Cliff Judge

I don't think Ueshiba thought of aiki as an ethically or morally neutral thing at all. This is one of the ways I think you guys are cutting yourselves off from the majority of the point of Aikido by framing aiki as a technical object. You are closing a lot of doors.

I also think you are misapplying the term aiki. A year back people were speaking mostly of internal power and then it became IP/Aiki and now you just say aiki. Aiki is a term that was not applied to particularly important aspects of martial arts before the sensational, travelling medicine show days of the late Meiji / Taisho / Showa periods. Other Japanese systems had their own ideas about internal power, as inner teachings. If it was considered to be such a game-changer, you would imagine the game would have been changed when people relied on these skills to survive and do their job.

And as a sidebar....I'm finding it curious how loudly the "Aikido waza are 87% correlated with Daito ryu kata" idea, promulgated by John Driscoll, is being thumped in this and a couple other recent threads. Most of the waza in Aikido - even some of the Daito ryu kata that are not commonly practiced in Aikido, for example Obi Otoshi - are common old jujutsu techniques.

I think you could argue that the simple fact that Aikido is a non-competitive gendai budo descended from jujutsu, and is an environment in which is preserved old jujutsu techniques that are too dangerous for competition, is a better reason for its continued transmission than some poorly-defined skill that is apparently completely separate from the technical syllabus.

For me it really does make the most sense that Aikido is the martial art transmitted from Morihei Ueshiba that uses a collection of techniques distilled from classical jujutsu to create an environment where the practitioner has a chance to experience aiki.