George S. Ledyard

That depends on what the knowledge is and the conditions attached to the giving of it. In the Koryu, knowledge belongs to the Ryu, not to any individual. Even the Headmaster is only the custodian of that knowledge. So, without permission to teach, no one is entitled... the knowledge is still the property of the Ryu until you are certified to teach and given permission to do so. Having an instructor certification isn't enough... you actually need permission.

On the other hand, an art like Aikido is different. Although before the war it wasn't. O-Sensei treated what he did like a koryu in many ways. He only taught a small group of deshi specially selected and didn't show his art publicly. The first public demo of Aikido after the war which was put together by the Nidai Doshu and the leadership at Headquarters was a very big deal precisely because it signaled the end of the art as a private martial practice directly transmitted by the Founder. At that point, much as the folks at Headquarters hate to admit it, the knowledge they were passing on became public domain so to speak.

Tom Read's teachings actually fall into both private and public domain areas. The Aikido he teaches is public domain. It's simply his take on the art and he accepts anyone from any style at his dojo and his seminars with no strings attached. Of course it's always good form to acknowledge where you got something, I always try to. But unless someone is training with him and wishes rank from him, what is given is done so freely with no expectation of any control or influence over what you do with it after you leave.

The Bo work is quite different. It is a unique creation. The entire conceptualization behind the technique is his alone. So with his Bo style, he chose to treat the knowledge more like a koryu. He didn't accept you as a student unless you committed to not teach without permission. He has every right to do this. The art is his and he gets to decide. You can choose to abide by the conditions and train or you can choose not to.

Saotome Sensei did precisely the same thing with his Two Sword. The Two Sword work we do is his unique creation. It isn't really like anyone else's two sword. For many years we only had permission to teach his Two Sword work within our dojos. Even though I taught Aikido all over the place, both within the ASU and at dojos with other affiliations, I couldn't teach the Two Sword work. So, it was a very big deal for me when, ten years ago, I was invited to demo at the first Aiki Expo and Sensei instructed me to do Two Sword. To my knowledge that was the first time it had been shown to a large group of folks from outside the ASU.

So, whereas Saotome Sensei would teach Aikido with every expectation that, whatever he gave you, you were free to take or leave, to go off and make it your own. The Two Sword on the other hand was different. It wasn't given to hit by O-Sensei nor did he get it from some koryu... it was a product of his imagination and his ability to take what he knew from Aikido and apply it in a Two Sword context. That entitled him to put stip[ualtions on what you could do with the knowledge. Just as in Tom Read's Aikibojitsu.

There is a massive and total distinction between the normal process of ryu ha evolution and what we are talking about. It is absolutely true that, new ryu were created when high level practitioners started to have their own ideas about the direction they wanted to take their training. Almost always these folks would already have some certification or other in the ryu. In other words they were advanced students who, in their full maturity had ideas that they wished to pursue that could not be incorporated within the ryu. It was considered disrespectful of ones teacher to change things and still call the art by the same name. So you gave it a new name and took it out into the world.

The issue of an unqualified person doing this was always real. There were numerous instances of people stealing scrolls etc and claiming legitimacy that hey had not earned. But in the old days this tended to take care of itself. You hung out your shingle and folks showed up at he door to check you out. If they beat you up in front of your students, you'd lose your students because no one wanted to train with someone who didn't know what he was doing. Even O-Sensei had to hold his own early on when he first started his own art. He had a number of challenges in the Ueshiba Juku days.

Of course it is considered a bit too crass to do dojo busting these days. Aikido in particular, with no competition (except for the Tomiki folks), has developed a sort of "it's all good" mentality. How many Aikido dojos do you think there's be in your area if the teacher had to be able to hold his or her own with trained martial artists coming through the front door? Maybe 5 - 10% or so of the dojos we actually have?

So, with the case under discussion, we are not talking about someone who mastered a style and now has his own ideas about where he wants to take his training. In a case like that, you'd have someone who had rank and was a functioning senior member of a style when he felt the need to innovate beyond what he'd been taught. Usually this can be accomplished by following certain protocols. Often, it is initiated by the teacher himself when he recognizes that the student is chafing at the boundaries imposed by his particular style. Done properly, it is not necessarily a break but rather a process of growth.

Instead what we have here is a junior practitioner, without certification, who is actually asked to leave a style. The commitment not to teach is doubly binding as. not only did he commit not to teach the style if he left, he wasn't even a certified instructor when he was still training in the style.

I am always staggered by various folks and their own sense of entitlement and self importance. One of my friends had a 4th Kyu student try and take over his dojo. She decided that she knew better how to run classes, she knew better what should be taught. She actually went to him and started telling him how to run the dojo and when he wasn't responsive she attempted to organize opposition to the Chief Instructor behind his back. The teacher is the founder of the school. He put a couple hundred thousand in to the dojo, which is stunning, he's got decades of practice under his belt and the full support of Saotome Sensei, and she felt that she knew better... at 4th Kyu!

There are whole organizations devoted just to those folks whose teachers failed to recognize what incredible talents they are so they left them and started their own things. But they still wanted the facade of legitimacy so they all banded together and provided ersatz ranks and certifications in each others arts. The world sokeship council is a perfect example of this idiocy. But even they usually don't accept a 4th kyu with no dan ranking whatever as a legitimate Founder of a style.

This is just another case of "Mark Tennenhouse" for those of you who remeber that fiasco.

This is not "piling on" or character assassination. This is what happens when you step out and decide to try to be a big deal and start your own style. No one asked this person to post or to seek feedback on what he was doing. But once you put it out there, it's going to get scrutinized. I've posted videos and some folks liked it and others thought it was bullshit. If I was worried about some folks not liking it, I wouldn't have put it out there. What else would one expect to happen? No one is forcing anyone to post... If Tenyu had not posted, this would have remained a matter between himself and his former teacher... Arcada is not the hub of the Aikido universe, or any universe for that matter. We would never even have heard of this except as some story Read Sensei might relate at some potluck for our entertainment.

But once someone announces he has founded his own style and puts it out there, YouTube videos, training history and all, he has essentially asked us to legitimize him by treating him seriously. No one is going to treat him seriously without scrutinizing his claims, which beyond whether he has technical skills, extends to getting a sense of what kind of person he is.

No question... it may be a bit worse since so many come to martial arts because of some sense of insecurity and inadequacy. If their training doesn't help them heal, they just become messed up folks with martial skills.

You wouldn't have very experienced senior teachers posting on this topic if it were just a matter of the individual in question. But this is a forum that is a resource for newbies as well as highly experienced people. Folks actions have a karmic payback that takes care of things in the end so we don't really have to do anything. But the inexperienced folks who come here to learn from those more experienced need to have some guidance. So the senior folks should give their opinions. In some cases those opinions will be largely in agreement and in others there will be little agreement, even amongst the most senior teachers. That's fine because they serve to frame the debate and the newbies can decide whom they agree with.

But these discussions are a complete waste if people don't express their ideas. The whole "it's all good" and "you can't be wrong if you are just sincere" attitude isn't true, in my opinion, and this is a place where those issues get sorted out. Folks who wish to treat twaddle seriously are totally free to do so, but so are the folks that think twaddle is twaddle free to express that too.