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The Ki of Barberism
"These very same assumptions operate in other activities, like hairdressing, for example. In my local shop there is a student, a deshi, whose entire training consists of watching in silence what the barber does. In the years I have been a customer I have never seen him cut a single hair, other than give a customer a shave. Eventually, he will be able to do this, but only on selected heads and always under the very watchful eye of the barber. I have no doubt that he will become a very good hairdresser, but this will not be the result of any explicit teaching on the part of the barber. I have been told that O-Sensei used to require of his deshi two years of ukemi practice before being introduced to techniques and in one of his books Saito Sensei suggests two years of suburi before beginning kumitachi. To my mind this is barbershop training par excellence.
I think it needs to be stressed that students brought up in a western educational system do not have these assumptions and that to approach a Japanese martial art like aikido, especially if it is presented according to the above assumptions, requires an intellectual “paradigm shift” of considerable magnitude.
The idea that the deshi has to “steal” the knowledge or techniques from the teacher is often mentioned by disciples of O-Sensei and there is the implicit suggestion that so-called western ways of teaching based on rational explanation have no place in aikido. This might have been the case in O-Sensei’s day before World War II, but it is clear that aikido’s “centre of gravity” has shifted somewhat. It might be too much to say that this centre is no longer in Japan, but the mere fact of thousands of dedicated and technically able aikido practitioners outside Japan must surely add a dimension to the art that O-Sensei cannot have imagined. In the rest of this article, I shall discuss the question of whether the actual dissemination of aikido has been “westernized” since O-Sensei’s time and if so, to what extent this matters for the future."
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"there are the so-called training manuals Budo and Budo Renshu. The former is supposed to have been written by O-Sensei himself and the latter to have been approved by him. However,
(1) they were only given to certain students, probably those who passed certain unspecified tests of martial virtue and were in no sense general aikido manuals available to anyone, and
(2) the explanations would be incomprehensible to anyone who did not possess a thorough knowledge of Japanese culture (in particular, of the contents and significance of the collections of Japanese myths known as the Kojiki and Nihonshoki) or who did not already understand the various techniques which O-Sensei practiced at the time.
Even then, many immediate students of O-Sensei have confessed that they had very little understanding of the more esoteric explanations he gave relating to the “unalterable” laws of the universe etc. These students continuously trained under O-Sensei’s direction and would surely have been in the best position to acquire such understanding. But this does not appear to have been the case."
"Judging from the written records and his own statements, it is highly probable that O-Sensei had experiences which might properly be termed mystical and these formed a central element in the creation of his art. Mysticism is a highly respected element in the Western religious tradition and it is clearly not the exclusive preserve of religions like Christianity, with its western intellectual background. The great mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross were, like O-Sensei, both major reformers in their chosen spheres of activity. Unlike O-Sensei, they both left copious records of their mystical experiences, but these records bring us no closer to an actual understanding of these experiences and they are in no sense a means of replicating these experiences in ourselves. O-Sensei composed some poems that are incomprehensible to most aikido practitioners. But perhaps we have no right to expect O-Sensei to present such experiences in words that we can understand ?"
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(my) Conclusion: Training for regaining spontaneity, rather than for the acumulation of techniques ? Practice rather than "understand".
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