Quote:
Katherine Derbyshire wrote:
There are, after all, only a limited number of ways to bend human anatomy.
But I think most aikidoka would say that aikido is more than the sum of its techniques. Most students of Daito ryu would probably say the same. To truly appreciate both the similarities and the differences in the two arts, I suspect that you would need to have substantial experience in both.
Katherine
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It was a shock to me when I recently had exposure to a second Daito Ryu school and found it to be very different to what I had already learnt. I guess like the various aikido schools, they can be quite different amongst themselves, yet through the different pedagogies there are similarities in principles that suddenly stood out clearly.
More recently, and starting to drift of topic, reading HIPS by Amdur I was bemused to see that Daito Ryu is arguably the creation of one man and that aikido is that of his celebrated student. Then to read that through it all, while there was respect for hierarchy and lineage, they were our there trying out everything they could get their hands on and stealing what they could to make it better.
Dialling forward to the next generation and Tohei Sensei does the something, albeit it with a shift away from martial focus in his later years.