Jeet Kune Do - Bruce Lee Combat system and philosophy

Jeet Kune Do is the name Bruce Lee gave to his combat system and philosophy in 1967. Originally, when Lee started researching various fighting styles, he gave his martial art his own name of Jun Fan Gung Fu. However not desiring to create another style that would share the limitations that all styles have, he instead gave us the process that created it.

JKD as it survives today - if one wants to view it "refined" as a product, not a technique - is what was left at the time of Bruce Lee's death. It's the result of the life-long karate skills development process Lee went thru. Bruce Lee said that his concept is not an "adding to" of more things on top of one another to form a system, but rather, a winnowing out. The metaphor Lee borrowed from Chan Buddhism was of consistently filling a cup with water, and then emptying it, used for describing Lee's philosophy of "casting off what's useless". He also used the sculptor's mind-set of starting with a pile of clay and hacking away at the "unessentials" ; the result was what he considered to be the bare combat necessities, or JKD.

One of the concepts of JKD is that a fighter should do whatever is required to protect himself, regardless of where the systems come from. One of Lee's goals in Jeet Kune Do was to break down what he said were limiting factors in the training of the traditional styles, and seek a fighting contention which he thought could only be found within the reality of a fight. Jeet Kune Do is at present seen as the genesis of the modern state of hybrid martial arts.

The idea of cross-training in Jeet Kune Do is analogous to the practice of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) in modern times - Bruce Lee has been considered by UFC president Dana White as the "father of mixed martial arts". Many consider Jeet Kune Do to be the predecessor of MMA because of its syncretic nature. This is especially the case with respect to the JKD "Combat Ranges". A JKD student is anticipated to learn diverse combat systems inside each combat range, and thus to be useful in all of them, just as in MMA.

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