about this question and our answer? You can read Arnuld’s comment under our Bruce Lee Mythology post. And visit his website

Lawrence Tan & Toni Josephson

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The Japanese poetic form Haiku communicates these little insightful “Zen” moments. In its simplicity, haiku conveys clean expression with few words. Content, meaning and color combine in compressed form as a clear mental image captures a feeling. It is the experience of fleeting things and change, like the seasons. Little life moments. Experienced and shared. Happening.

The social media microblogging site Twitter has a Zen quality. The premise of Twitter? Answer the question “what are you doing”? Each post, called a tweet is like a haiku – a fluid expression of a moment in time. Though Twitter doesn’t follow the formal haiku structure (3 lines; 5/7/5 syllables), here one is unburdened by verbosity (there is a 140 character limit on Twitter posts) as our human travails and observations are expressed. Little life moments. Experienced and shared. Happening.

Here’s our Zen moment (really), while writing this was posted on Twitter by fakelvis:

“A cup of tea in bed, antithetical, but I love it.”

Toni Josephson

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A vast human sea of 2,008 martial artists clad in white move in graceful precision at the opening ceremony of the Bejing Olympics. It is difficult to believe it isn’t CGI. It isn’t. One figure’s perfected skill is reflected in the other, and the next, as they form a breathtaking cloud of Chinese martial arts merging both slow motion Tai Ji and fast Wu Shu with a staggering scale. It is immediately apparent to the viewer that something incredible is happening, and the original combative intent of martial arts is transcended. This is more….

Perhaps after centuries of absorbing Zen and Daoist thoughts and culture, the Chinese hold the martial arts more as an expression of aesthetic movement in service to art and philosophy. Up close in the Olympic ceremony, each individual martial artist is kicking and punching, but from a bird’s eye view, these 2008 separate bodies merge as one. It is a single flow of living energy as the circular patterns change from moment to moment. One may immediately understand this liberation and beauty beyond Asian thought — as many of us from everywhere in the world reacted with a universal nod.

On another level, this can be seen as a visual metaphor for Daoism, which holds all of life as an infinite rhythmic flow of of things forever in transformation. The magic is in consciously being a part of its movement. We often become so focused on ourselves and our own rhythms that forget that we are all part of something much bigger. Maybe when we stop, even for a moment and step back, we may glimpse the big picture….and flow in consonance to its pulse. Ours is a shared experience. Remember what you saw in that Olympic martial art moment. Find your tempo.

When you use mindful movement to align yourself in thought, action & emotion as one moving part of the whole, you are moving closer to the source. And in that deeper connection there lies the power and beauty of life.

Lawrence and Toni

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