Quote:
Matthew Gano wrote:
Doesn't this suppose one person's meaning is applied by another?
|
Well, except that Mary's comments don't clearly establish that she doesn't mean exactly the same. She has rejected "testing" in the discussion...so it does begin to sound like purely cooperative following of form with a guaranteed fall.
Quote:
Mark Freeman wrote:
...I personally like "cooperative practice" because it points to what we're getting at (I believe) in Aikido: mutual beneficence; mutual improvement in every way we can manage.
Thoughts?
|
Well, I said above that we have to cooperate in many ways just to end up on the mat together. Budo is a social creation for the mutual benefits you describe--whether only for a very small group of members or for society as a whole. No social activity can survive if it is not very much cooperative, but if there is no social tension within the group, something is wrong. It's against human nature, so it can't be a very good group.
Budo cooperates for the purpose of mutually developing martial arts knowledge and ability in the participants. Not all budo is necessarily directly relevant to self defense. Kyudo, for instance, probably has no more than attitude and mental state to contribute to a self defense situation, but it is budo.
Aikido, on the other hand, is a "fighting" art, even if the technique is non-resistance leading into a joint lock or throw. That basic nature is well established. And the basic method of developing that in Ueshiba's time and in all his students up to the late 1940s, was to train the non-resisting technique against a powerful attack and immediate counter attack if the attacker is not instantly controlled.
The resistance is the only way to sharpen the aikido tool of non-resisting control of the attacker.
Cheers.
David