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Jeet Kune Do

Bruce Lee’s way of the intercepting fist.

The combat philosophy founded by Bruce Lee in the United States in the 1960s: simple, direct and free from fixed styles. Its idea: absorb what is useful, discard what is useless.

Fact file

Country
United States
Founder / origin
Bruce Lee
Year / period
1967
Type
Complete arts
Sources: Bruce Lee Foundation · Encyclopaedia Britannica

History

Jeet Kune Do — "the way of the intercepting fist" — is the approach Bruce Lee named in 1967. After training Wing Chun with Ip Man in Hong Kong, he opened schools in Seattle, Oakland and Los Angeles, and took ideas from Western boxing, fencing and many other styles.

Lee saw it less as a style than as a philosophy: "absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, add what is specifically your own". After his death in 1973 his notes were published as "Tao of Jeet Kune Do" (1975), and students such as Dan Inosanto carried his teaching forward.