By Chris Lau, CNN
(CNN) — Jet Li’s work has always carried some degree of risk. Performing many of his own stunts, the martial arts star has fought opponents on shaky bamboo ladders (“Once Upon a Time in China”), leapt from tall buildings (“Romeo Must Die”) and dodged fireball explosions (“High Risk”).
But no amount of training could have prepared him for his real-life brushes with death.
Li was vacationing with his young family in the Maldives when tsunami waves triggered by the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake suddenly hit the beach. “I have my wife and two daughters in that moment,” he recalled, saying they all felt “very close to death.”
“The water is here,” he said, gesturing to his chin. “If it was a little bit higher, 20 inches, then I would have died.”
The 63-year-old martial arts star was speaking candidly about his near-death experiences in a video call from LA, where he had been promoting his new memoir “Beyond Life and Death: The Way of True Freedom.”
A year after the tsunami, Li had another scare when he fell from a 12-foot-tall tower while filming “Fearless,” leaving him with internal injuries. A few months later, he suffered from severe altitude sickness at a remote monastery in Sichuan, China.
“Each time I survived,” he writes in the book, “my desire to become truly free became stronger.”
By “free” Li means “zizai” (in Mandarin Chinese). The Buddhist term is a combination of “zi,” meaning “self,” and “zai,” which translates as “to be.” Together, the words mean being content with whatever life throws at you or, as Li writes, “the liberation from the need to control anything.”
Part-autobiography part-philosophy, the actor’s story is told via 10 “insights” acquired through his study of Tibetan Buddhism, including mantras like “separate the bitterness from the pain” and “be a grandson to the world.”
He’s hoping to impart wisdom to readers from his ongoing quest for ultimate inner peace.
“I think a lot of people in the world today know how to train their body: be healthy, lose weight, exercise,” he told CNN, while adding that it’s also important to train the mind.
“Happy is mental, healthy is the body. There are two parts. You need to find a way to balance them.”
Now more focused on charity work and his spiritual journey than making movies (this year’s “Blades of the Guardians” was his first film in six years), Li doesn’t care much about fame these days. Still, he was pleasantly surprised earlier this month when a crowd at LA’s Gold Gala — which celebrates Asian Pacific talent — rose to its feet as he walked on stage to accept one of the event’s special honors.
“It really moved me,” he said. “Sometimes when I’m in China… people just say, ‘He is old; he cannot make movies,” he said. “I thought a lot of people had already forgotten who Jet Li is.”
But who could forget? Li is revered as one of cinema’s great martial arts actors, appearing in epics like Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” (2002) and Hollywood blockbusters “Lethal Weapon 4” (1998) and “Romeo Must Die” (2000). The latter two movies helped “open the door to the world,” he said, following early successes in Hong Kong’s storied but comparatively small martial arts film industry.
Born in Beijing, Li was recruited by a state-run sports school at the age of 8 to train in wushu, or Chinese martial arts. By 12, he had won the first of five consecutive national champion titles, sometimes beating opponents twice his age.
His acrobatic skills helped him land his first movie role, in “Shaolin Temple” (1982), in which he played a young man seeking refuge at a monastery to master kung fu and avenge his father’s murder, ultimately becoming a warrior monk