Had one of my interesting thoughts. I've been glancing at the posts here as they come up--and today went back to Dan's OP. And one of the complaints about his post, as well as other's that bear the same focus, is that Daito-ryu aiki is a gokui skill, requiring unique and specialized training, and that it's outcomes are also unique--with an intimately related issue of legacy, lineage and initiation. Whereas the "homogenizers" would assert that DR aiki is a particular manifestation of a more universal set of skills. Shall we say that Internal Strength is classical music and Daito-ryu aiki is Mozart. (however, many within DR assert that their form is unique, leading DR aiki to have subsets of Duscek, Kuhlau Mozart and Hummel . . .. with each and everyone claiming to do the Mozart version).
Which leads then to a complaint of what could be considered "brand-name," aiki being a term that is associated with DR and aikido, and without initiation, one cannot understand it's essence, and it is arrogance to assert that one is doing the same thing when not initiated. AKA: composing "in the style of Mozart" isn't Mozart. Have I summed this up without doing too much harm to things.
Anyway, I don't care to participate in this debate again and I've posted in many places what my beliefs are about lineage, initiation and the like. But two thoughts come to mind:
In my research on my revised version of Old School - which will be
out in a few weeks I write about a great mid-Edo martial artist, Honma Sengoro, who is described as doing a feat very similar to that of DR, but perhaps at a higher level. He was pinned
face-up by five retainers of a daimyo. Not the same ryu or dojo. And he
easily stood up, with five people unable to stop him. He was rechallenged and eventually did it five times. The salient point is that in the commentary of the history, it states something like,
"This showed his exemplary skill at kumiuchi." Kumiuchi is a generic term for body-to-body grappling. What is significant here is that Honma is described as being at the top of the heap in a skill that was commonplace, so to speak. In other words, to the Japanese, it was a given that grappling had components of IS. It was a matter of course. (I also take this on in Hidden in Plain Sight, of course, discussing such schools at Kito-ryu and Yoshin-ryu, but the signal point here is that a generic word that was used by everybody sufficed to describe a form of IS).
Second point: The first known written reference of Daito-ryu aiki is in Sagawa the elder's training notebook in 1913, I believe. At the time, Takeda was teaching Daito-ryu jujutsu (of course, he was teaching what people now call aiki, but the point is that he was a great teacher of something people referred to by a
generic term). So Takeda visits his student, Ueshiba, and meets with Onisaburo, who urges him, so the story goes, to change the name of his art to aikijujutsu or aikijutsu - I cannot remember which. I'm guessing that there were two reasons: 1) these skills were now so rare that as they were no longer a commonplace, they deserved an "uncommon" name 2) marketing
Which leads to this question: if Takeda hadn't changed the name, Dan could have posted, "Jujutsu as a concept--why all the fuss." Linguistically speaking, we'd be talking about a continuum--or a nodal point, with all kind of ramifications, rather than something alleged to be unique (unless DR was included in the title).
To be sure, if one asserts that s/he is teaching
Daito-ryu and is not initiated or has been made hamon, that is wrong for specific reasons. But my point is that aiki is a "trademark" almost by an accident--A paranoid, unlettered guy was influenced by the whacky guru of his, then, leading student to change the name of what he's teaching. Wonder what our debates would be like if that hadn't happened?