All that Lee has ever written seems to have been written/said before him. Let's see the basics: "forgeting" technique, the appliance of Zen, fighting your ego, your anxieties etc rather than the opponent in front of you are all concepts older than his grand-grand-grand parents from what I read on books. Bruce Lee is phenomenal, one of a kind, and one of the best martial artists to date. But in which sense is he a pioneer/innovator? This is somehing that some people seem to have misunderstood. I believe that Lee was a pioneer myself. But so many fanboys treat him as if his martial art and his philosophy are so incredibly revolutionary and awesome. In fact, Lee's philosophy was much older than him, he simply had a VERY good grasp on it, and was able to explain it so well, and save marftial artists from their attachement to blind, mechanical execution of technique. I think that this is what Lee meant when he said that he had not really invented a style himself. Do you guys think that BL is credited with more than he should be in that sense? I think that he is not overrated, but not the inventor of all that he applied. After all, it is only natural to use older concepts (see "Every battle is ultimately a fight against the Self") etc), for he studied older MA philosophy in and out.
No. He made it all up himself, all the zen, the techniques and principles, everything is totally original and Bruce Lee's own. Hence the bit in the thingy of Jeet Kune Do where it says take what's useful to you. Serious answer, the west was, I daresay, mostly ignorant if not completely so about stuff like zen, so at the time it WAS all new to them. It's easy to look back now and say it's all been said before, but Bruce was the first mainstream guy as far as I know (I could well be wrong) to bring it to our attention.
You're right, he was the first one to bring all these in public attention. But concepts like linking oneself to true emptiness in MA, always fighting the Self and other anxieties rather than the opponent, self perfection through combat etc were "invented"/metioned before (see Kano Jigoro, Morihei Ueshiba, Masaaki Hatsumi just to name a few). I think he studied all that carefully, absorbed what is useful and discarded what is useless (that part is his- as is using all that is effetive is a true innovation as well).
