Quote:
Mark Murray wrote:
IMO:
Looking at Daito ryu, we have jujutsu, aikijujutsu, and aiki no jujutsu. The base of all is jujutsu. The higher level skill is aiki. aiki is the internal body skill, jujutsu is the external body skill.
When you are required to move to gain kuzushi, you're using jujutsu. Again, I'm not stating this is a bad skill. Really good jujutsu can be formidable, just as the Gracies proved many times over. But it's really good jujutsu and not aiki.
Aiki is an internal body skill that is made up of quite a bit of various things to enhance the way the body works, so that an external delivery mechanism (for example, jujutsu) is made more powerful.
Or perhaps people think that all of those thousands of martial artists who had backgrounds in all manner of jujutsu who met Takeda found that he was just doing very, very good jujutsu? Or that Tomiki, as he was tossed 60 different ways when meeting Ueshiba, just thought, wow, he's got really good jujutsu? Or that those highly ranked kendoka (who had trained for a long time) came to study with Ueshiba because he had really great "tai sabaki" from his jujutsu skills?
The answer is that all those people already *had* extensive backgrounds in jujutsu and they had the experience with high level jujutsu people. Meeting Takeda, Ueshiba, Kodo, Sagawa, etc, they all came away knowing that these people had something very, very different. That difference was aiki. An internal body skill.
All those jujutsu people knew and practiced the manner in which to take advantage of physical positional or postural weaknesses. Aiki trains a body not to have those weaknesses. It's why Ueshiba could not be pushed over, whether to the chest or while sitting. Aiki training changed Ueshiba's body to handle force differently. He didn't *need* to move to affect a person, but chose to move because he expressed his aiki in an outward physical manner via modified Daito ryu techniques combined with a spiritual belief system.
Is it a generalization? No, I don't believe it to be.
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One day my grandfather (who has since passed) walked into his daughter's house and found her lying dead in a pool of her own blood. She had been beaten, strangled, and stabbed. He walked back to his shop next door where he worked and told a close personal friend and employee that he had better go next door and look for his daughter. That person (another dear friend now passed) went next door saw the same thing my grandfather did and immediately called the police.
Now, my grandfather swore that his daughter WASN'T there when he first went over. It was obvious to everyone that her body HAD been there and had been there for a while . . . his mind/emotions just couldn't SEE it even when his eyes could, prompting him at some level of consciousness, to send someone else to go SEE and take appropriate action.
I think there is a parallel here. I have virtually used the same words that you just have to explain the same thing . . . for years . . . to the same ends . . . crickets chirping. I have what I call the 150% rule. That is, one must be able to do something 150% quantitatively and qualitatively beyond the capacity of one's witness before that witness will begin to consider that what one is doing is operationally different than what the witness already "knows" and can explain. (As you know O-sensei demoed the 150%+ rule quite frequently.) Anything less than 150% and, in all likelihood, the witness will place, and explain, what is happening in the context of what they "know." Trouble is, I'm not developed to the extent that I can readily demonstrate a capacity of 150% beyond most folks.
Even still, as with my grandfather's example, I suspect that if a person isn't mentally/emotionally prepared to accept that something completely and fundamentally different from their normal frame of reference is at play, if they are so (understandably) mentally/emotionally invested in having something be a certain way because they devoted their life to THAT WAY they may not be able to SEE "reality" even when it is lying right before them.
And if they can't, thankfully in the case of a recreational "martial" pursuit, it probably won't matter that much anyway.
*Please take a moment to
literally count your blessings. It is incredibly uplifting to feel gratitude for all that one has, especially if one has been missing what one has not.*
All the best,
Allen