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Bruce Lee: The Tao of Gung Fu
by Bruce Lee
Gung fu is a special kind of skill, a fine art rather than just a physical exercise or self-defence. To the Chinese, gung fu is the subtle art of matching the essence of the mind to that of the techniques in which it has to work. The principle of gung fu is not a thing that can be learned, like a science, by fact-finding or instruction in facts. It has to grow spontaneously, like a flower, in a mind free from desires and emotions. The core of this principle of gung fu is Tao – the spontaneity of the universe. The word Tao has no exact equivalent in the English Language. To render it into the Way, or the “principle” or the “law” is to give it too narrow an interpretation. Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, described Tao in the following words:
Consciousness and the Martial Arts with George Leonard
Interview by Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove
Hello and welcome. Our topic today is “Consciousness and the Martial Arts,” and my guest, George Leonard, is an Aikido teacher. In addition he is a former senior editor of Look magazine, a consulting editor to Esquire magazine, and the author of numerous books including The Transformation, The Silent Pulse, Education and Ecstasy, and The Ultimate Athlete. Welcome, George.
Great to be here.
It’s a pleasure to have you here. In your work with Aikido, you pay a lot of attention to the notion of energy, and being sensitive to the energy field around the human body. Could you talk a little bit about that? It’s a notion I think a lot of people in the West particularly are not too familiar with.
The Martial Arts as spiritual and psychological disciplines
By Peter Payne
The exigencies of combat place great demands on the capacities of the warrior. These demands can act as powerful learning situations for self-discovery and self-confrontation, and may be used to further the spiritual endeavor.
Perhaps the most important of these is the confrontation with death. We are all confronted with death in each loss or change in our lives, but such confrontations we can easily evade, dealing perhaps with the specific change without coming to grips with the principle of change which implies our personal death.
We shall all be confronted one day with our own deaths in the most direct and powerful way – but this will usually be a sudden, rather irrevocable and inconvenient event, of little use (from the point of view of this lifetime) in a training programme.
All spiritual systems set up a confrontation with death; the basic preparatory practices of Buddhism involve the remembrance that one’s life is short and of uncertain duration, that one may die tomorrow. In the Chod rite of Tibetan Buddhism, practicioners visit a Tibetan graveyard at night (where the corpses are left exposed to the elements and scavengers) and invite the demons to come and take them.
Aikido & Conflict Resolution
A Short Story by Terry Dobson
THE TRAIN CLANKED and rattled through the suburbs of Tokyo on a drowsy spring afternoon. Our car was comparatively empty – a few housewives with their kids in tow, some old folks going shopping. I gazed absently at the drab houses and dusty hedgerows.
At one station the doors opened, and suddenly the afternoon quiet was shattered by a man bellowing violent, incomprehensible curses. The man staggered into our car. He wore laborers clothing, and he was big, drunk, and dirty. Screaming, he swung at a woman holding a baby. The blow sent her spinning into the laps of an elderly couple. It was a miracle that she was unharmed.