Unorthodox selfhelp in Lee’s lessons
Bruce Lee left behind a legacy of action. The film clips and still images from his short life helped make the martial arts a pop culture phenomenon in America. He was the fearless warrior whose way of being was an inspiration to institutions from the UFC to the WuTang Clan.
But physicality wasn’t the only part of Lee’s persona. It may not have even been the most important part. In the new book “Be Water, My Friend,” his daughter, Shannon Lee, makes a convincing case for her father as a unique brand of philosopher, one whose teachings can apply to any student of life.
Bruce Lee, who was born in San Francisco and spent some of his crucial developmental years in the Bay Area, combined elements of various styles of martial arts with a fierce devotion to selfimprovement, creating his own art form, which he called jeet kune do — “the way of the intercepting fist.” In her book, Shannon Lee compiles her father’s lessons about clear thinking and purity of intention — “emptying the cup” and becoming “consciously unconscious” — into a kind of selfhelp book for people who don’t read selfhelp.
Her father completely embodied his own ideologies, Lee says, speaking on the phone from Los Angeles, where she lives. “I don’t think it’s possible to read the depth of his words or his writing and think he was just an armchair philosopher,” she says. “He was
really in deep practice, deep expression. It was real for him — he wasn’t just espousing cute quotes.”
When Bruce Lee was a teenager, his kung fu mentor tried to get the young man to understand the importance of calming his mind. Lee, with all the fire of youth, could not see beyond his own impetuosity. Ordered to take a week off from training, Lee was furious. He rowed a boat out onto the harbor in Hong Kong, and when his anger got the best of him, he punched the surface of the water, repeatedly.
The water, of course, was not hurt. It merely refilled the place where his fist had just been. This fluidity of being led to one of the overriding principles of the rest of Lee’s life: “Be water.”
Shannon Lee says she was in her late 20s when her mother, Linda Lee Caldwell, asked her if she would be interested in taking over the stewardship of the family business. “I never considered I’d be dedicating my life to helping maintain and promote my father’s legacy,” she says. “But I’m a part of it. There’s no not being a part of it.” She laughs.
She began studying her father’s life and writings in earnest. She was just 4 years old when he died of a cerebral edema at age 32, in 1973.
“There’s a weird push and pull being ‘ Bruce Lee’s daughter,’ ” she says. “I couldn’t be more proud, more grateful, and it’s also been a real struggle throughout my life to understand what that even means.”
In writing “Be Water,” for the first time she believes she understands. “This aspect of him” — her father’s philosophy of life — “is where he and I absolutely intersect.
“I’m a person who works on myself. I’m trying to attain as much balance and fulfillment in my own life as best as I can. And that is what my father was also doing.”
She had her father’s entire library to consult — the martial arts books, of course, but also his books about New Age thinking, financial success, the keys to good acting and even dealing with back injuries. ( For the last several years of his life, her father dealt with debilitating back pain, she writes.)
“It could be an interesting project, to do a catalog of his books,” she says. He read all manner of subjects, including poetry. The common denominator: “It was all nutritive.”
In a way, the controversy over Bruce Lee’s most recent portrayal in the movies — the scene in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” in which Brad Pitt’s stuntman character, Cliff Booth, coolly dispatches a pompous character based on Lee — gives “Be Water” another layer of meaning.
When the film came out, Lee received a flurry of requests for comment, so she went to a theater to see it. “That was a cringey moment for me,” she says. “I felt terrible. Half the audience was laughing.”
The portrayal has led to a public perception that her father was a jerk, she says ( though she chooses another word). As her father might have done, she’s learning to roll with it.
“Hopefully it will add something useful to the dialogue,” she says. “We all suffer from this disease at some point in time. There are times when you know you’re doing something to make yourself look good, or to be right, or win the argument. You’re caught up in your ego, essentially.”
Such pitfalls are described in a section on what her father called the “Six Diseases” of the human condition — basically, Lee says, “# winning.”
Though Lee doesn’t call herself a practicing Buddhist — nor would her father, she adds — “Be Water” includes a succinct passage about the “Eightfold Path,” a Buddhist prescription for overcoming obstacles.
She has a friend who is a devoted Buddhist, Lee says, a friend who told her she’d never heard the “Eightfold Path” explained quite so effortlessly. The Buddha himself expected that his teachings would need to be reinterpreted for successive generations, as Lee notes.
Her new book does just that for her father.