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Old 11-30-2009, 11:21 AM   #23
jxa127
Location: Harrisburg, PA
Join Date: Jul 2000
Posts: 420
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Re: The Aikido Paradox

Wow, Buck is getting skewered!

I think I get what he's saying, or at least this is my understanding of an aikido paradox.

A paradox is a seeming contradiction that is nevertheless true or, (alternatively) a statement that seems true but is in fact self-contradictory.

The common understanding of aikido (as published in works like The Spirit of Aikido and The magic of conflict is that O Sensei developed his art as a way of unifying the universe. Therefore the art is expressed through techniques that deal with violent attacks in a way that practitioners can defend themselves while also protecting their attacker from injury.

So far, so good.

Now the contradictory part: we practice defending ourselves against violent attacks by studying violent techniques that have a very real possibility of injuring our killing the attacker.

What makes this a seeming contradiction is the way we perform the techniques. We usually choose the "nice guy (or gal)" way of finishing a technique so that the risk of injury to the attacker is minimized.

Having written all of that, there's a lot of scholarship going on right now examining just exactly what O Sensei meant when taking about an art that unifies the universe. If anything, the new scholarship show even more paradoxes in the aikido world. I'll quote from the first of Peter Goldsbury's excellent series of articles on Transmission, Inheritance, Emulation (http://www.aikiweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12008):

Quote:
Transmission

(a) Morihei Ueshiba made no attempt to ‘teach' the knowledge and skills he possessed to his deshi.

(b) The latter all gained profound knowledge and skills during their time as deshi, but it is by no means clear that they gained all the knowledge or that all gained the same knowledge.

(c) Morihei Ueshiba appears to have made no specific attempt to check whether his deshi had understood what they had learned from him.

Inheritance

(d) On the other hand, all the evidence indicates that Morihei Ueshiba worried very much about passing on the art to future generations and finally designated his son Kisshomaru Ueshiba as heir and inheritor of the art.

(e) Kisshomaru Ueshiba seems to have changed the inheritance he received quite radically, again, with no clear reaction from his father, such that it has been stated that the aikido taught by him and by his successors nowadays is no longer Morihei Ueshiba's aikido.

Emulation

(f) Just as the heirs of Morihei Ueshiba have passed on their knowledge and skill to their deshi, so also have the deshi of Morihei Ueshiba passed on their knowledge and skill to their own deshi, but with very varying degrees of success, such that the knowledge and skills of present and future generations are becoming and will become increasingly varied in quality, in proportion as they become more distant from the source.

(g) The fact that many of these deshi live outside Japan and that aikido has become a Japanese art practiced more outside Japan than in Japan has profoundly affected and is profoundly affecting its essential character.
So, O Sensei cared very deeply about his art and its continuation, but did not attempt to teach those skills to his students or check that they understood what they learned from him.

If that's not a paradox, I'm not sure what is.

Regards,

----
-Drew Ames
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