Quote:
Lee Salzman wrote:
I can think of two ways to look at this:
1) What is the end result of doing these specific exercises a lot? You get better at the specific exercises. They each have a set of external demands placed upon the person doing them (i.e. foot here, arm there, etc. etc.) that are different between all of them or else they would look exactly the same. So rather than say they are all birds, call a duck a duck, a turkey a turkey, and an ostrich an ostrich. These external demands are there to teach something about how one is to do the exercise in question. Now, it may be possible to generalize principles from the form of the exercise about other movements, but the result of the exercise is bound up with the form, because the form defines the utility of the exercise.
or:
2) If, following these external demands, it is still possible to do the exercises "wrong" or that it is still possible to do all these exercises the same "way" regardless, then there are, in fact, demands not intrinsic to the exercise, and you could go so far as to say the exercise in question is actually useless and pointless for teaching them. The necessary demands of the exercise are not bound up in the form of the exercise itself. Why do an exercise to learn something if it doesn't specifically teach it? You could just as well rub your belly and pat your head over and over and practice whatever underlying principle there is and it would be equally effective as doing Shiko or Buddha's Warrior Attendant Pounds Mortar or xingyiquan or....
Which of those two ways of looking at it is it? I dunno. I got my own vague answers, but I would rather pose these as questions.
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Part of my wry point goes back to the original inference in the thread where the assertion was made that doing Shiko a certain way was wrong. I'd suggest that many ways of doing Shiko are "wrong" or at least "incomplete" and we get nowhere if people simply make assertions and move on. I essentially said the same thing to TGWK by asking him to explain "how it works" rather than just make general pedagogical assertions.
Shiko, like most exercises, can become more and more complex as it develops because it encompasses the connection of the body, the natural winding of the body caused by the lay of muscles/bones/tendons/fascia, ways of using power, and so on. When we trivialize someone's version of how to do Shiko, we should have a reason for why or better. When we offer advice, we should be able to say how it works, at least to some degree, because there is always a "how". There is no magical ki.
In terms of the second point... can non-productive, ritual exercise be done for many years, resulting in missing the point? You betcha. Happens all the time. If you go back a few years in A.W. archives, you'll see that it used to be thought that the ritual or the technique had all the subtlety. Now we're getting into interesting times where more people are seeing that Aikido (and other arts) were deliciously more complex than just "subtle technique skills". There are subtleties of body skills and these are the core of what "Aiki" is and the core of most Asian martial arts that they thought was so magnificent that it rated the Yin-Yang approval sign. Ain't it grand?
Mike