Well, it's older than me. I guess that's pretty old I remember reading that some schools (leave it for the scholars amongsts us to tell us which ones) were supposed to be around 900 to 1200 years old. Of course, information has changed over the years, I imagine it would depend on when you define the creation/birth of a Ryu.
when i was a kid i used to ask my gran how old she was... 'as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth' was her reply every time asking how old ninjutsu is can be just as vexing...the common line is about 1000yrs...but what about the 1000 years before that..? if the principles of the art are universal...they have always existed... to steal an analogy from Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)... gravity has always been here...Newton didn't 'discover' it...he just described it better than anyone who came along before him... in a similar vein...the principles of perseverance, stealth, forebearance...the ideas about efficiency of movement, concealing actions to arrive at more conclusive results, flow, balance, space etc etc...all existed in all cultures since the very begining...but for some bizarre reason...they got put together and described in a very compelling way by some guys and gals in fuedal Japan...
The way Hatsumi sensei has explained it in private conversations to a friend of mine who was living in Japan at the time. . . He posits a sort of primal ur-art, the "source" of all martial art which, as humans spread and adapted to different sets of geographic/climatic conditions and developed different cultures, also adapted to them -- in the process becoming specialized, locked into certain forms. . .becoming "partial arts". He has indicated that he feels that in recent years he has penetrated to this primal source or essence, and this is what he is now trying to transmit -- not the nine ryuha that people keep getting hung up on and misled by. This is also connected with his feeling that people who trained with him years ago, even if it was for a considerable period, don't really have a clue about his art.
Very nice. I sometimes think that practitioners of other Bujinkan-related arts feel that when Soke says things like this, he is in someway attempting to put down their training for marketing reasons, and that really it's just sour grapes on his behalf. However Soke seems in my estimation to genuinely believe that these other people are missing the point entirely, and Dale seems to have hit the nail on the head with this. I don't wish to be seen to have a go at these other practitioners - what they do is genuinely very good a lot of the time, but it seems to me that it really is far removed from what Sensei is doing, for the reasons outlined above.
