Jan 28, 2023 Updated
The gravity of suffering (dukka) pulls his undead self down back towards Earth. Bruce Lee like dragon spirit from a Chinese ghost story tires of his ghost life, a life of limbo and desires to be reborn. As he spirals down, the dragon is attracted to pain and the remembrance of dukka.
We, the other unborn, join Bruce. Our mothers quake and ache as they gives birth to a new generation of troublemakers.
We do not quite understand that we were dead. But because we are attracted to the familiar, we are reborn into life again. The cycle repeats itself.
We scream out because we feel the pain of birth. Our parents scream out as they spend their youth, their energy, and sanity and much money raising us. We suck out their youth. We return their black hair for grey hair.
We experience pathos: love, lose of love, joy, lose of joy, victory and its lose.
The Hero Dies and Is Reborn
We die and are reborn again and again; the cycle, the wheel of death and rebirth, repeats itself, samsara. Each of us is unique, each of us experiences the same pain, death, and rebirth. One of us knows that this is all an illusion, an act of sorts.
Each of us has the ability by ourselves to reach nirvana: liberation from illusion. One of us has reached nirvana. With nirvana, we never are reborn to experience the illusions, the illusions of life, pain, and death.
Most of us don’t want or understand nirvana. Instead, we enter theaters and video stores, addicted to our dreams and illusions of self. We enter again and again experiencing death and rebirth. We watch scenes of life. People laugh, are sad, die of old age, die of hunger, die lonely, die without regrets.
Death Is an Illusion
We stop and watch Bruce Lee films because of the universality of the sameness: the pathos of the Buddhist beat that in life there is suffering, dukka. Films, a type of drug, represents the cycle of life, a microcosm of who we are. We see a cycle of life. We are addicted to this experience.
We return again and again. As our heroes liberate the imprisoned, revenge our father’s death, and help the poor, we love the high that the illusion brings us. We want the justice of illusions. Bruce Lee fights for us.
We are attracted to excess. We want Bruce Lees to fly higher as he kicks, to break more bones or to die for us once again, like Bruce Lee did in the film in Fists of Fury (aka Chinese Connection), like Brandon Lee did both in film and in life as in the Crow. It’s okay, for death is an illusion. So teaches Buddhism and Kung Fu films.
Bruce died in 1973, but he lives on in action films and in parodies. As he lives in the action moves of Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, and Tony Jaa, he remains an iconic figure and even a studied figure in classes taught at universities.
Pop open some root beer, stuff some popcorn into your mouth, and become Shaolin monks in Enter the Dragon, and fight Chuck Norris in epic battle over life and death in the Roman Coliseum.
The Mythic Battle of Good vs Evil
We must defeat the mythic concept of evil instead of fighting the post-human existence of the normalcy, mundane, or mediocrity of postmodernity.
We can’t fight gas prices. We can’t understand how to fight the terrorists, who won’t stand in front of us. We need to feel our enemy with our own fists like they do in those Bruce Lee films.
Instead, we are pulled down by taxes and insurance and medical fees while being embarrassed by our Republican and Democratic politicians. These are battles we have lost. But we have Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Donnie Yen, and Tony Jaa to defeat those enemies who can be defeated in the cinema light of illusion.
Bruce Lee remains the eternal king of kung fu, the original hungry ghost of justice. His scream awakens our Iranian, French, Korean, Brazilian, Iraqi, Egyptian, Italian, Irish, Kenyan, Argentinean, Mexican, Japanese, American . . . . our human soul. The art of fighting is about the art of discovering one’s self.
We are the clones of Bruce Lee, . . .
fighting against postmodern injustices, revenging the death of our masters, like Confucius taught us to. We fight against imposters. We are the heroes of our times. Trying to scare us, someone breaks a board in front of us. But boards don’t hit back. It hits. I don’t hit because I don’t exist as Buddhism taught me.
It hits at lightning speeds. I don’t need a system to teach me or enslave me. I don’t need Wing Chun, for I can create my own fighting system: Jeet Kune Do. However, it is really only a philosophy. Remember, no style is greater than the person. I don’t need Hollywood for success. Hollywood had to come back to me.
Ironically, now Hollywood imitates me. Watch the Matrix, Dark Knight, and even Buffy the Vampire. You will see my creative cinematic, inventive fighting style being borrowed again and again.
We were born in San Francisco. We came to find gold in the nineteenth century and even helped to build railroads and open restaurants. Wasn’t the American Dream for Chinese too? No. You made laws (1882 Chinese Exclusion Act) against us, preventing us from becoming citizens, preventing us from marrying whites.
We couldn’t even kiss whites on the silver screen. Asians were not alllowed to kiss Whites on screen by law.
We were incarcerated on Angel Island waiting to join our paper fathers. Some of us were never allowed into America. Some of use wrote poems of revenge while there:
Leaving behind my writing brush and removing my sword, I came to America.
Who was to know two streams of tears would flow upon arriving here?
If there comes a day when I will have attained my ambition and become successful,
I will certainly behead the barbarians and spare not a single blade of grass.
(University of Washington Press. “Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940”)
We are not fortune cookie speaking detectives like Charlie Chan or rat eating, evil villains like Fu Manchu or Emperor Ming. We are not white pretending to be yellow. We are not bananas, yellow pretending to be white.
We are fighting warriors!
We hunger for attention and respect.
You thought you defeated me. You wouldn’t let me star in major motion pictures or as the main star of my own television show. I left my country and returned to my other land, Hong Kong. I became so successful there, you wanted me to return. The Dragon returned, and everyone wanted a piece of me.
Though I died a young death, I am more alive in death. I am eternal. After I died, I received a star on Hollywood in 1993, some 20 years after I died. Why so long? It is still hard for you to admit that I am Bruce Lee, the invincible.
We are attracted to excess. We want Bruce Lees to fly higher as he kicks, to break more bones or to die for us, like Bruce Lee did in the film in Fists of Fury (aka Chinese Connection), like Brandon Lee did both in film and in life as in the Crow.
It’s okay. Death is an illusion. So teaches Buddhism and Kung Fu films. Bruce died in 1973, but lives on in action films and in parodies. As he lives in the blinding moves of Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Tony Jaa, he remains an iconic figure and a studied figure in classes taught at universities.
Pop open some root beer, stuff some popcorn into your mouth, and become Shaolin monks in Enter the Dragon, or fight Chuck Norris in the Roman Coliseum. We must defeat the mythic concept of evil instead of fighting the post-human existence of the normalcy, mundane, or mediocrity of postmodernity.
Fragments from the cultural fallouts and stereotypes fall down around us. It is raining blood and steel, gore and nunchaus.
Didn’t I read this before. haha
Doc Nirvana
AKA Doc Wayne Stein