Thread: Ki and Koryu?
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Old 07-09-2007, 08:37 AM   #14
tedehara
 
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Re: Ki and Koryu?

Quote:
Craig Hocker wrote: View Post
I have always found this sort of statement hard to swallow, because a) it implies that the Ki Society in Japan has no need of explicit non-traditional training because the students are Japanese. Ki training is just for us backward Westerners...
While we might need ki training because westerners have no tradition of ki, the Japanese need to train because they do. While they have this implied understanding of ki, they need an explicit knowledge to investigate it and utilize it in daily life.

The Japanese situation is usually given as fish's awareness of water. While a fish lives and dies in water it probably doesn't have a great awareness of it, since water is so closely tied to it's daily living. Within the Japanese culture, this understanding of ki is expressed as part of the everyday language. To really examine it, you have to discuss it and try using it in your daily life.

The Ki Society's understanding of ki is nontraditional and needs to be explained especially to the average Japanese. If you look at older Chinese and Japanese texts they make many assumptions about the reader's understanding of ki. These assumptions cannot be made for a modern person either western or Japanese.

Quote:
Craig Hocker wrote: View Post
...From a koryu perspective, it's really laughable to call anything about aikido "traditional". Daito Ryu itself has very little claim and perhaps none to anything traditional. The osmosis approach is a highly questionable approach in a gendai art where teaching large groups of people who practice relatively infrequently in their spare time is far more often the norm than the occurence of full time one-on-one apprenticeships. Plus the fact that koryu tend be more explicit in what they teach than the "traditional" aikido approach. Someone going to battle needs to learn quickly and doesn't have the luxury of taking 20 years to develop.
Since I don't practice any koryu art, I can't say how they instruct. I have heard from several sources who consider their approach "traditional" the idea that ki development occurs naturally through practice. Therefore according to this viewpoint there would not need to be a separate course for ki development.

As Chris Li has pointed out, Koichi Tohei has written about Tempu Nakamura in Japanese. Tempukai, the organization that Nakamura Sensei founded exists today. The information is available. The research and translation needs to be done to bring this information to a wider audience. What you are asking for is a lot of work from someone.

Last edited by tedehara : 07-09-2007 at 08:40 AM.

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