The recent -though “recent” is already doing some optimistic work here, since its roots stretch back to the 1970s- schism within the Catholic Church offers an occasion for reflecting on the dynamics of groups and organized communities.

A brief survey of religious history suggests that disagreement and fragmentation are not exceptions but constants across major faiths. The various branches of Judaism, the deep divide in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites, the many traditions of Hinduism, and the striking plurality of philosophical schools within Buddhism all point in the same direction.

It almost seems that wherever there is a sense of the sacred, there is also, almost inevitably, the seed of dissent. And when that sacred dimension is accompanied by a hierarchical structure -one vested with the authority to define the boundaries of interpretation, ethics, and correct practice- the centrifugal force of division becomes not an accident of history, but one of its recurring patterns.

With the necessary caveats of scale and context, something similar appears to occur in any human group organized around shared ideas, values, or practices. Even, perhaps especially, in the modest world of Aikido.

A closer look suggests that Aikido, too, carries an implicit-if not for some explicitly acknowledge- dimension of sacredness. Not in the sense of formal religiosity, though its etiquette borrows visibly from Shinto forms, but in the quieter sense of a practice that organizes time, attention, and inner posture. Each training session gradually marks out a space within the week: a space of reflection, which is, after all, the original sense of keiko, and which slowly reshapes the practitioner’s habits, perceptions, and dispositions.

Practice, environment, and the relationships that emerge within them become increasingly central to those who commit to the discipline. A sense of belonging follows almost naturally.

This is what occurred in the lifetime of Morihei Ueshiba and his students, across the different phases of the art’s development. And it is what continues, in its own way, in Dojos today.

As groups grow, so does the need to stabilize and extend what has been developed: through ranks and certifications, through institutional recognition, through programs that can be transmitted beyond the presence of any single teacher. There is also the desire -no less important- to preserve continuity over time, and to allow the practice to outlast its individual custodians. Inevitably, organization follows.

Hierarchies, rules, terminologies, programs, schedules: from small private circles to formal associations and ultimately federations, the architecture is familiar.

Seen in this light, the history of Aikido organizations acquires a curious symmetry. From a single spark -the founder- many flames emerged: students who began spreading the art nearly seventy years ago. A small, loosely structured group giving rise to a global movement.

And yet from that shared origin, which one might reasonably imagine as cohesive, have proliferated a multitude of organizations -perhaps too many. Each convinced it is best positioned to preserve the integrity of what it received, and to respond appropriately to the demands of the present.

Attempts at reunification have periodically followed, often framed in ecumenical terms and carried by institutional ambition. They are, more often than not, followed by equally familiar centrifugal reversals: declarations, ruptures, and the formation of yet more bodies, each with its own charter and hierarchy.

When Hannibal was told that crossing the Alps with elephants was impossible, he is said to have replied: “I will either find a way, or make one”.

One sometimes has the impression that something similar animates many departures from established communities: not merely disagreement, but the quiet insistence on drawing a path where none seems available.

It is not, and should not be, for an outsider to judge the moral texture of such decisions. Still, from a certain distance, division often appears less like tragedy than like expedient -undertaken for motives that range from the sincerely principled to the merely practical.

Some leave convinced that they have been entrusted with the task of preserving tradition in its purest form. In doing so, however, they may end up removing themselves from the very collective effort that keeps that tradition alive, reducing it, ironically, to something closer to a fossil than a fire. That is, of course, assuming the tradition has been fully understood in the first place.

Others simply find no room within existing structures and proceed to construct new ones in a more congenial image. The familiar pattern of “jumping ship” remains visible even in disciplines that like to imagine themselves immune to it. Titles and ranks are often reassigned with surprising speed; authority is frequently reconstituted with equal ease, sometimes in forms more rigid than those left behind.

There are also those who grow impatient with institutional constraints and simply recreate them elsewhere, calibrated to personal preference. Or those who migrate toward looser frameworks, just to discover, in time, that any sustained practice tends to generate its own rules, expectations, and exclusions.

In common usage, “schism” is reserved for traditions with a centralized authority, particularly in religious contexts. Within Catholicism, it carries a precise theological and juridical meaning. Elsewhere, in systems without a single governing center, one tends instead to speak of schools, lineages, or currents. The vocabulary changes; the underlying dynamics, less so.

The Martial Arts world, incidentally, is quite comfortable with this alternative lexicon: schools, traditions, ryū, or streams of transmission.

So one might ask, without excessive irony, whether those who insist they practice “traditional” Aikido, or belong to the lineage of a particular teacher, or identify with a specific ryu, are entirely outside the logic of schism- or whether they are simply participating in it under a different name.

In shu-ha-ri (守破離), the movement from faithful imitation (shu) to individual interpretation (ha) is not only expected but structurally necessary, as is the eventual arrival at ri.

Ri (離), in its classical association, is linked to the trigram of Fire and the South in the I Ching: that which illuminates by virtue of its relationship to what sustains it. It is clarity through connection, rather than separation.

And yet the same character also marks a threshold: an opening, a passage through which one departs. In Japanese, its written form appears in rikon (離婚), divorce -a departure formalized.

To leave without rupture, to remain technically and emotionally coherent while no longer attached in the same way, is a difficult equilibrium. It is perhaps one of the quieter demands of adulthood, in practice as in life.

More often, though, the alternative proves more seductive: separation, rupture, the clean break.

In the dreams of an elderly Japanese man some decades ago, there was once the idea of a practice that might serve as “a way to reconcile the world and make human beings into one family”.

Then, eventually, we arrived.

Disclaimer: Picture by Jan Van Der Wolf from Pexels