The Pathless Dragon: Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Deep Influence on Bruce Lee
In 2017, MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong fought Tai Chi master Wei Lei. The fight was a big moment: centuries of tradition were put to the test against a few decades of fighting in cages. ⠀
Xu left Wei bleeding on the floor…in ten seconds. ⠀
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The fight confirmed what the MMA community had known for years: compared to modern fighting techniques, martial arts like Kung Fu and Tai Chi had essentially become complicated forms of dance. ⠀
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Bruce Lee knew this years before anyone else. He saw that martial art styles had become “flowery and ornamental”, that its teachers saw themselves as deities who deserved blind belief, and that its strict doctrines had refused to evolve with the times. ⠀
Sorta like…religion, which is where Bruce Lee’s approach came from: the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti. ⠀
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In 1929, Krishnamurti stepped down from his position as the chosen messiah of the Theosophical Movement, a religion started by Russian and American intellectuals enamored with Eastern traditions — the world’s first hippies. ⠀
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After stepping down, Krishnamurti spent the rest of his life railing against organized religion, blind belief in ancient writing, and the need for a ‘messiah’ or a ’system’. ⠀
“Truth is not something dictated by your pleasure or pain, or by your conditioning as a Hindu or whatever religion you belong to.” ⠀
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In 1970, while recovering from a back injury that would require him to be medicated for the rest of his life, Bruce Lee studied the writings of Krishnamurti. This lead him to close his schools and began spreading his philosophy of “…using no way, as way; using no limitation, as limitation”.⠀
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“Fighting is not something dictated by your conditioning as a kung-fu man, a karate man, a judo man or what-not.”⠀ ⠀
In their fight against the confines of tradition, Krishnamurti and Lee were doing work that the Buddha and Mahavira (founder of Jainism) would have found familiar, since they waged similar fights against elitist and secretive Brahmans thousands of years earlier, democratizing Hinduism for the masses.
The challenging of tradition is its own sort of tradition.
