The following interview was conducted in 2023 and published in the UK magazine BLR, issue 11.
BLR: We seem to be in an open, thoughtful place with the onus on detail and investigative merit. Putting aside the insanity of hero worship, if you will. Are we only now getting an analytical picture – a true picture – of a man and his actual accomplishments, warts and all?
James Bishop: In terms of Bruce Lee’s accomplishments, I think that was pretty well documented over the decades after his death. I don’t think we are learning much more about that now. But we have learned in recent years more about his difficulties and personal failings: that he was unfaithful to his wife, that he was abusing and likely addicted to serious drugs, that he was a man with conflicted emotions and didn’t have this zen-like, peaceful centering that he tried to project. So the past few years have been a revelation, and the sanitized version of Bruce Lee that his family and friends successfully promoted for four decades has been shown to be a significantly incorrect depiction of the man.
BLR: Looking back at my original review of the Tao [of Jeet Kune Do], I’m struck by the review’s brevity. I wasn’t particularly taken by the book, as I recall. It felt fragmented even before I knew a little of its origins. It’s curious that we have long hung our collective hats on regarding it as the cornerstone of Jeet Kune Do when it seems to lack more than a veneer of authenticity.
James Bishop: Well, now that is certainly most evident in my book, Who Wrote the Tao? The Literary Sourcebook for the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. It verifies that the feeling (of something not being entirely right with the Tao of Jeet Kune Do) was not without merit. If it seemed fragmented, it is because it was simply fragments of one man’s personal research into the works of dozens of different authors in a variety of seemingly unrelated fields. So my new book lays bare those realities and allows us to recontextualize the contents of the Tao of Jeet Kune Do.
BLR: The Tao [of Jeet Kune Do] seemed a little guilty of inaccessibility for the layperson. While I’m aware now more than before of some of the sources, language and terms within its pages it’s fair to say that my understanding hasn’t evolved in tandem to that awareness. Does your work serve as a lens through which we can view and better understand the Tao and its many sources?
James Bishop: Absolutely. For example, in many cases, Bruce Lee made slight changes to the passage, such as changing bits of terminology. I not only give you the source of the passages seen in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, but I also give you the original passages themselves. This allows you to see the passages as the authors intended. Beyond that, by revealing these sources, you can now track Bruce Lee’s progression through these sources to see how his mind compiled his notes.
BLR: With the subsequent study and presentation of Lee’s notes and writings in published works by John Little and now your volume, has the Tao [of Jeet Kune Do] been superceded and effectively rendered obsolete? Does it still have a place and a part to play?
James Bishop: I don’t think it has been rendered obsolete or will stop being sold; what is rendered obsolete is the notion that Bruce Lee wrote it. It still has some value as a guide to his development.
BLR: The timetrame of the Tao [of Jeet Kune Do] puts it in the same arena as the first official biography The Man Only I Knew and the casting of the Robert Clouse biopic which perhaps had a hand in spawning the Bruceploitation genre, what is known of the rationale for conceiving the Tao?
James Bishop: The Tao of Jeet Kune Do was an effort to produce the book that Bruce Lee flirted with publishing in the years shortly before his death. I think there was a practical consideration, too, namely that Bruce Lee’s widow and children needed to produce income to support themselves. But Linda Lee was very clear in her intention to honor Bruce Lee’s original idea for the book, that it be a guide for the learner but not a “how to” book.
BLR: You were off in the wilderness for some time; your second book, Bruce Lee: Dynamic Becoming was released in 2004 I believe. What was it that prompted your withdrawal and what is it about this project that drew you back into the fold?
James Bishop: I was uninvolved in the world of Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do for about 16 years. There were a couple of reasons for my withdrawal. The major reason was my unhappiness with some of the unhealthy elements of the fandom, some of which I outlined in a guest column for Inside Kung Fu magazine. I also grew tired of the petty squabbles among the Jeet Kune Do community, and an excellent speech by Leo Fong at the 1999 Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do seminar in Seattle made me question whether following the direct path of Bruce Lee in Jeet Kune Do was really the best way to honor his encouragement of self-actualization. I realized that the best way to honor Bruce Lee was to forge my own path based upon my own experiences and talents and not try to retrace someone else’s steps.
Finally, the thing that really solidified my decision to walk away from the subject of Bruce Lee was when my list of books in Lee’s Library that I researched, developed, and published in Bruce Lee: Dynamic Becoming was posted online on a website called “House of Bruce Lee” with the owner of the website claiming credit for my work. When I saw that, I lost all remaining interest in writing for the audience. And I think this serves as an example of why respecting authors’ rights and those of any other type of creator is important. When you steal or plagiarize from someone’s intellectual and creative work, one of the results is that you significantly reduce the incentive of the creative person to continue producing such work. No one wants to create art or produce scholarship if their work is going to be stolen or plagiarized. And I feel strongly about this, obviously, or I wouldn’t be doing all of this scholarship into the real origins of the words attributed to Bruce Lee.
