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Carsten Möllering wrote:
@Erick:
From which sources did you get your understanding of kan/li?
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I don't have sources for kan 水and li 火 -- other than relating them to water and fire in Ueshiba's text. I have no background in Bagua or even the Iching conceptions of these old ideas. They may be helpful from Chinese sources, but the simpler way is to look at
what he himself said:
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Aikido is the Way of the principle of the eternal, unchanging system of the Universe. The Great Emptiness was created before the birth of the Universal "SU" voice, the One Original Source (Ichigen), our parent God. Life is the history of the acts of God since then, since the ancient age of deities of our country, and the practices of aikido originate in this history. My aikido is a Way to perform ascetic practices guided by Divine Providence, while expressing the significance of the Divine Sword (matsurugi) and being a manifestation of the sword itself. I regard it as the true martial art (bujutsu). The workings of the Universe are called "takemusu aiki," and are born from the One Original Source, and unify water and fire, that is, the Breath of Heaven and the Breath of Earth, in order to produce one unified breath.
I would like to explain what this means. When the soul and body bestowed upon me interact with each other as an inseparable union through the workings of "SU" and "U", I produce the voices "A, O, U, E, I" from the bottom of my abdomen letting them emanate from my physical mouth. This form is exactly the same as the manifestation of the frictional actions produced by the movements of water and fire, that is, the interactions of the two dieties, Takami Musubi and Kami Musubi (see Takemusu Aiki in AJ116), when they dance while ascending spirally to the right and descending spirally to the left.
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And then he relates the water and fire to the Kojiki -- and tacks the interwined spirals to the image of the floating bridge and 'jeweled' ('tama-form' -- spiral):
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Aikido is a true martial art and is manifested in all martial arts that have thus far come into the world, and in the workings of the Universe, that is, the core of the Original Source of aikido. It is firmly rooted and especially expressed in the actions of the two deities, Izanagi no Mikoto and Izanami no Mikoto (see AJ116), when they gave birth to islands and deities, that is, the conspicuous workings of the interaction between fire and water. In other words, the interaction between fire and water are the workings of Ame no Minaka Nushi (see AJ116),
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The modern Japanese have their bodily hangups but their ancestors were notably more earthy in their imagery: "Male who invites" is a concrete image -- of the male -- rising, extension, expansion; "female who invites" is the counterpart -- receiving, compressing, enfolding. These are tied to the interacting fire and water ascending and descending spirals of tensile and compressive stress and the "frictional actions produced by their movements." This is a correct physical description of torsional shear action -- just using different words to describe it.
I may not be entirely right in my exposition of those physical principles of this manner of action into full blown mechanical terms but I am damned close to the sense the man intended -- and more right than not. I think taking his concerter imagery and mapping it like this onto concrete and well-understood principles is a good way of trying to break thought the seeming esoteric usage-- It isn't esoteric -- it is just imagery-- and actually useful and descriptively concrete imagery. Same in the Doka and similar expressions regarding water and fire even in Budo Renshu.