Takemusu
How would you translate takemusu, and how would you explain takemusu aiki?
This is how I do it (and I might be very, very wrong): Take = bu, martial Musu = improvisation (appx.) aiki = blending/joining energies Thus: improvised martial art, according to the principle of joining energies (instead of opposing them) |
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Jun has it: Takemusu Aiki A "slogan" of the founder's meaning "infinitely generative martial art of aiki." Thus, a synonym for aikido. The scope of aikido is not limited only to the standard, named techniques one studies regularly in practice. Rather, these standard techniques serve as repositories of more fundamental principles (KIHON). Once one has internalized the KIHON, it is possible to generate a virtually infinite variety of new aikido techniques in accordance with novel conditions. http://www.aikiweb.com/language/vocab.html |
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I think improvisation for "musu" doesn`t sound quite right. The Chinese character in verb form is "umu" which means to give birth, thus the definition of "creative" in a literal sense.
The interesting thing about the Japanese language is the ability to be incredibly vague. By saying Takemusu Aiki, the Founder was most certainly not teaching anything concrete. Grammatically, the sentence could mean, " Take gives birth to aiki" or " Aiki gives birth to take" or "creativity brings about aiki which then causes take." Each character could be looked at separately and reconfigured in different ways. Ai, ki, take, musu. Then there is kototama theory which says that each sound can be looked at separately and reconfigured. Ta, ke, mu, su, a, i, ki, plus the differing pronunciations for the characters, bu, umu ( which can be divided into u and mu) Personally, I think it is one of those things where understanding comes with study, experience, and reflection. Louis Armstrong was once asked, what is swing? He answered something like, "If you gotta ask, you ain`t got it." This might be something similar. Charles |
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Improvise or create
Well, it's not so easy. We can't just say that musu means create, give birth, and use its western language meaning in the concept.
Arts of war don't give birth, but quite the opposite: they kill people. So, the word must have been used in a symbolic way, not intending its "root" meaning. When I use "improvised", this is a western concept that does not seem to have an obvious Chinese or Japanese counterpart. So, somebody implying a similar thing, would have to find his/her own Chinese/Japanese word for it. That word could very well be musu/umu. I mean improvise in the jazz musician way: melody created in the moment, so to speak out of nowhere. This is creativity in action. I believe that is what Osensei was talking about: Using the aiki principle for creativity in Martial arts. Like Charlie Parker on the saxophone :) Take/bu is the song, aiki is the theme or sentiment, musu is the creative process. |
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Arts of war do give birth. The offspring is just not as cuddly.
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Hi Stefan
You wrote "Arts of war don't give birth, but quite the opposite: they kill people. " and quite so, but perhaps this is where the founder intended Aikido to be different from other martial arts? Perhaps the true significance of Aikido lies in its constructive power - the fact that we day out and day in practise harmony - not only in words - but in physical movements with other people. As Nishio sensei have put it - "..in Aikido we posses the worst tool of all - the tool to kill people - but with this tool we instead create harmony, life and guide people to the see the beauty of humanity. Using the worst tool we create and shape the highest being - aikidokas are truely the greatest artists" :) Brgds Jan |
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Then, a relevant interpretation of takemusu aiki might be something like: creative budo by blending energies. Or, in more words: A budo that brings life instead of death, through the principle of joining energies. Wouldn't that be almost exactly what Nishio sensei always said about aikido? |
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Here's is my take on this:
Take = relates to things martial; it can mean martial techniques Musu = the same musu as in musubi where it means roughly "connection" (to tie the knot); here it has a creative or procreative connotation Aiki = in this contect it is the "state of aiki", the harmonious condition so to speak, it relates to the state of mind of the practitioner Therefore, the state of aiki gives birth to or creates the techniques of the martial arts or, a bit more complexly, if the practitioner is in the state of aiki (his Mind is harmonious) the techniques of the martial sphere will spontaneously be created out of this state of harmony without conscious effort on his part. O-sensei's expression of this principle was to state that the techniques of Aikido were divine techniques that were revealed to him by the Kami, not something he made up or discovered. |
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No problem :-) I was just wondering whether you had read some article that somehow justified the connection between the two different words. It is not uncommon in japanese litteratur to find one chinese character used in a such way that either pronuonciation of the character or the character makes the reader associate it with another word with similar reading - or another meaning of that character. Therefore Osensei may deliberately have chosen musu because that same sound also associates to the word musubi - connect. And in that sense "connect" could be a secondary meaning of the word, but that interpretation probably need to be supported by some of Osensei writings.
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The state of aiki or the Kannagara no Michi cannot be separated from the harmony with nature you talk about. They are integrally connected in my understanding of what O-Sensei meant. The discussions elsewhere about O-sensei and farming touched on this. If we say that being "martial" for us means being in harmony with our natural environment, I would just say that it must be O-Sensei's re-worked view of what martial is (Love) as opposed to what it had traditionally meant (which O-sensei felt was more about destruction; hence his statements that True Budo is Love). Don't you just love these simple phrases that take about two pages to even begin to define? |
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i'm pretty sure i've seen musu and musubi linked in books by both john stevens sensei and saotome sensei. in fact, i think they both make reference to "musu" being a shortened way of saying musubi. see, i think, philosophy of aikido and secrets of aikido by stevens sensei, and aikido and the harmony of nature by saotome senei.