Around the same time that I was grappling with whether to continue writing about Bruce Lee, John Little left the Bruce Lee Educational Foundation. When John left, Taky Kimura called me to explore whether I would be interested in stepping up to represent Bruce Lee’s philosophy for the foundation. I turned him down. Instead, I focused my intellectual efforts on other areas. I followed John Little on his next adventure and assisted in establishing the Will Durant Foundation, including co-producing a documentary on the Pulitzer Prize-winning philosopher. I attended graduate school and earned two master’s degrees in professional development and mental health counseling. While completing the second master’s degree, I also started and eventually earned my Ph.D. in educational psychology with specific foci on the subjects of creativity and highly gifted and talented people. My educational track clearly drew from my earlier interest in Bruce Lee; you can see how everything sprang from that.
The beginning of my re-entry into the world of Bruce Lee happened in 2019. That November, I was at a professional conference in Minneapolis, having drinks with colleagues. Most of my professional colleagues were unaware of my involvement with the subject of Bruce Lee; I seldom talked about it. But there were a few there who knew. When someone mentioned that little bit of trivia about me to the group, one of my colleagues, Colm O’Reilly from Dublin City University in Ireland, asked me if I would be willing to come to Dublin in 2020 and speak at his university concerning the intersection of giftedness and talent as it relates to Bruce Lee. My first inclination was to decline, but then I realized that 2020 marked the twentieth anniversary of my lecture on Bruce Lee’s philosophy at Trinity College in Dublin. I felt that it would be an inspired way to mark the anniversary. So I accepted the invitation. Unfortunately, the pandemic started in March of 2020, and we had to cancel plans to bring me over to Ireland. However, the planning of it renewed my interest in Bruce Lee. Not wanting to let the anniversary of my lectures with John Little and Andy Kimura go unmarked, I remembered that we had filmed our lectures and travels there in 2000 and decided to produce a documentary on the experience. That documentary, titled Building the Bridge: The 2000 Bruce Lee Philosophy Lectures in Ireland, was released on YouTube later that year. In the interim, word was getting out that I was dipping my hands back in the waters of Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee Mania magazine in Spain contacted me and asked me to write a few articles, which covered the subject matter that I would have discussed at my lecture at Dublin City University. On top of that, I was invited to write for Jeet Kune Do Quarterly magazine, where I restarted my “In the Spirit of Bruce Lee” column that I began in the Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do Nucleus’ old Bruce Lee magazine. And now I am working on this ongoing research into Bruce Lee’s writings.
BLR: Correcting the perpetual misattribution of quotes of others, passed off as the original thoughts of Bruce Lee, must be tiresome work. Do you think we’ll ever get to a spot where these influences are rightfully recognised?
James Bishop: They will be recognized if I have anything to say about it. Yes, it is tiring work, but fascinating work at the same time. And as a trained researcher now, I feel that I am more prepared for this undertaking than I was 20 years ago.
There are some challenges to these actual authors being fully recognized. One is the willingness of the publishers of books attributed to Bruce Lee and Bruce Lee Enterprises to take the steps to halt the continued misuse of other people’s work. I honestly don’t see that happening because it benefits them to keep this train going. Also, there is the matter of the fans’ willingness to give credit where credit is due. Many fervently want to believe that these quotes came from Bruce Lee and, in some cases, are actually angry that I am revealing these things. They are often the ones with the tortured arguments, like, “What does it matter who said it?” It matters because truth and accuracy matter. Those individuals will likely continue to repeat these quotes, crediting Bruce Lee because, for them, it is really about the icon, and they need to maintain their image of him.
BLR: Among your finest work up ’til now was cataloging a considerable portion of the contents of Lee’s personal library by sight, using photographs – has this moved forward since Bruce Lee: Dynamic Becoming and do you think it will see completion?
James Bishop: When I published the list of books in Bruce Lee’s library in Dynamic Becoming, that list was under 400 books. My friend and colleague Marcos Ocaña continued my research and published a list of around 700 several years ago. When I once again took up my research into the writings attributed to Bruce Lee in April of this year, I also renewed my work on that list. My list of books in Bruce Lee’s personal library continues to grow and is now around 1,200 books – three to four times the size of my original list. It also includes information on magazine issues and even musical records that Bruce Lee owned. But unlike with Bruce Lee: Dynamic Becoming, I am reluctant to release it in print for the reasons I mentioned. The possibility that someone will then take my list and claim it as their work discourages me from doing so.
Note: Since the time of this interview, Dr. Bishop has completed his inventory of the library of Bruce Lee and will be releasing it in a comprehensive book form in 2025.
BLR: To what extent was Lee an original thinker? We know he was widely influenced but how much of this was integrated into his line of thought before indirectly passing off other’s material in his teaching in his lifetime?
