Ellis Amdur

Peter - Just grist for the mill - and perhaps anticipating part of your discussion: One thing that makes Ueshiba (and Takeda Sokaku) somewhat unusual is that a lot of ryu founders were also "lone-wolves" and subsumed their lives to an ascetic ideal of training. Yet either they, or one of their successors, each founded a ryu, with a formula (progression of teaching, "capped" by gokui, which, in theory, at least, enabled successors to replicate the founder's journey.