Bruce Lee And The Vibrating Palm

Was the death of Bruce Lee really as simple as we’ve been told? The conspiracy theorists with books and films to sell would like you to believe not.

Just how did Bruce Lee die? A fluke reaction to harmless painkillers, as was the official verdict? Well, that’s entirely possible, as is the idea that he had an undiagnosed heart condition that acted as a time bomb in his body. Young people – even very healthy young people – do die of heart attacks. I knew someone who died in his sleep while in his early thirties; he’d been partying away, full of life the night before but was killed by a heart defect that no medical checks had picked up on. This was in the late 2000s, so it’s entirely possible that the medical system in 1973 Hong Kong would not spot the problem in advance or be able to confirm it for sure post-mortem.  Both claims essentially reach the same conclusion – that the fittest man on the planet might have been killed by a medical condition that had been with him from birth. Lee died aged 32, and the early to mid-thirties seems to be the point when these internal time bombs go off.

At the time of death, his death was blamed on an allergic reaction to one of the ingredients in the painkiller Equagesic. Later theories have suggested that the reaction was brought on by heat stroke and Lee’s physical over-exertion. Author Matthew Polly points out in his book Bruce Lee: A Life that Lee had had his underarm sweat glands removed to produce a more aesthetically pleasing image during fight scenes. Well, you learn something every day. This did not help his body deal with the hot temperatures while practising his martial arts. Later theories suggest that the trigger for his death was hyponatremia – a lack of sodium in the blood. But it all comes down to the same thing – fatal cerebral edema. Death by misadventure, as the coroner’s report states. Sometimes, bad things just happen.

Of course, Lee was a big star – maybe the biggest star at the point of his death – and was noted for his almost ridiculous levels of fitness. For him to have been killed by something so ordinary was never going to satisfy the sort of people who, even back in 1973, wanted to see a conspiracy in everything. Famous people never simply die of natural causes or ‘misadventure’ – there has to be some sinister, criminal activity at the heart of any celebrity death. I’m always fascinated at the way conspiracy theorists are effectively as celebrity-obsessed as a TMZ reader. Yes, I’m aware that sometimes the truth is being hidden from us. And that Hollywood studios have a long, unsavoury history of whitewashing the dubious behaviour and grubby deaths of stars. But sometimes – maybe most times – the cause of death quoted is what it is. Perhaps conspiracists buy into the celebrity dream and think that these people really are better than the rest of us. An ordinary, miserable or even grotty death shatters that illusion. No wonder we want to attach some exotic mystery to it.

In 1974, a year after Lee’s death, the martial arts world was abuzz with a new theory – that Lee had been killed by rival martial artists using the mysterious technique known as the Vibrating Palm, which allows the ancient and secret art of the delayed death strike known as the Vibrating Palm. This power – so mysterious, powerful and magical that a cynic might consider it to be a load of bollocks – allows the practitioner to strike down an enemy with a mere touch. Then, at a time of the assailant’s choosing that may be as long as ten years hence – the victim will drop dead.

The reason that the martial arts world was abuzz with this theory is because it was one of several put forward by author Alex Ben Block in his hastily-written bestselling biography, The Legend of Bruce Lee. Block’s book is an opportunistic effort, highly readable but a bit overly gushy and tries to suggest throughout that Block is part of the martial arts culture rather than what he actually was – a show business writer, Hollywood Reporter editor and media hack (we say ‘hack’ in the nicest way, obviously). Whatever interest that he had in the martial arts world began and ended with this book and so we can perhaps forgive him for being a bit wide-eyed and excitable at the stories that he discovered about ancient and secretive practices carried out by ancient and secretive assassins. Ninjas, Shaolin monks and other, even more mysterious groups like the practitioners of Dim Mak (or Dim Muk as Block has it), who can kill a person with a single blow that seems inconsequential but will then cause death  – either immediately or delayed, depending on the desires of the assassin.

In Block’s book, Dim Mak and the ‘vibrating palm’ are two separate arts, though this seems to be down to him becoming confused or possibly over-excited while reading the handful of books and magazines that he credulously used as reference guides to the martial arts world. Nevertheless, they would seem to essentially be the same thing. Dim Mak, regular readers will recall, is the method used by Count Dante, the Deadliest Man Alive who advertised his training techniques in comic books throughout the 1970s, which seems a bit reckless when you think about it. Did the authorities ever question Count Dante over Bruce Lee’s death? Seemingly not.

