Was Bruce Lee Right About Fixed Patterns?

Over at JDK HQ|Taekwondo Perth was an article that examined Bruce Lee's ideas on fixed pattern practice and how those ideas impact the practice of a traditional martial art. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

 It's ironic. The Founder of JKD, that's Jeet Kune Do, and attributed as the Father of MMA, Bruce Lee was brought up schooled in Wing Chun. A talented athlete with a keen intellect, he assessed the tactical strengths of his traditional martial skills (based on those fixed patterns), and then reached for and assimilated new skills to round off his fighting base.    

But you don't totally 'empty' your cup of your existing skills. You 'empty' that cup of your preconceptions, your bias, and incomplete assumptions. With new insight, you add to your skills and build your foundation. 

Minus the grandstanding you see in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, the quote above which has been attributed to Bruce Lee is correct. Fixed Set Patterns will not help you better deal with a dynamic situation. If you take out the posturing from actor Jason Scott Lee, the quote isn't to pick on those systems that use 'fixed set patterns.' You know why? It's because almost all systems I've come across use fixed set patterns. 

Call them Kata, Hyung, Tuls, Punyo, etc. Even boxing at various levels uses drills that are repeated over and over again. Know what those are called? Those are called Fixed Set Patterns. 

In my tradition, I use Fixed Pattern Sets called Hyungs. Early in my career, I started spreadsheeting individual techniques within those patterns to associate them with every skill I could identify. Neck deep and about a year in, I started to realise that I was just spinning my wheels. Some enthusiasts were impressed but I knew I wasn't on the right path, and appending more words to techniques wasn't creating any value. 

Eventually, there was a threshold that needed to be crossed. That threshold was a Fixed Set Pattern that a 19th century Karateka claimed was all he needed for street combat. It was a kata that I had been obsessed with for a long time. It's simple mirrored techniques seemed superficially simplistic, until I looked at it as a problem solving mechanism. I found I could use just the one technique for a same side attack. Then I saw it applied to an opposite side attack. And extending that train of thought, it would also work if I had guessed either wrongly! That I could recover using that technique! 

The Kata did not produce this tactic. It inspired the insight within me to see this for myself. 

Since then, the more I understood of the technician's situation, of his opponent, and the dynamic situation in an engagmenet, the more value I could draw from our fixed set pattern. 

I know sometimes I seem dismissive of patterns. That I seem more than happy to choose my own flipbook story ending. Nothing can be further from the truth. The pattern is our unchanging benchmark. But it is a benchmark created by an architect who was limited to chunking a few skills into a sequence of about 40 moves. 

The pattern does not show in entirety that architect's skill.