Jeet June Do (or JKD) which means “way of the Intercepting Fist” in Cantonese, was founded by the late Bruce Lee in 1967. It is actually not a martial arts style. It’s a hybrid fighting system and life philosophy that is unique to each and every Jeet Kune Do practitioner. Nobody’s JKD style of fighting should be alike. To try and be Bruce Lee and fight as he does, would not make you a Jeet Kune Do practitioner.
Originally when Bruce Lee began researching various fighting styles, he called his martial art after his given name – Jun Fan. However not wanting to create another “style” that would share the limitations that all styles have, he instead gave us the process that created it – Jeet Kune Do.
Bruce Lee did not believe in “styles” and viewed them as artforms with borders, boundaries and limitations. He believed that all martial arts styles have their benefits, and at the same time weaknesses. Ideally, the Jeet Kune Do practitioner would only absorb “useful” information and disregard what isn’t useful.
Applying what is learned in real combat training situations is what allows the student to figure what works or doesn’t work for oneself. It is at this point that one can discard that which is useless. The critical point of this principle is that the choice of what to keep is based on personal experimentation with various opponents over time. It is not based on how a technique may look or feel or how well one can execute it. If the technique is not beneficial in combat it is discarded. Lee believed that only the individual could come to understand what worked for oneself based on critical self analysis and by “honestly expressing oneself; without lying to oneself”.
Bruce Lee also used the sculptor’s mentality of beginning with a lump of clay and hacking away at the “unessentials”; the end result was what he considered to be the bare combat essentials, or JKD.
Fighting is dynamic and never static. Because of this, the JKD system works on the use of different tools in different situations. The 4 different ranges of combat (Kicking, Punching, Trapping, & Grappling) are all used in JKD using flowing techniques from one range to another. This is sometimes referred to as “style without style”. Unlike more traditional martial arts, Jeet Kune Do is not fixed or patterned. A fighter should do whatever is necessary to defend himself, regardless of where the techniques come from. The ability to adapt is one of the core concepts of Jeet Kune Do.
Bruce Lee often used the analogy of “being like water”. Water is infinitely flexible. It can be seen through, and yet at other times it can obscure things from sight. It can split and go around things, rejoining on the other side, or it can crash through things. It can erode the penetrate the hardest rock by gently lapping away at it, or it can flow past the tiniest pebble.
Bruce Lee did not believe in the memorization or “Kata’s”, as most traditional styles do in their beginning-level training. He often compared doing forms without an opponent to attempting to learn to swim on dry land. Circumstances in a fight change from millisecond to millisecond, and thus pre-arranged patterns and techniques are not adequate in dealing with such a changing situation.
Learning various martial arts styles and the idea of cross-training in Jeet Kune Do is very similar to the practice of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). UFC president Dana White considers Bruce Lee as the “father of mixed martial arts”. A JKD student is expected to learn various combat systems within each combat range, and thus to be effective in all of them, just as in Mixed Martial Arts.
