What does AIKIDO (合気道) mean?
Ten years ago I read essays from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and I discovered the incredibly great importance of the meaning of the words. I believe that that recognition purified my thought. Since than when I come across a certain new term, or an already known one and interesting to me, without hesitation I look for its etymology! Because in that way I can UNDERSTAND it and not only learn it by heart.
When it comes to foreign terms, this method becomes complicated, but almost without exceptions, it provides good results.
What does AIKIDO (合気道) mean?
In almost every encyclopedia you can see that the usual translation of this Japanese term with three monograms is:
• 合 – harmony
• 気 – energy
• 道 – way
The first two monograms together give the meaning of the term, and the third monogram – DO is here to complete the term and to make it a whole. A whole whose meaning I will lay out here.
At first, a short history: Were does AIKI come from? The ancestors of the people who are making Toyota now, as I already mentioned, had different preoccupations in the middle ages. The warfare, of course, was not only present with these people – it was present allover the world, but their attitude towards it was indeed a unique one. After all, their culture, which throughout the time produced their mentality, was characterized by a specifically LARGE dedication towards any activity or phenomenon. This kind of attention, which we, in all our not enlightened nature and superficiality, can call it over an “extremism in attention about details”, they had it also in their attitude towards warfare. Actually, I should say that they had it in a large amount especially towards warfare, because it was always life or death question with them.
We all know that to enter a battle with an aim to destroy the opponent, sole strength is not enough, but the middle aged Japanese went as far as possible in learning the details of fighting, for their time. Notes had been preserved from the school of the Takeda clan about the dissection of human corpses so that they could get to know the human body and its weaknesses better. So, in order to be more efficient, they spread their knowledge in the area of medicine. And without further ado, you can already see that they approached this with an outmost seriousness.
They developed extraordinary skills of fighting and warfare by getting to know the abilities and weaknesses of the human body. But, as it can happen everywhere, in Japan also, not everyone is genius, so great discoveries are rare. One of these great discoveries in the area of martial art is the AIKI principle. The discovery of this principle can not be assigned to anyone in particular and although the Japanese would certainly want to, it can not be assigned to them in general, because they learned from the Chinese, who are far older culture then the Japanese (the same principle is used in the Chinese martial art TAI CHI CHUAN). May as it is, it had been written, in the clan Takeda, that the principle Teijun created the martial art which he called AIKI JUJUTSU, and than, it got the name DAITO RYU AIKI JUJUTSU, because of the castle Daito.
Now, what is this principle, which I say is a great discovery, characterized by? We have all heard about “using the strength of the opponent” but, few of us had given it a thought about what exactly does it mean, and even fewer had understood it, through personal experience!
To be continued …