I consider it a corruption. Poorly taught students who became teachers in closed environments.
There is simply no need for you to connect to someone's center when you yourself are connected. It is progression of newbies training as meat heads, using their shoulders and isolated muscle that causes the same reaction in the other fellow that created this mess we now call budo; replete with "ancient concepts few know their way around. These days you can watch most any Japanese experts in various arts and see a disconnected body heavily reliant on technique and cooperation to get by. You can take your pick, have them push themselves off a wall, or hold them at a certain place while they cut or do waza and you will see the equivalent of any kid at the gym as far as centered connection in their movement.
It is very rare to see a swordsman or any aiki teacher truly cut or move from hara. I could put thousands of dollars down and win most every time putting some extremely famous men to the test.
Do it yourself. And before you touch, ask them specifically what is to be connected to what? Ask them to spell it out for ya. Then put your hand ...on their hara and tell them not to move their arms at all and to show the hara moving their arms. Then ask them how to train to make....a hara (you're not born with one). Don't be surprised when a) they have nothing to show b) nothing to offer you by way of explanation.
Once you learn to actually make a hara and move this way... you will see the failure to produce Dantian driven movement in just about everyone in budo, including very famous people. Some you know well.
Again, put them to the test. Ask them how to make one, how to connect it. When you find out they can't tell you, you've learned a valuable lesson about myth making of famous men in budo. Another deep secret? They know their full of it too. Because they can't explain it themselves. They were never taught. Its a house of cards with no competent person willing to step up and demand some level of competency and at the very least, honesty from our peers and teachers.
Here is another tidbit. When you move.. from hara, you affect them... In their hara... Without aiming or trying to connect to it. It is what is supposed to be making kuzushi on contact, not technique.
When you move with muscle they respond with muscle.
Last is what you see in many experienced people; technique designed to redirect force from revealing their own structural weaknesses in frame and form. It can feel soft, so it is considered high level. Take away their technique? They often feel as connected as any other average person.
When someone with a substantially connected center moves... your average person gets swept away with its movement. This was the original -and still- purpose of the power of a connected hara (Dantian) and why it was highly prized and the training for it kept by and large secret.
Again if someone thinks connecting to someone's center is such a smart idea, go back in time and connect to Takeda. Let me know how that works out for ya. ;-)
The very idea is stupid and a guaranteed failure isn't it? And yet the concept is taught by just about everyone in the Japanese arts.
Which is why you can move around just about all of them at will when you have a developed Dantian.
They argue for decades on the net.
They quote their teachers.
They get mad,
They call you arrogant...
Then.... Well... you meet and move them all around because in the end...
They don't have one and don't know how to make one and don't know how to hide it even if they had one.
Too many arts are just one huge mess of muscling through and hoping for the best. We need to start over.
Last edited by Dan Harden; 17th February 2015 at 03:38.
Dan
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