Jeet Kune Do ( JKD ) is the name Bruce Lee gave to his combat system and philosophy in 1967. Originally, when Lee started researching various fighting styles, he gave his martial art his own name of June Fan Gung Fu. However not desiring to create another style that would share the constraints that all styles have, he instead gave us the process that made it.

JKD as it survives today - if one wants to view it "refined" as a product, not a technique - is what was left at the time of Bruce Lee's death. It is the result of the life-long karate skills development process Lee went through. Bruce Lee stated that his concept is not an "adding to" of more and more things on top of one another to form a system, but rather, a winnowing out. The metaphor Lee borrowed from Chan Buddhism was of constantly filling a cup with water, and then emptying it, used for describing Lee's philosophy of "casting off what's useless". He also used the sculptor's mind-set of beginning with a pile of clay and hacking away at the "unessentials" ; the final result was what he said to be the bare combat essentials, or JKD.

One of the concepts of JKD is that a fighter should do whatever is important to protect himself, irrespective of where the methods come from. One of Lee's goals in Jeet Kune Do was to break down what he told were limiting factors in the coaching of the conventional styles, and seek a fighting contention which he suspected could only be found within the reality of a fight. Jeet Kune Do is presently seen as the genesis of the modern state of half-breed martial arts.

The concept of cross-training in Jeet Kune Do is similar to the practice of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) in modern times - Bruce Lee has been considered by UFC president Dana White as the "father of mixed martial arts". Many consider Jeet Kune Do to be the predecessor of MMA because of its syncretic nature. This is particularly the case with regard the JKD "Combat Ranges". A JKD student is anticipated to learn varied combat systems within each combat range, and therefore to be effective in each one of them, just as in MMA.

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