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Old 11-23-2011, 04:40 PM   #28
DH
Join Date: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,394
United_States
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Re: Violence and Aikido

Quote:
Kevin Leavitt wrote: View Post
i've always wondered about the Healing Sword. What does that concept mean? How does a sword heal?
Kevin
The most common description I have read is that of saving life or preserving it. Again though it denotes violence.
Kill one (presumably evil) person to save many.
Draeger assigns it (I believe to Otake Sensei) to "Kill one, to save ten thousand."
Take take the drama and Sam-U-eye stuff out of it and the concept applies to your job or any cop walking the beat.
Hope that helps.

Even the idea of love that was bandied about in many earlier cultures people misunderstand. Ueshiba trained assassins. Many times when those guys talked about love it also entailed discipline, sacrifice, or killing to preserve family, village and clan. Aikido's history and it's birth was not through the type of peace some people in Aikido think it means.

This peacnic stuff was nonsensical to them, to most anyone who lives in the real world and nonsense to many in the art of aikido. It is typically offered by those who live, protected by those who will do violence on their behalf; Police, Judges, and the military, so they can live in a civil society. Mankind will always live under peace through strength. In the very few cases were non-violent protest succeeded, it was because those in power capitulated.
Mercy belongs to the victor. Anyone thinking they can stop real aggression- through aikido waza- without aggression is simply kidding themselves. Instead people "play" together nicely in a dojo with their budo get-ups, with attacks deviod of real agression, with defense that hardly needs to be of any real use.
And Aikido is not alone in that.
Dan

Last edited by DH : 11-23-2011 at 04:54 PM.
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