Nothing New under the sun!!!!

 

                Growing up Bruce Lee was one of my favorite martial artists…well before Van Damme that is.  Anyone that has read a great deal about martial arts should know who Sifu Lee was, he was not only a martial arts action star, one of the first Megastars, but also a Kung Fu instructor who coached lots of people and has written a great deal, as well as a great dealing having written about him. He is often quoted by others to demonstrate his most inspirational thoughts and quotes. But there is a hidden secret that everyone should know….Lee was actually quoting or swapping quotes from others.

                Lee was a graduate of the University of Washington and left university having studied the dramatic arts, philosophy, Psychology and various other subjects but never actually graduated. Lee studied some very deep philosophy while in university and it formed a lot of his later thoughts and writing, he would often be quoted as having originally said things like “Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one”. The problem is, he did not coin this, it comes from some Indian philosophies.

                Lee also “created” his own system of martial arts called Jeet Kune Do, or way of the intercepting fist.  To do this he did not reach out to the void and just create the system, he started with a base from his Wing Chun studies, which were not completed by the way, then began studying different styles of martial arts from Tae Kwon Do and Karate to boxing and even Fencing. He then created an idea of what he wanted, a series of philosophies on fighting if you will and he formed them to a completed style of fighting. His system borrowed heavily from boxing, Judo, TKD, Karate, and lots of other systems and proved, as he once said that there are no new things under the sun, all men (I believe he meant people) have only two arms and two legs. 

                Our own heritage takes a lot of the same approach. Funakoshi merged the teachings of several instructors to create his own system and Azato Sensei merged the teachings of his Karate master with those of a sword fighting system he studied, and some suggest that he also studied horse riding and merged some of that as well. When you look at other styles, like Shito ryu, you will see some similarities between them and our system of Shotokan (or from their point of view the opposite). This is again because there is nothing really new under the sun. When we see incredible ideas and Kumite strategies that no one has seen we have to realize….someone has seen them and this is just someone executing something rarely seen or not seen in some time.

                I am often struck by the way someone words something or the interesting way someone puts something related to an old idea. The one thing that I want to put forwards to every one of my students is that the stuff I am teaching, its tested, tried, and true. And while I put a lot of my own spin on Karate…I am the first to say “I stand on the shoulders of giants”!  By which I mean that I learned from great people and I am trying to stick to as traditional a system as possible, but with my own twist on how to get that info to you.

                To those that profess to have created a new system, or a new way of doing something….You are not fooling anyone, at At the end of the day…we can see who influenced you the most and what you took from whom. We don’t get fooled often, and remember when someone asks you if you created your own system or innovated something….their is nothing new under the sun.