my take on this....
i think kyokushin is stronger now because of the of the way it has splintered and grown since sosai`s death.
although numbers may have dropped in what i might call pure kyokushin dojo`s, we have to take into account the new relatives....so when you take all of these into account the spawn of sosai continues to grow.
what i believe sosai gave us was...a way of life, a syllabus and of course his teaching and guidance.
let`s equate this to the medical profession........sosai was one of the greatest, if not the greatest teaching professor of his era with medical students keen to learn....what gives the professor the most pleasure............. the students learning his methods and techniques and then improving on them and so the cycle of learning continues.
scattered around the world are the spawn of sosai doing just that.
as for the spiritual side of things, i think this varies from sensei to sensei but can still be found but i have to admit perhaps not as strong as it was in the past ... as gary so elequently put it...then it was almost "cultish" perhaps it`s better now.
now stronger..do you mean in compared to other styles?
1] do you mean for being taught to compete in the various disciplines....knockdown, clicker, non contact and kata.
2]do you mean from a budo point of view.
3]do you mean improving streetfighting and self defence abilities.
4]do you mean as a foundation for a martial artist.
this is my overview from somebody who stopped training seven stone ago!!!!
i could pick people in knockdown tournaments who were going to fold very quickly....i thought the "pick" lacked strength and conditioning and perhaps some did but i picked them purely from the style they came from and the badge they wore..[slightly brainwashed] what i didn`t take into account is that we were not fighting under their rules....how well would we have done under their rules!?
i had this tribal/cult like thinking gary mentioned in another thread. anybody who wasn`t wearing kyokushin colours wasn`t "worthy!!"
now i think you have to dismiss[imo] any dojo/style that doesn`t compete.
my local dojo run by a guy i used to train with, a nice enough guy who embarrassed quite a few of the b.k.k`s top fighters in his day, wearing a 3rd kyu.....now i think he wears five or six gold stripes and i quote," i don`t believe in competing." are they afraid of being exposed??
i offered i have said in a previous thread to help a friends daughter a 2nd dan in this dojo fight in the bkk open...after viewing the previous years dvd she told me she wasn`t up to it.
this is a dojo that bases itself on the kyokushin syllabus....
so an example of kyokushin getting weaker!!!!!!!!!
examples on how it is getting stronger are...
pheezy`s dojo in scotland.
he had a fighter mixing it with the cream of the cream of the bkk at reading, proving himself to be a top,top fighter at knockdown...and then two weeks later the same guy wins a muay thai fight by stoppage in the fourth round, this just wouldn`t have happend 25 years ago, or if it did..i didn`t know about it.
then we have gary under the enshin banner with his modern methods of teaching and forward thinking, the list goes on and on...brazil etc;etc
now sorry to quote "spirit" again but it`s my favourite quote on our forum.
"it`s not the style that counts but the sensei"
so when you try and decide what is the best/strongest style......there isn`t one...some get stronger, some get weaker depending on who is teaching at the time, this includes kyokushin dojo`s............................................ ......
i would like to have trained under gary,pheezy spirit etc............................... but there again i am a little bit more enlightend now!!!!
