View Single Post
Old 06-23-2008, 10:12 PM   #78
Mike Sigman
Location: Durango, CO
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 4,123
United_States
Offline
Re: Aikido™ and Aiki…do. Where are we at?

Quote:
Robert John wrote: View Post
That's a sucky wiki article if you ask me
Doesn't even begin to cover anything really germane on the subject.

Remember, most guys in the chinese arts are just as clueless. They just have more vocabulary to work with so they sound prettier when they BS
Actually, whoever wrote the article tried pretty hard (compared to some attempts I've seen in the past 25 years), but what he didn't know sorta jumps out at you.

I'm not a real big fan of the internal/external debate because the qi/ki/jin/kokyu skills are in both the internal and external martial arts. There are so many more variations than just those two of how they're developed and used that a simple dichotomy doesn't really work. On the other hand, there are a lot of distinctions between how they are developed and used, so often it looks pretty absurd when somone uses his White Crane-trained skills and tries to pass them of as Taiji, Xingyi, etc.

Same thing with Aikido, BTW.... if someone learns hard kokyu skills, that's fine, but Ueshiba and Tohei obviously used the softer approach to skills. But it's a good thing to see the level of discussion reach this far.

FWIW

Mike Sigman
  Reply With Quote