Shannon Lee, the daughter of martial arts icon and jeet kune do founder Bruce Lee, recently granted Black Belt an exclusive interview regarding the production of Tao of Jeet Kune Do: Expanded Edition — a refurbished, augmented and enhanced update of her father’s most famous book. She touches on what went into the new layout and how it was modernized for a contemporary audience while still retaining the martial arts and philosophy content that made the original edition such a quintessential classic not only in the Bruce Lee canon but also in the whole of martial arts and philosophy literature.
First on the agenda for the Tao refurbishment was clarity. “What was great about this process — because I was very involved in [the Tao's] re-editing — was that as you read through it, you had to really … [because] we wanted to be really clear about, ‘OK, this paragraph is referring to this sketch,’ so we had to draw all these lines and make all these correlations,” Shannon Lee explains. “And then we wanted to make sure that those things were clear in the new manuscript.”
