Personal Traits
Morihei Ueshiba regularly practiced cold water misogi, as well as other spiritual and religious rites. He viewed his studies of aikido in this light.
As a young man, Ueshiba was renowned for his incredible physical strength. He would later lose much of this muscle, which some believe changed the way he performed aikido technique
Ueshiba was said to be a simple but wise man, and a gifted farmer. In his later years, he was regarded as very kind and gentle as a rule, but there are also stories of terrifying scoldings delivered to his students. For instance, he once thoroughly chastised students for practicing jō (staff) strikes on trees without first covering them in protective padding. Another time, as students sneaked back into the dojo after a night of drinking and brawling, he smashed the first one through the door over the head with a bokken (wooden practice sword), and proceeded to scold them.
Morihei Ueshiba played the game of Go often. During one game with Sokaku Takeda, Takeda utilized the Goban as a weapon against a man he mistook for an assassin. The "assassin" was actually a friend of Ueshiba, and had arrived in a scarf due to bad weather. The scarf hid the man's identity, triggering Takeda's paranoia as, at the time, many people actually were trying to kill him.
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Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or traits:
“I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality.... Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“And, beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)