Thursday, November 6, 2014

People using Bruce Lee's teaching as means of earning money

Whenever I read about somebody giving out classes of Jeet Kune Do, the "martial art" of Bruce Lee, I know they are scammers.

The way I see it Jeet Kune Do was a philosophy, rather than martial arts, and if it actually is a martial art, it is an incomplete one, Bruce died to young to fully develop it.

It's like the founder of Judo dying at 32, and then you have people teaching Judo. Or ITF taekwondo founder Choi Hong Hi dying at 32 and having one student selected to pass his teachings to the entire world, in Bruce Lee's case, it wasn't even fully developed yet.

So how can people say they teach Jeet Kune Do. Teaching a few concepts from a book from a person that died quite a few years back without even his permission to do it, it's ridiculous. They literally only have the books and films, and the ones that are supposedly allowed to teach either Jeet Kune Do, or Jung Fang Gung Fu at the end they are teaching their own interpretations of them.

I'd rather study Bruce Lee's material myself, and then if I'm going to take classes about martial arts and stuff, I'd rather go to something that has been fully established, instead of something that people argue about because they don't fully understand it, and it's surrounded by a lot of doubt and mystery because the creator of it died way too young, and pay people to give me their own interpretations of it.

As artists I think that probably the most important thing is to create your own thing, instead of just using someone else's thing all the time. Like so many people do.

To me that's what makes a real master, somebody who has learned and mastered a lot of sources and at the end he has developed his own, that now other people can learn and develop their own expressions from there. Somebody who wants to be identified with his own thing, who wants to represent his own work and creation.

And if you are going to teach and represent someone else's expression, you should at least have complete permission to do so by the creator of that expression.

4 comments:

  1. & that's why it's called McDojos. Selling cheap bootlegs of genuine craft for profit.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You are right on point. Poor Bruce. He is not even alive to see how they are corrupting his teachings.

    ReplyDelete

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