Aikido and the Right to Kill

[arche_apeiron]

Watch on YouTube

This is an older documentary about Aikido, but it is still good.

When I tried describing Aikido to my husband, I described it as being "pacifist," but that isn't the right word. It isn't offensive but defensive is probably a better description. It is controlled aggression. It is using the aggression of your opponent against them.

Aikido is against starting a fight and is about ending a fight. 

While the moves can injure the opponent -- you can break a person's fingers and arms and dislocate their shoulders or break their nose  -- the goal is to make it so your opponent cannot hurt you or anyone else.

I think it is good to consider the context from whence Aikido came. The creator of Aikido, after serving in the military during WWII, found the death and violence and emotional trauma that war causes to be too much. The culture of martial arts was one where you would aggressively challenge others as a move of ego. People were injured and killed due to rage and a thirst for violence, not because you wanted to end the fight. It left a bad taste in his mouth, and so Aikido was born, a martial art that is effective for all people regardless of gender or strength or age. 

My religion is on one level a warrior religion, and people who follow it often fetishize the Viking stereotype and the berserker. I can't say that I don't do the same. But perhaps the berserker was not necessarily "out of control" but in fact was experiencing something similar to the mushin no shin goal of the samurai, which is translated to "no mind." You enter an altered state of processing all the forces coming at you with no discursive distraction of thought. Time stops. Space contracts. Everything becomes clear. 

If someone is trying to kill me or a loved one, I have the ethical right to kill them before the job is done. But I have seen the trauma that too much killing can cause a person and the healing that Aikido can bring them. Killing may be an ethical right. Killing may be necessary. Killing, however, won't necessarily serve your spirit. And so, as I look into Aikido which does not teach fatal moves, even when someone comes at you for a fatal strike, I am sitting in a space that the character Morgan in The Walking Dead struggles with. He swings between two extreme ways of handling trauma and aggression.  I am of these two minds, too. But, according to the Samurai, a true warrior has no mind.