Bruce Lee was an original thinker in the sense that he developed new approaches to fighting and training. He certainly deserves credit for that, and one could argue that his originality in that area significantly impacted the martial arts. However, nothing in the literature attributed to Bruce Lee is particularly original; in fact, most of it is the verbatim words of other people. In that way, he is more of a “thinker” than an “original thinker”; a “second-hand philosopher” rather than an “original philosopher”. And, regardless of whether the writings are original, the fact that he was such an intelligent person capable of understanding and recognizing the value in the literature he was consuming, and then producing a cohesive gestalt with it, are things we can appreciate. Bruce Lee was a very intelligent man and a seeker of knowledge.
BLR: I found that this topic is explored somewhat in Dr. Paul Bowman’s book, Theorising Bruce Lee. A quick skim talks of ‘the entire philosophy so passionately espoused by Lee derives from the writings of other people.’ Moreover it goes onto discuss the idea that Lee is a ‘translator of ideas’ into the ‘application of martial arts’. Does this constitute plagiarism? Or an overlap and interrelationship of ideas?
James Bishop: Yes, Bruce Lee was a plagiarist. Plagiarism is the representation of another author’s thoughts, ideas, or words as the original work of oneself. The word plagiarism was derived from the Latin word “plagiarus”, which means kidnapper. Interestingly enough, the first person to use the word was the Roman poet Martial.
Most of the materials wrongly attributed to Bruce Lee are examples of Pseudepigrapha, a type of plagiarism in which a person is incorrectly credited for another person’s work. So the Bruce Lee Estate has, knowingly or unknowingly, credited Lee for the works of other people. This is true of the Tao of Jeet Kune Do and much of the Bruce Lee Library series.
However, it is also true that Bruce Lee plagiarized many times himself. I have found examples of Bruce Lee plagiarizing in his college essays, self-published book, poetry, film scripts, and many of his letters to other people. Even “Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate” had at least one example of plagiarism in it. He plagiarized, that I can identify, from 1961 until late 1972. And he knew what constituted plagiarism; not only am I sure he was introduced to the definition and rules against plagiarism in college, his college English professor confronted him with her suspicions that he was plagiarizing. Lee seemed to do all of this plagiarism with impunity.
Bruce Lee was very good at recognizing the applicability of ideas from disparate sources and then weaving them together, but you can still do that and cite your sources. If we want to speak of Lee as a scholar, we must hold him to the standards of a scholar.
You mention Paul Bowman’s book. Let’s use that as an example. Dr. Bowman is a scholar. When you read his book, you will note that he does not take credit for other people’s ideas; in fact, he scrupulously makes sure that he gives credit to the author or originator of every idea or passage that does not originate from himself. That’s what scholars do.
BLR: In Linda Lee’s 1975 biography, she talks of the writings as a way of Lee making sense of the riot of ideas in his head during the period of his back injury. So, no clear mention of a book in development. In the Tao [of Jeet Kune Do] itself, mention is made of these writings during the period of injury, but again, no mention of intent to be made into a book, but then Linda talks of his intent to ‘finish’ the book in 1971. So a mixed message there? In Shannon Lee’s foreword to the 2008 version of the Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method book, she talks about an exclusive 200-copy-only JKD book circa 1967, the idea for which was abandoned after the photos for what would be Fighting Method were taken. Late 1972 into 1973, she notes that he began looking at the image sequencing again, with captions, and that it was ‘possible’ he was reconsidering the project. In her book Be Water, My Friend, there is a contemporary take on Lee not wanting to ‘concretize’ in print something that he saw as a living thing capable of change. To your mind, would there have been a book of some description had he lived beyond 1973?
I can’t say definitively if there would be a book had he lived. What I can say is that he did intend to write the Tao of Jeet Kune Do (the title he gave the book) beginning in 1967, but ultimately abandoned the project. I can say this definitively because he announced it in a 1967 interview in Black Belt magazine, and there were repeated references to it in the following years in its pages until the magazine announced that Lee had cancelled the project. The sequences that Lee shot for the book became the Fighting Method series of books after his death.
He abandoned the book because of concerns about solidifying his martial art and, more practically, because he became too busy making films in Hong Kong. It is possible that he might have revisited the idea at some future point.
BLR: Posthumously, through no fault of his own, quotations of others have been misattributed to Bruce Lee and the “Be Water” line, which he was merely quoting in the Berton interview, is now exclusively tied to his brand. How much of that was Silliphant’s Longstreet script, and how much was Lee?
Yes, posthumous quotes have been attributed to him, but he is also guilty of direct plagiarism. So we can’t simply deflect all of the blame from him. As for the Longstreet script, we will never know how much of that was Bruce Lee and how much was Stirling Siliphant, but I suspect it was mostly Lee. And I suspect that because that script’s “be water” passage is also plagiarized from books that Lee owned.