Morihei Ueshiba
Every founder of every great martial art spoke of his art in terms of spirituality. In this regard, I particularly enjoyed Aikido. I was fortunate enough to study with one of Morihei Ueshiba’s (the founder of Aikido) students. One of only four who after many decades of effort finally found for himself what Ueshiba was talking about.
For what Ueshiba taught was radically different from the bastardized and diminished faux-Aikido now so popular in many dojos. And yes, unlike the much diminshed versions taught all over the world, the art can be deadly. Very. So the art has dual appeal - on the one hand it appeals to violent people because it can be used to kill; and on the other it appeals to peaceful folk because it can be used to deflect attack without harming the attacker. There is a third appeal too, albeit not as common - sometimes it draws people as a path toward awakening (aka ’enlightenment’).
This third aspect was what interested Ueshiba. He studied every martial art he could find for most of his life. Eventually he became the best - undefeated by Chinese or Japanese masters, military experts, street gang leaders, and others who came to challenge him. But he always felt that he had not gone far enough, had not found the inner peace he had so long saught. In time however, he came to see that the inner quiet and absolute attention required when deflecting attack was exactly the same inner quiet and absolute attention required when sitting in meditation in a zendo. At that point he began to use martial arts as a means toward one single purpose - to find a way to be fully alert and attentive permanently. For as he later said, anything less than pure permanent attention was useless - the student was merely fooling himself into thinking he understood something. The martial aspect became for him, as it is for all true martial artists, incidental.
In 1925, after a life time of peace, Ueshiba awoke from the dream in which so many live out their lives:
“All at once I understood the nature of creation: the Way of a Warrior is to manifest Divine Love, a spirit that embraces and nurtures all things. Tears of gratitude and joy streamed down my cheeks. I saw the entire earth as my home, and the sun, moon, and stars as my intimate friends. All attachment to material things vanished.”
After many years of "ripening" as the Cha’an people say, he had a second vision in 1940:
“Around two o’clock in the morning as I was performing ritual purification, I suddenly forgot every martial art technique I had ever learned. All of the techniques handed down from my teachers appeared completely anew, Now they were vehicles for the cultivation of life, knowledge, virtue, and good sense, not devices to throw and pin people.”
And two years later, the final vision came in 1942, during the worst fighting of WWII:
“The Way of the Warrior has been misunderstood as a means to kill and destroy others. Those who seek competition are making a grave mistake. To smash, injure, or destroy is the worst sin a human-being can commit. The real Way of the Warrior is to prevent slaughter — it is the Art of Peace, the power of love.”
But not love as we normally understand it. What he meant was love without source or object - awakening to that which occurs when all that exists is the permanent presence of the absence of a concept of self.
