Cliff Judge

That's not how I define "martial legacy" at all, I am simply using an english phrase for budo. If you disagree that Aikido is a budo, cool, but I think you disagree with just about everybody who is familiar with what budo is.

BTW, while we are arguing semantics, I think the term "legacy" implies something bequeathed...in our case here, Ueshiba's legacy would be skills, knowledge, or pedagogy that he developed and INTENDED for his students to take on and continue to pass to their students.

You could probably argue that a legacy is simply the historical impact of a person, i.e. what they did, what they are known for. But if that's how you are defining Ueshiba's legacy (he did stuff, we have stories about it, some people still alive felt it firsthand and they can talk about it) then you must admit that that's a different sort of legacy than what Kisshomaru, Shioda, Tohei, Tomiki, Saito, etc left behind - those guys actually created training systems and built organizations to foster them.

It's the difference between one person dying and leaving a million dollars to charity, and another person dying without a will and his neighbors remembering how he once had a million dollars.

Yes, he pulled together a number of verified quotes from different sources, and he analyzed them in terms of whether there was a difference between Kisshomaru's kihon waza and the skills that Osensei demonstrated. I think he did a good job of that. I'd even say that the analysis holds for any of the other mainstream Aikido lineages.

I believe, based on the title of the essay, that Mr. Murray set out to show that Ueshiba bequeathed a legacy to us that is very different than that of Kisshomaru or the other students. But the essay doesn't really seem to go that far, as I read it.