Block bases his theory on an article in Black Belt magazine in which ‘Malaysian expert’ Kah Wah Lee explains the deadly power of his technique that involves – steady yourself – “with supreme concentration, the practitioner would convert his Chi into resonating vibrations and transmit them through the hand to the victim’s body cavity”. Well, that sounds plausible. Apparently, the exact pitch of resonance would determine the point at which the victim dies.

Dim Mak, we might note, seems to have been something found mostly in Wuxia martial arts fiction and cinema until Count Dante, the mysterious (and possibly made-up) Kah Wah Lee and Block brought it to Western attention. Since the 1980s, various people have popped up to claim to be practitioners, usually with books, videos and classes to sell. Black Belt was still pedalling the connection with Lee’s death in the mid-1980s. Of course, they never have to prove their deadly powers, because that would be a criminal offence. There is not, apparently, a ‘bit of a headache’ version of Dim Mak – it’s all or nothing and so there is no legal or ethical way of actually demonstrating that it works. How convenient. There are, certainly, blows that can kill without leaving much of a mark – a cardiac concussion when struck in the heart area, for instance. But Dim Mak and the ‘vibrating palm’ would seem to be the invention of fantasy writers.

Block isn’t throwing all his assassination theories into one basket though. He also explores the ‘Oriental herbalist’ theory that seems to have been the invention of karate expert, stuntman and bit-part actor Ed Parker. This is the claim that fiendish experts in – as Block calls it – “the inscrutable East” can use herb poisons unknown to Western science (or, indeed, to reality) to kill an enemy, herbs so magical and non-existent that they can vanish from the human body entirely before an autopsy is even carried out. Block goes further and suggests that it may have even been the work of fiendish Ninja pharmacists. This all feels like a combination of Asian fiction being taken literally and that odd form of racism that suggests that those mysterious foreigners have strange occult powers unknown to the civilised West.

Block’s wacky theories certainly impressed the possibly pseudonymous ‘Wan Chang O’Shaugnessy’, who enthusiastically reviewed the book in issue 15 of Marvel’s Deadly Hands of Kung Fu magazine. His excitable credibility seems to have been a typical reaction – “The dojos will again buzz with speculation”, he says with all the certainty of a man who had never been near a dojo in his life but who felt the need to speak with the authority of a martial arts expert (Block’s book is full of similar suggestions that he is part of the martial arts scene rather than a jobbing writer working from a collection of magazine clippings and press releases).

Some of that speculation, presumably, would be about just who might be the killer of Bruce Lee. The list, it seems, is endless. As everyone is keen to point out, Lee was not universally popular – he was arrogant, aloof, egotistical. In other words, he was a movie star. But he was a Chinese movie star and so we are supposed to read sinister intent into his death. Block sails surprisingly and dubiously close to fingering the Shaw Brothers as suspects, though the idea that Lee’s films were putting other studios out of business was laughable – if anything, his international success opened up the whole world for martial arts movies of varying quality. The suggestion of inter-disciplinary rivalries between martial arts schools has more credibility – but for all the Western chin-stroking about the effect of ‘losing face’ might be, it’s hard to see karate masters irked by Lee’s dismissal or kung fu elitists who wanted their art kept secret killing him in such a sneaky way. Surely they would want to send a message of superiority rather than show that the only way that they could defeat Lee was through poison or the vibrating palm, murders that they could never take credit for. Again, it speaks more of a Western obsession with the East being an alien and ‘inscrutable’ world than it does of reality.

There remains a lot of money to be made from the death of Bruce Lee. That money demands a more exciting finale than ‘death by misadventure’ and so stories about family curses (made all the more attractive after the death of Brandon Lee), exotic assassination and even the idea that maybe he faked his death for whatever reason you care to make up are all going to continue. A new theory about his death is all that biographers have as a USP now. Conspiracy theories arise because the truth is simply too boring. We all want something more exotic, more sinister, and more outlandish because it excites and reassures us. The alternative, that fit and healthy young people can simply go to sleep and never wake up, is a much scarier idea for people to cope with.

DAVID FLINT

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