Happy Birthday BRUCE !
Iconic actor, director and the cameras of that era were not able to catch the nimble moves. Bruce Lee was a child actor in Hong Kong who later returned to the U.S and you know what, he was not just a martial artist but also a philosopher par excellence. He starred in the TV series The Green Hornet (1966-67) and who knew this debut will someday challenge Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than light.
Shortly before the release of mega buster Enter the Dragon, he chose to follow the trail of Swami Vivekanand, Ramanujan saying a final goodbye to our dazzled out daddies at the age of 32 on July 20, 1973.
Lee was born Lee Jun Fan on November 27, 1940, in San Francisco, California, in both the hour and year of the Dragon but unlike his philosophy inspiration J Krishnamurthy his legacy spread like a forest fire across the globe.
Lee received the name “Bruce” from a nurse. In the early 1940s, the Lees moved back to Hong Kong, then occupied by the Japanese, and this was the spark to the gunpowder . Apparently an enigma in front of the camera, Lee appeared in roughly 20 films as a child actor, beginning in 1946 and finally conveyed the message ” Be water my friend” by actually booming into a tsunami like wave.
He studied dance, and his fighting style, his footwork seemed like a peacock dancing simultaneously being a lion on hunt.
Winning Hong Kong’s cha-cha competition, and I jump like dolphin as i saw my Bruce would become known for his poetry as well.
As a teenager, he was taunted by British students for Chinese background. This was anger channelized and by 1953, he began to hone his passions into a discipline, studying kung fu (referred to as “gung fu” in Cantonese) under the tutelage of Master Yip Man. ( Do watch Hollywood’s IP Man series, if you have missed it in any case) By the end of the decade, Lee moved back to the U.S. to live with family friends outside Seattle, Washington, initially taking up work as a dance instructor.
Devoted Teacher
Lee finished high school in Edison, Washington, and subsequently enrolled as a philosophy major at the University of Washington. He also got a job teaching the Wing Chun style of martial arts popularly known as the jeet kundo today. This was a blend of philosphy and action and this blend was as path breaking as Shakti turning in Shivam. There through the charisma of his teaching, Lee met Linda Emery, whom he married in 1964 and Linda writes a book with such an accurate name “The only man I knew.”, in his memories.
He and Linda soon moved to California, where Lee opened two schools in Oakland and Los Angeles. He taught mostly a style as we mentioned before, the style called Jeet Kune Do, or “The Way of the Intercepting Fist.” Although whoever has gone deeper following the tributes after tributes like the Birth Of The Dragon had known it was finally no style, no boundaries, non duality that Bruce wanted us to be gifted via him.
Lee, as obvious being devoted to a variety of workouts and physical training activities, suffered a major back injury and this was the time when an exceptional writer within him got birth. He came up with the idea that became the basis for the Buddhist monk TV series Kung Fu. Breaking Box Office Records
Lee signed a two-film contract, eventually bringing his family over to Hong Kong based on the same. The Big Boss, Fist of Fury in the U.S., was released in 1971 featured Lee as the factory worker hero who has sworn off fighting yet enters combat to confront a murderous drug smuggling operation. Combining his smooth Jeet Kune Do athleticism with the high-energy theatrics of his performance in The Green Hornet, was the charismatic center , that set new box office records in Hong Kong.
All in all by the end of 1972, Lee was a major movie star in Asia. He had co-founded with Raymond Chow his own company, Concord Productions, and had released his first directorial feature, Return of the Dragon. Though he had not yet gained stardom in America, he was poised on the brink with his first major Hollywood project, Enter the Dragon.
Lee’s one inch punch is yet such an enigma that keeps spirituality alive in the jargons of dynamics. Bruce Lee’s son also died while in action but as the legacy flows in blood, his daughter is a TedEx speaker carrying the torch for generarions to come. Yes, for information sake we deliberately leave some data for you if you intend to soar a bit more. The author being a diehard fan stops at this moment because of a strange agony that surrounds him as the dots get connected with his own father while writing this for you.
Passin the batton, On July 20, 1973, just one month before the premiere of Enter the Dragon, Lee died in Hong Kong, China, at the age of 32. The official cause of his sudden and utterly unexpected death was a brain edema, found in an autopsy to have been caused by a strange reaction to a prescription painkiller he was reportedly taking for a back injury. Controversy surrounded Lee’s death from the beginning, as some claimed he had been murdered. There was also the belief that he might have been cursed, a conclusion driven by Lee’s obsession with his own early death.
More rumors of the so-called shaolin curse circulated in 1993, when Brandon Lee was killed under mysterious circumstances during the filming of The Crow. The 28-year-old actor was fatally shot with a gun that supposedly contained blanks but somehow had a live round lodged deep within its barrel.
With the posthumous release of Enter the Dragon, Lee’s status as a film icon was confirmed. The film, said to have a budget of $1 million, went on to gross more than $200 million. Lee’s legacy helped pave the way for broader depictions of Asian Americans in cinema and created a whole new breed of action hero — a mold filled with varying degrees of success by actors like Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and Jackie Chan.
Lee’s life has been depicted in the 1993 film Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, based on the 1975 Linda Lee memoir Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, and the 2009 documentary How Bruce Lee Changed the World. And in the summer of 2013, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum opened the exhibition “Bruce Lee: Kung Fu. Art. Life.”
Lee’s legacy as a premier martial artist continues to be revered as well. Daughter Shannon Lee was largely involved in the 2011 update of her father’s instructional guide Tao of Jeet Kun Do.
Cooncluding the tribute with this philoospher cum fighter’s quote still blowing in the wind like that supersonic sidekick with that “Huuuu”.
Immortal Eternal – Bruce Lee QUOTES :
” The martial arts are ultimately self-knowledge.
A punch or a kick is not to knock the hell out of the guy in front, but to knock the hell out of your ego, your fear, or your hang-ups is the key.
The core of understanding lies in the individual mind and until that is touched, everything is uncertain and superficial.
Truth can not be perceived until we come to fully understand our potential selves. After all, knowledge in the martial arts ultimately means self-knowledge.
A fight is not won by one punch or kick. Either learn to endure or hire a bodyguard.
There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there—you must go beyond them.
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.
As you think, so shall you become.
Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.
If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
There is no such thing as defeat until you admit so yourself, but not until then!
Be a practical dreamer backed by action.
Never waste energy on worries or negative thoughts, all problems are brought into existence — drop them.
Real living is living for others.
Learning is never cumulative; it is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end.
The measure of the moral worth of a man is his happiness. The better the man, the more the happiness.
Happiness is the synonym of well-being”.
Miss you Bruce, you are as much alive in hearts as much are the waves in Pacific Ocean.