first post... hi everyone! |
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For me, I just see it as martial-aiki, the practical side, if you like. The emphasis is always on the aiki, not the takemusu. What kind of aiki? Takemusu-aiki. |
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Charles |
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Takemusu [ 武産 ] then, means made in martial. Or, takemusu-aiki means, aiki developed from the martial. Martial aiki as opposed to say, willy nilly aiki. That's how I see it :) I have not seen the Japanese book Takemusu Aiki, but if it has musubi written as 産日 - well, I can't imagine what the intended meaning is. Lit. Japan+Born. But more than waffling on about what it means - I wonder, how does it affect your training? I mean, how does the sign on the wall that says takemusu-aiki get reflected in your training in practical terms? |
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Hi Rupert
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I asked my Japanese graduate students this question last week. None of them had the slightest clue. There was a chorus of, "We have no idea unless you tell us how it is written (i.e., the kanji)." When I wrote the characters on the board, they still had no idea, though they knew what "take" meant and what "musu" meant. They had never seen the two put together in one word.
There are two ways open to Japanese to understand the meaning of the term. One is to start with the concept and see what it immediately means. A crucial element here for modern Japanese is the way the word is written; the other is to start with the characters and see what meanings can be read into them. With an alphabet-based writing system we do not have these options. As I suggested, たけむす does not appear in any Japanese dictionary I possess. 'Take' with the meaning of 武 does not appear in any Japanese dictionary as a complete word. 'Musu', however, does appear and means birth or to be born. The kanji are 生 or 産 and the meaning is to take root and grow, or to be born. 'Musu' in this sense first appears in the Manyoshu. (Musubu and musubi are different concepts.) If you start from the characters, you can see the various ways in which they were read. The character 武 is read as MU or BU and as 'take' when part of a name. 産 is read as SAN or SEN and as 'umu': to be born, and it is clear that this is what O Sensei intended the word to mean. For in "Takemusu Aiki" (p.31), he states, "All the martial arts (武技 bu-waza) that have been created (産み出して来た umidashite-kita) up till the present time are manifestations of takemusu (武産の現れ: takemusu no araware). The big problem with Japanese is the tendency to create edifices that might well turn out to be purely verbal. At present I am having a dispute with a Japanese psychologist colleague who is doing research on a state called in Japanese kandoh 感"ョ. This is a combination of kan (= feeling) and doh ( = move). In the dictionary, there are a wide range of meanings given, such as being impressed or emotionally moved. My colleague thinks that these meanings all fall short and miss the true or deeper meaning of the word. So he leaves it in Japanese and talks in English of "experiences that evoke kandoh". But the problem here is to distinguish kandoh from the experiences that supposedly evoke it, such that it can be defined independently of the experience and its effects. Best regards and apologies for a long post, |
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Hi Charles
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To make sense of "Takemusu Aiki" it is crucial to have read the "Kojiki". Best regards, Edit. I see that Jun's dictionaries will not support the deities in the Kojiki. In the two examples above, the last characters are HI (sun) and kami (deity). |
Koan and kanji
This is getting very interesting, indeed. Thanks, Peter, for taking the time to share your knowledge.
I can understand that Osensei used the concept takemusu aiki intimately linked with his cosmology, his spiritual world view. That would indicate a proper interpretation of his use of the term, being sort of more symbolic than practical. He would not mean something like "with aiki you create the most effective budo", or for that matter "improvise budo techniques that agree with the aiki principle". It seems he has combined two concepts, each with a vast and complex meaning to him: takemusu and aiki. Maybe we should investigate what he actually meant by aiki, as well? That has surely been done. Anybody got the facit? Can it be sort of a koan? Was Osensei using the term takemusu aiki, well aware that most of his students would not understand at all? Peter's experiment with his students implies it. Peter, is it possible that Osensei saw it so that budo has gone through an evolution (takemusu), where aiki is the optimal result? On that note - did he ever consider the possibility that budo could evolve higher than aikido? Sorry for adding so many questions, and not contributing with any answer. PS: I believe that a westerner easily forgets about the significance of the Chinese pictograms, making up the words in China and Japan. The kanji lead to a slightly different intellectual process, from that of our sound-alphabets. Their writing is built on images instead of spoken language. This has to be taken into account - just don't ask me exactly how ;) Probably, it makes sense to stress the importance of analyzing the specific kanji, their components and in what contexts they are generally used. |
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Peter, thanks for the references. I checked some of the paragraphs in Takemusu Aiki, and I think I will return to my first view that there are no link between the word musubi and Osenseis use of musu. The reference to names of deities in the Kojiki doesn't support any link.
On the other hand I believe that the temptation to link musubi (connect) to musu in Takemusu comes from paragraphs like the one where Osensei writes that "..Bu must be connected/linked to the principle of the universe..." (sorry I don't remember the exact page somewhere in the pages 17-20 ;-)). Right after that passage Osensei writes "Takemusu no Bu, which gives birth to love(Ai wo umu "Takemusu" ..... ) , is different in quality from Bu that do not connect with the universe" I am not surprised that non of the students did not have an answer to what Takemusu means, after all Takemusu origins somewhere in the cosmology (I don't know if that is the proper english word for it ;-)) of Osensei, as Steffan also points out. Peter, do you know if anyone translated those pages from Takemusu Aiki? |
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