View Single Post
Old 11-24-2009, 07:10 AM   #10
MM
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 1,996
United_States
Offline
Re: Push Test to Nikkyo

Quote:
Eric Joyce wrote: View Post
Quote:
Mark Murray wrote:
I'm trying to compare and contrast aiki, which is internal, to jujutsu, which is external.
Mark,

I appreciate you posting the video and explaining what you are trying to accomplish in the exercise with your uke. However, don't you think the comment above that you made is a generalization?
Thanks Eric.

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.
  Reply With Quote