Читать книгу Bruce Lee Artist of Life. Inspiration and Insights from the World's Greatest Martial Artist онлайн

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Alive, a man is supple, soft;

In death, unbending, rigorous.

All creatures, grass and trees, alive

Are plastic but are pliant too,

And dead, are friable and dry.

Unbending rigor is the mate of death,

And yielding softness, company of life;

Unbending soldiers get no victories;

The stiffest tree is readiest for the ax.

The strong and mighty topple from their place;

The soft and yielding rise above them all.⁵

The way of movement in gung fu is closely related to the movement of the mind. In fact, the mind is trained to direct the movement of the body. The mind wills and the body behaves. As the mind is to direct the bodily movements, the way to control the mind is important; but it is not an easy task. In his book, Glen Clark mentioned some of the emotional disturbances in athletics:

Every conflicting center, every extraneous, disrupting, decentralizing emotion, jars the natural rhythm and reduces a man’s efficiency on the gridiron far more seriously than physical jars and bodily conflicts can ever jar him. The emotions that destroy the inner rhythm of a man are hatred, jealousy, lust, envy, pride, vanity, covetousness and fear.⁶