Quote:
Oisin O'brien Bourke wrote:
Aikido may have stemmed from daito ryu, but they are different arts, they have different methodologies and have been from the beginning, but I know a lot of aikidoka believe otherwise. But even if they were the same thing, joining any group with the intention of taking proprietary teaching in order to personally benefit your own thing is unethical.
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Oisin,
"Aikido" tends to be defined with a very broad brush, as you seem to be doing here, and I have long believed that to be dangerously misleading.
Here's an interesting thing. My own aikido teacher was originally a student of Gozo Shioda, even though he has been in the Aikikai for decades now. I've been increasingly aware for quite a while that there are mismatches between the way his aikido works and how most Aikikai shihan teach techniques. The mechanics of his body movement seemed more subtle and more softly persuasive than what I had seen in what you might call the "Kisshomaru school", and in a way that is nothing to do with mere relaxation or softness in themselves.
After having noticed a certain person's name and opinions appearing regularly on this forum a few years back, out of curiosity I registered for a workshop he was due to give here in the UK. At that workshop, I had an epiphany: all of a sudden, I saw that my aikido teacher's "aiki engine" was almost identical to the method this person was showing (even though the outward forms they show are very different) and, what's more, he was showing us a set of exercises he learned from his Daito Ryu teacher that were clearly designed to develop these skills. I could see that both men's movements were fundamentally based on spirals and opposing forces, which I have never seen in the modern Aikikai Hombu Dojo style. Watching footage of Shioda Sensei and some of the senior Yoshinkan shihan, I can now see very similar mechanics to what I have seen of Sagawa and Horikawa from Daito Ryu.
Incidentally, I've come to the conclusion that the "aiki engine" of Koichi Tohei and his students (I assume this also applies to Maruyama Sensei, though it's been ten years since I saw him last) is different on a profound level from those of either modern Aikikai aikido or of the Daito Ryu / Shioda lineage. It seems very much based on the combination of deep relaxation with a very efficient use of gravity.
Now how this relates to Morihei Ueshiba (who of course had a Daito Ryu teaching diploma from Sokaku Takeda) is a whole other question...
Alex