Jeet Kune Do: The Way of The "Stopping Fist"

Jeet Kune Do is training and discipline toward the ultimate reality in combat. The ultimate reality is returning to one's primary freedom, which is simple, direct, and nonclassical.  A good Jeet Kune Do man does not oppose force or give way completely. He is pliable as a spring; he is the complement and not the opposition to this opponent's strength. He has no technique; he makes his opponent's techniques his technique. One should respond to circumstances without artificial and "wooden" prearrangement. One's action should be like the immediacy of a shadow adapting to a moving object. One's task is simply to complete the other half of the "oneness" spontaneously. In Jeet Kune Do one does not accumulate but eliminates. It is not daily increase, but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity. It is the half-way cultivation that runs to ornamentation. So it is not how much fixed knowledge one has accumulated, rather it is what one can apply alive that counts. "Being" is definitely more valued that "doing."

 

The understanding of Jeet Kune Do comes through personal feeling from moment to moment in the mirror of relationship and not through a process of isolation. To be is to be related. To isolate is death. Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease, when the mind is obsesses with it. Learn the principles, abide by the principles, and then dissolve the principles. In short, enter a mold without being caged in it, and obey the principles without being bound by them. My followers in Jeet Kune Do, do listen to this - all fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns. Try to obtain the manageable shape of (a) nicely tied paper package of water! When one has reached maturity in this art, one will have the formless form. It is like the dissolving or thawing (of) ice into water that can shape itself to any structure. When one has no form, one can be all forms; when one has no style, one can fit in with any style.

 

In primary freedom one uses all ways and is bound by none, and likewise one uses any technique or means that serves one's end. Efficiency is anything that scores. When you perceive the truth in Jeet Kune Do, you are at the undifferentiated center of a circle that has no circumference.