Quote:
Jon Reading wrote:
I happen to believe that O Sensei left a legacy, it wasn't his to begin with - it was material he learned from Takeda and others and so forth. O Sensei was just a man who was able to consolidate what he learned and demonstrate it. It's the admonishment to chase the material, not the man. For me, this is simply a back tracking task to see where O Sensei got his stuff, then pick up the trail from there. Losing O Sensei as a resource is a lost chronicle, but not necessarily the end of the line.
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Well that pretty much mirrors my perspective. I see a long line of tradition and teachers whose relevance to my own study and progress is defined by my distance in time from them. Nariyama, Tomiki, Ueshiba, Takeda, his teachers - a particular name change having no importance - but I am happy to call it Aikido. I think when we talk about a legacy of a particular man we talk about his contribution to the whole and not what he did not pass on. For that reason I rebel against the idea that there is a lost Ueshiba M. legacy.