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Tall Tales
and Reality: What I Really Learned from Master Morihei
AJ: What was the most important thing you learned from Morihei
Ueshiba?
Toihei Sensei: The way people most talk about ki these days tends
toward the occultish, but I will say that I have never done anything even
remotely involving the occult. Much of what Ueshiba Sensei talked about, on
the other hand, did sound like the occult.
In any case, I began
studying aikido because I saw that Ueshiba Sensei had truly mastered the
art of relaxing. It was because he was relaxed, in fact, that he could
generate so much power. I became his student with the intention of learning
that from him. To be honest, I never really listened to most of the other
things he said.
Stories about Ueshiba
Sensei moving instantaneously or pulling pine trees from the ground and
swinging them around are all just tall tales. I’ve always urged aikido
people to avoid writing things like that. Unfortunately many people don’t
seem to listen. Instead, they just decrease the size of the tree in the
story from some massive thing to one only about ten centimeters in
diameter. In reality, it’s pretty difficult to pull even a single burdock
root out of the ground, so how in the world is someone going to extract a
ten centimeter pine tree, especially while standing on its root system?
Such things are nothing but exaggerations of the kind often used in
old-fashioned storytelling.
The stories have
gotten rather incredible since Ueshiba Sensei passed away, and now people
are having him moving instantaneously or reappearing suddenly from a
kilometer away and other nonsense. I was with Ueshiba Sensei for a long
time and can tell you that he possessed no supernatural powers.
AJ: Sensei, you seem in very
good health for a man about to turn seventy-six. Has this always been the
case?
Toihei Sensei: Actually, I was rather frail as a child. My father said
I needed to be stronger and made me take up judo, which he had been
involved in at Keio
University. I trained
hard and eventually did grow stronger, but after entering the pre-college
program at Keio a bout with pleurisy forced me to take a year off. My
hard-earned strength suddenly began to vanish again.
Unable to endure the
thought of losing what I had worked so hard to gain, I replaced the judo
with other forms of training such as zazen (seated Zen meditation) and
misogi (purification). I vowed not let my strength deteriorate again even
if it killed me. Worrying about my health and living as a semi-invalid did
nothing to help with my recuperation, so I just said to hell with it, I
might as well throw myself into training, even if it kills me. Aikido was
part of that training as well. I concentrated on keeping myself strong, and
somewhere along the way the x-rays showed that the pleurisy had completely gone
away. Amazingly, I had gotten better.
Although the ideas
were somewhat vague at that time, I had a sense that it was my mind and
spirit (kokoro) that had motivated my body. I realized that the way you
hold your mind is important. Physical illness is okay (if not desirable),
but it is unacceptable to allow illness to extend to your mind or your ki.
In Japanese, when the
body malfunctions in some way we call it yamai, or byo, which means simply
"illness"; but when the failure extends to one’s ki as well we
call it byoki. So although my body may be afflicted with some sort of
illness, I don’t let that extend to my ki. If the mind is healthy, the body
will follow.
After my recovery I
returned to the judo club, but I couldn’t bring myself to resume training as
enthusiastically as before. One reason was that judo inevitably emphasizes
conditioning of the body before turning to matters of the mind. My
thinking, however, was that the mind moves the body, and that anything you
think in your mind you should be able to do with your body as well.
Also, having been away
from judo for nearly two years, by the time I got my second dan, everybody
else was already ranked fourth or fifth dan. Even many of the third dans
had progressed so far ahead of me that they could throw me all over the
place. That wasn’t very interesting and it wasn’t much fun, either.
Hoping to strengthen
myself, I went home and started kicking lightly at the support pillars
around the house. After doing that a couple of thousand times a day,
though, the walls started to come down. My elder sister wasn’t very pleased
about that and made me go outside in the garden instead. After a few weeks
I got so I could move my feet with the same agility and dexterity as my
hands. I went back to the dojo and was able to throw everybody.
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