Quote:
Chris Hein wrote:
Aikido has grown way beyond Ueshiba.
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What?
How do you define "beyond"?
Usually, it means "surpassed," but aikido certainly has never again attained the heights that Ueshiba expressed, much less surpassed him.
Quote:
Chris Hein wrote:
If you're interested only in Ueshiba that is fine, but the Aikido community has grown and changed in the last 50 years or so. What you are saying is analogous to every painter trying to copy and continue what, say, Matisse did. Matisse was great, and showed us lot's of things, but he's not the end of painting. Proving what Ueshiba said or didn't say doesn't change anything. Aikido is not a Koryu, it is a living system.
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The main way I see "the aikido community's" having grown since Morihei is in numbers, certainly not in quality. What I advocate (and I think Chris Li and the IP seekers will concur) is not to mimic Morihei, as you imply with the comment about Matisse. We're not saying to copy and continue what Matisse did unless you simply mean "create original and powerful works of art." In fact, it's the general aikido community that continues to do the same 3,000 techniques (actually about fifteen variations each of about fifteen main techniques) over and over with no "live" quality and uke falling down no mater what happens. So, if that's what you mean by "grown," I'm afraid that's another serious fallacy.
What Ueshiba said was intended to free us of the need to "do aikido" within that limited number of set techniques and the unreal relationship between uke and nage. Takemusu Aiki is the spontaneous generation of technique based on the use's response to contacting someone with a "budo body." That's both doing what Ueshiba did and doing something he never did, rather than always looking like you're doing what he did...yet with something noticeably lacking.
Quote:
Chris Hein wrote:
Frankly I have no idea if what you think Ueshiba was getting at was right wrong or indifferent. I'll let you and the historians hash that one out. But the Aikido community outside of the internet, that I speak with, doesn't sound like the picture you are painting (pun intended).
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It's sort of like having a "physics community" that has its own version of physics, though, isn't it? Whatever floats your boat, I guess.