The Height of Cultivation
July 20, 2017Thursday morning message
July 20, 2017
The Height of Cultivation
“The height of cultivation is really nothing special. It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum.”- Sijo Bruce Lee, founder of Jeet Kune Do
“The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity. It is the halfway cultivation that leads to ornamentation”. – Sijo Bruce Lee, founder of Jeet Kune Do
Dear Academy friend,
It’s been a while since my last JKD article but I thought that today, July 20th, the day on which we commemorate Bruce Lee’s passing would be a good day to return to the “airwaves”, so to speak.
And I wanted to restart with one of the lesser known but more misinterpreted of Bruce Lee’s famous quotes, namely the two you see above regarding “the height of cultivation”.
For many years we’ve heard many people say that Jeet Kune Do is all about simplicity. And while that’s true it’s perhaps not simplicity in the normal sense of the word.
Let me explain. Have you ever used the expression “You make that look so easy”? Isn’t that another way of saying “You make that look simple”? Like, for those who can remember, Greg Louganis in high-dive competition. Or Bruce Lee fighting Bob Wall in Enter The Dragon!
In his recent book The No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations, authour Dan Kennedy wrote about his 1971 start in advertising with a 1961 book, Dynamic Selling by S. Robert Tralins. He then details the painstaking steps he took to absorb the book’s teachings. Then he summarises (I’m paraphrasing here), “After much study from this book and a variety of other sources, I developed a complex, sophisticated approach…).
Yes, I had the same reaction when I read those words. I thought “This could well be Bruce Lee describing Jeet Kune Do.” And that’s when it hit me!
The simplicity Bruce Lee was talking about is the ability to make things look easy, an ability that comes about only AFTER many hours of diligent training.
That’s why it’s the “height” of cultivation, not the starting point. So this idea that Jeet Kune Do is so simple that anyone can do it and anyone can understand it is a gross misunderstanding, in my opinion.
JKD is in fact a complex, sophisticated approach to martial art training. But understand that complex in this context, should not be thought of as synonymous with complicated.
Now go out and conquer the world,
Sifu DW for TeamUMAA
www.unifiedmartialart.com
“Using Martial Art As a vehicle for personal growth and development”
786 864-2081
P.S. In a future article I’ll tell you exactly what it was that distracted me away from article writing. You won’t believe it!
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