View Single Post
Old 02-02-2010, 11:48 AM   #106
Mike Sigman
Location: Durango, CO
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 4,123
United_States
Offline
Re: Kokyu development for Aiki in Aikido

Quote:
Jonathan Olson wrote: View Post
That may be a good illustration of the dantien or hara. I wouldn't know. But it doesn't fit Ignatius' description. Is it a specific "hard articulated muscle-like" structure, or is it a broader concept involving multiple tissues in the area of the belly. This could include several muscles, that might be hard when contracted.
Well, actually my point was that these probably ARE the same thing and the concept is not new.... it's been around a long time. When the dantien is used to control the whole body, it develops muscularly because it has to. You can't use a part of the body a lot without it developing in strength.

The physical development of the hara is such a recognized phenomenon in Oriental martial-arts that there are old jokes about being able to discern what a person's skills are by the way his hara is developed, and so on. The way an expert calligrapher does characters was also supposed to be an indication of his hara and interenal strength development (which is why in the movie "Hero", Jet Li wanted to see how 'Broken Sword' did a certain character with a brush).

Maybe the point is this conversation and some of the conversations over the last five years is that there's still a lot of new things to discover about Asian martial-arts that many 'ranked' teachers simply didn't know?

From an interview with Seiseki Abe
http://www.page.sannet.ne.jp/shun-q/INTERVIEW-E.html

Quote:
4、INFLUENCE OF AIKIDO ON CALLIGRAPHY

What influence did practicing both misogi and aikido eventually have on your calligraphy?

The three converged into one for me. Aikido, for example, is ultimately not really about twisting wrists, causing pain, or throwing people; it is about cultivating "ki," which is something distinctly different from these things. The same is true of calligraphy. There are five or ten thousand characters we can brush in learning about form and line, but ultimately we are pursuing something beyond these, and that something is none other than "ki".So calligraphy and aikido became the exact same pursuit for me and I began to practice both as hard as I could.

 

You once remarked that "the essence of calligraphy lies in kokyu. (lit. breath)." Is this the same sort of kokyu we find in aikido?

The very same.
Mike Sigman
  Reply With Quote