{"id":5156,"date":"2012-09-18T11:03:34","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T16:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/?p=5156"},"modified":"2012-10-23T11:29:43","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T16:29:43","slug":"personal-reflections-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/personal-reflections-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Reflections"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Paul Hibschman<\/p>\n

We hear people refer to themselves as Aikidoka as a way of saying that they practice Aikido.\u00a0 In my understanding, this is incorrect on several levels. \u00a0Ka is an honorific suffix that is not used in the first person, \u201cI\u201d, in Japan.\u00a0 It denotes a high honor and is rarely used at all in Japan. \u00a0In this \u201cReflection, I want to go into what does it mean to practice a martial art. \u00a0I hope, if you understand the complexity of what we are learning, you will realize why none of us are likely to get to that level of honor. \u00a0So let me create the following argument.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs he Tia Chi or does he do Tia Chi?\u201d was a question I overheard in restaurant in Chinatown, San Francisco a decade ago or so.\u00a0 The question goes to the heart of martial art practice and who is a practitioner.\u00a0 What does it mean to be involved in a martial art.<\/p>\n

I doubt few who approach a martial art\u2019s practice hall ever stop to wonder what \u201cdoJo\u201d means or what the word, \u201cdo\u201d means as used in the name of various martial arts, for example, judo.<\/p>\n

Once I was by a swimming pool in California practicing Chinese calligraphy when an Asian woman came over to see what \"Dao\"<\/a>I was doing.\u00a0 I was trying to draw the ideograph for \u201ctao\u201d as in Tao Te Ching <\/em>by Lao Tsu which is a basic book for Chinese philosophy about life and its goal. \u00a0\u00a0This is also the character for the Toa of Poo<\/em>, if you want a reference closer to home. \u00a0The character is also Romanized as \u201cdo\u201d which is also the last character in Aikido.\u00a0 She looked and said, \u201cwu shu\u201d, paused and again said, \u201cwu shu\u201d, paused again,\u00a0 looked at me and said, \u201cyou wu shu !or?) and walked off.<\/p>\n

For the purist in the readership, an Asian character cannot be transliterated which means to take one letter in one alphabet and render it in another alphabet, as in the Roman A = the Greek Alpha. For us, an Asian ideograph is Romanized and even then by several different systems which drives scholars crazy.\u00a0 When it comes to meaning, Asian characters are that: characters.\u00a0\u00a0 It is like asking what does the character Mickey Mouse mean? \u00a0Each of the thousands of Chinese characters has many meanings and ways to pronounce it.\u00a0 We Westerners try to force this artistic expression into a kind of binary process with limited success.\u00a0 But this is really my point: we try to force a given meaning onto the name of a martial art.\u00a0 In doing so, we lose part of the art.<\/p>\n

\"Dao\"<\/a>The character for \u201ctao\u201d that I was working on has a root meaning of \u201cway,\u201d as in the road to enlightenment. \u00a0When you train for Aikido you are training in a way of life through harmonious energy.\u00a0 The various techniques are just that: techniques. \u00a0In the West, we have a hard time getting away from dualism as in a mind\/body split.\u00a0 In the East, it is the other way around — mind, body, spirit, aliveness are all in one and difficult to split up.\u00a0 In the East, (non-movie style) martial arts are one of the ways working on mind\/spirit progress.<\/p>\n

If any reader is getting restless and wants to go break boards or find an article on causing pain through pressure points, I ask for a bit more patience.\u00a0 Most Eastern spiritual practices have a few aspects in common.\u00a0 Most require a leader, teacher, or guru.\u00a0\u00a0 Most involve a physical aspect \u2013 yoga postures, Sufi dancing, Shoaling martial training.\u00a0\u00a0 The teacher is central with the task of aiming the student in a nameless direction and drawing the student out of self.\u00a0 Practitioners who are lucky find a teacher and virtually fall in love or, at least, awe.<\/p>\n

My teacher is Saotome Sensei. \u00a0When I hear, see, think about him, there is a curious twist that happens someplace deep \"Dao\"<\/a>inside me.\u00a0\u00a0 I doubt that he has any idea who I am, although he might recognize me probably, as his student.\u00a0 He taught Aikido in Washington, D.C., for what must seem to him, forever.\u00a0 He is now retired in Florida after over 50 years of weekly teaching but still shows up in D.C. with some frequency.<\/p>\n

Once, he decided to offer a short series of 5:00 a.m. classes in movement meditation.\u00a0 It was a standing meditation with a particular and not easy to do correctly, rocking motion of the hips, accompanied by a very defined arm swing.\u00a0\u00a0 Breath control was also central to it, as was a kind of chant.<\/p>\n

When he was teaching a regular class, if he wanted to say something while we were practicing, he would clap, we would sit where we were, and he would talk.\u00a0 Once, years after his special meditation class, he clapped, we stopped and sat.\u00a0 He assumed that mentation posture, rocked forward, moved his arms forward but continued them up into that wide-open, encompass everything posture that we are seeing frequently from the politicians in this election year.\u00a0 Then he said, \u201cAikido!\u201d\u00a0 He did this twice maybe even three times in different directions, looked around and asked, \u201cUnderstand?\u201d\u00a0 Then he motioned, and we continued to practice the technique we were working on.<\/p>\n

If you search YouTube, you can find films of O\u2019Sensei doing and saying (according to the subtitles) something similar.\u00a0 I doubt that I could find an example quickly for these little clips are buried in films of a regular practice sessions or talks.<\/p>\n

I am now in my early 70\u2019s and my practice of the physical aspects of Aikido is definitely limited by energy reserves and a certain lack of bounce.\u00a0 I also lag because I spent over ten years in the mountains of California without any good Aikido training within 50 miles and did not practice.\u00a0 Yet, there is this other side of Aikido that is learned with a teacher and with the physical and the mental practice achieved through that teacher.\u00a0 Once that is learned, it has the possibility of going on no matter where is the dojo or the teacher. \u00a0That is, it becomes a part of us which, in a way, is a step towards us becoming part of it, in the sense of, \u201che is aikido.\u201d \u00a0I do not think that I have the answer to what Saotome asked with his up-swung arms.\u00a0 But I do think I understand the question.<\/p>\n

\u201cKa\u201d as a suffix probably means the person has become the art. \u00a0I hope we are all practicing in a way that the art can at least become a part of us. \u00a0\u00a0I suggest we leave \u201cka\u201d for the Shihans who probably will not use it anyway \u2013 except in analogous way to indicate everything is Aikido and can be elevated to a position of honor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Paul Hibschman We hear people refer to themselves as Aikidoka as a way of saying that they practice Aikido.\u00a0 In my understanding, this is incorrect on several levels. \u00a0Ka is an honorific suffix that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,12,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paul","category-philosophy","category-shihan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5156"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5361,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156\/revisions\/5361"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}