View Single Post
Old 05-09-2010, 12:51 AM   #68
oisin bourke
 
oisin bourke's Avatar
Dojo: Muden Juku, Ireland
Location: Kilkenny
Join Date: Dec 2005
Posts: 359
Ireland
Offline
Re: Yoshinkan and "aiki"

Quote:
Dan Harden wrote: View Post
That's interesting
This has nothing to do with altering the traditional arts. You are offering an opinion about a method. .Do you understand what I and others are discussing?
I have read this type of criticism on another forum. I am guessing, and truly only guessing that this type of critique comes from a presumption that we are teaching newbies and influencing them. This is a false assumption. The majority of people training this way are teachers or people with many years in the arts, all more than capable of making decisions on their own. As I stated above many are senior level teachers, some experts in their own right so some of the fears sound overwrought and generally do not address the realty of the training going on. I would very much enjoy hearing why you think it is harmful to any tradition. Seriously.
Here are a few questions of interest.

1. What does it have to do with learning/altering the traditional arts?
2. How is it harmful? In what way?
3. How is it changing the tradition in your view?
4. Do you suppose that of the hundreds of people now training this way-they want to quit/ alter/ make a fuss in some way? Instead they make positive comments about the effect on their training.

I teach teachers (for the most part)
5. Are you supposing men who have been in the arts for three, four and five decades are not capable of making decisions about their own training and traditions?
6. Have you spoken with them? What have they told you? Who are they?
7. SInce they comprise teachers of Koryu, hundreds of years old, teachers up to Shihan in Aikido, teachers of Daito ryu, teachers of traditional Karate,....what would you say to them about this training effecting their traditions?
FWIW, I am member of koryu myself, hundreds of years old, other members of which who train this way read these pages.
8. What would you say to us about this training and our ability to make decisions affecting our own tradition that we have not considered ourselves?

Thank you for any thoughts
Dan
I was referring to comments such as this:
"Budo should be the same way. Movement is movement. There are things you can see in interaction and movement."

My point is that Budo is not merely a "method" of efficient movement. That may be an important component of Budo (or any "way" for that matter) but I often get the impression from these discussions that other aspects are being ignored completely.

I was making a general point based on the your comments along with others on Aikiweb who have trained with you, in particular Mark Murray (who discontinued Aikido I believe). It seems to me from reading here that you DO seem to be influencing people. I may be wrong about this, but I'm only going on the general comments on this site.

If there are senior people in traditional arts who have/are training with you, I'd love read their comments about how they incorporate your training methodology into their arts. From reading most of your comments, you seem to see pretty much all traditional Japanese budo as seriously lacking a methodology in developing high level "Aiki"/efficient movement (perhaps I'm wrong about this?). You've also stated that the traditional model of teaching is seriously flawed in terms of withholding information, so I'm having trouble seeing how long term/senior students of the arts can train while maintaining two contradictory positions!

Perhaps the problem isn't with your comments as such as with the relative lack of public commentary by senior Koryu/Aikido people etc on the connection between what they've learned from you and others and how it impacts on their arts.

My comments might not address the reality of such training simply because I don't know anything about training in your Dojo or who trains with you! I'm restricting my points to comments made by you on this forum.

Ultimately, I rarely get involved in these discussions because of the time involved. Hopefully this reply helps clarify where I am coming from.
  Reply With Quote