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A Moment of Understanding, By Bruce Lee
Essay Taken from The Tao of Gung Fu
Gung Fu is a special kind of skill; a fine art rather than just a physical exercise. It is a subtle art of matching the essence of the mind to that of the techniques in which it has to work. The principle of gung fu is not a thing that can be learned, like a science, by fact finding and instruction in facts. It has to grow spontaneously, like a flower, in a mind free from emotions and desires. The core of this principle of gung fu is Tao - the spontaneity of the universe.
After four years of hard training in the art of gung fu, I began to understand and felt the principle of gentleness - the art of neutralizing the effect of the opponent's effort and minimizing the expenditure of one's energy. All these must be done in calmness and without striving. It sounded simple, but in actual application was difficult. The moment I engaged in combat with an opponent, my mind was completely perturbed and unstable. And after a series of exchanging blows and kicks, all my theory of gentleness was gone. My only thought at this point was "somehow or other I must beat him and win!"
My instructor at the time, Professor Yip Man, head of the Wing Chum school of gung fu, would come up to me and say "Loong [Bruce's nickname in Cantonese], relax and calm your mind. Forget about yourself and follow the opponent's movement. Let your mind, the basic reality, do the counter-movement without any interfering deliberation. Above all, learn the art of detachment.
"That was it!" I thought. "I must relax!" However, right then I had just done something contradictory against my will. That occurred at the precise moment I said "I" < + > "must" < - > "relax." The demand for effort in "must" was already inconsistent with the effortlessness in "relax." When my acute self-consciousness grew to what the psychologists refer to as the "double-bind" type, my instructor would once again approach me and say "Loong, preserve yourself by following the natural bends of things and don't interfere. Remember never to assert yourself against nature; never be in frontal opposition to any problems, but to control it by swinging with it. Don't practice this week. Go home and think about it."
The following week I stayed home. After spending many hours of meditation and practice, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then - at that moment - a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn't this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all my might - yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it, but this proved to be impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world and what could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.
Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water. Right then as I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the bird flying over the water? This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached - not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself, I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.
I lay on the boat and felt that I had united with Tao; I had become one with nature. I just laid there and let the boat drift freely according to its own will. For at that moment, I had achieved a state of inner feeling in which opposition had become mutually exclusive, in which there was no longer any conflict in my mind. The whole world to me was as one.