You have some good points. I won't reply to them all as I don't have the time...
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Matthew Story wrote:
No I don't. The fact that their skills and abilities were real does not make ki real, and does not make ki a useful word.
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Logically, one can infer that because you have A (skills and abilities), then that does not equate to B (ki being real) or C (useful). However, in the manner in which those martial artists used the word, "ki", it was real. Granted, it may not be useful to us to use it as they did. There are better training methods. In that, I agree.
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Matthew Story wrote:
Because they were martial artists of great skill with a unique take on the martial arts.
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Think about it for a second.
People who had trained in jujutsu for 20 + years. People who had trained in Judo for 20 + years. People who had trained in kenjutsu. Kendo. Sumo. These people were seasoned martial artists who had seen, trained, and felt thousands of techniques done thousands of ways. Yet, when meeting Takeda, Sagawa, Horikawa, and Ueshiba, they nearly all said ... that's mysterious, that's impossible, I don't know what he's doing, I've never experienced anything like that, etc.
Read the recorded interviews and articles. It wasn't just some new way of doing techniques (the aiki greats all said their art was formless). It wasn't some unique take on a martial art (the aiki arts do not look like jujutsu, judo, etc). It was something completely outside all of that.
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Matthew Story wrote:
Of course not. Ueshiba was an aikido master, not a ki master. He used ki as an explanation for some things in aikido, but that doesn't change the reality of aikido.
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LOL, okay, you have me there. He was an aiki master.
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Matthew Story wrote:
I'm not advocating tossing all that out. I'm advocating tossing one word out.
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What if in that 1%, their usage of the word "ki" was an important concept that the other 99% didn't get? If you toss it out completely, you might miss an important concept.
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Matthew Story wrote:
Are you suggesting that there are some things in the martial arts that cannot be explained by physics? I'd like to see some evidence of that.
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No, I'm not suggesting it at all. I'm outright stating it as a fact. Sort of like 99% of the people once thought the earth was flat and 1% said it was round. Just because 99% of the people believe something, doesn't always make it a fact.
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Matthew Story wrote:
Absolutely. If we are going to understand the history of our art (and history is key to understanding anything), then we are going to have to understand what our forbears meant when they used the word ki. That doesn't mean we have to use it, and it certainly doesn't mean we have to believe in mysterious invisible forces.
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Yep, I think we're in agreement on a good bit of this.
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Matthew Story wrote:
Not believing in ki doesn't mean I think Ueshiba, Shioda, etc. were frivolous morons. If that were true, I wouldn't train aikido. I think you're drawing a false dichotomy here. One can find truth and art in the ways of the old masters without believing everything they believed and without using all the same terminology they used.
Ueshiba once said that his understanding of aikido came to him in a spiritual awakening when "a golden spirit sprang up from the ground, veiled my body, and changed my body into a golden one". So does it mean that we are not following the ways of the founder if we don't believe in golden spirits?
Ueshiba also said that "the source of budo is God's love". Does that mean that atheists cannot follow the way of the founder?
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Regarding Ueshiba's golden light ... some of the Chinese grandmasters talked about a golden light/ball as part of their training. These were the very martially skilled Chinese grandmasters, not the flaky ones. So, Ueshiba was following in a long line of classic martial art progressions. Because we (plural for the 99% of us) didn't know that, we attributed it to something flaky and otherworldly.
Regarding the second Ueshiba quote ... have you read Chris Li's blog posts? Ueshiba was talking about solid, classical martial theory. What *we* got in translation was: A) Kisshomaru's changed views of a worldwide aikido and B) words that would appeal to a world wide audience. Neither A nor B were what Ueshiba was actually talking about.