But that's the very point, from my point of view—rediscovering that wheel! It's true that there are fora for TKD and other KMAs, but what you may not realize is that there is a kind of split in the view that TKDists have on their own art. This is, I think, important to understand if you're trying to figure out why a KMAist would hang around a karate forum. It has to do with a kind of world view:
- do you see TKD as being, more than anything else, a fighting system for CQ self-defense, and if so,
- do you see the technical content of TKD as being embedded in the hyungs—basically the Korean analogues of karate kata, and made up of the same subsequences of movements as those in karate kata (especially Shotokan), such that the logic of these sequences—why these particular movements are put together—is derived from the original logic of the bunkai for the source kata which gave rise to the Korean forms; and
- do you see the optimal way of thinking about bunkai—the one that gives you the greatest practical advantage—to be that which the founding masters of Okinawan karate had in mind in designing the kata that then went to Japan, then Korean (where they were subsequently dismantled and reassembled in many cases)?
If you answer 'yes' to all three of these (and many, if not most TKDists do not, I'd guess), then it's very likely you're going to be interested in the karate threads because, in a way, you're going to closer to the original source meanings of those hyung sequences. Imagine that you're an academic, specializing in the French language. You are certainly going to want to keep up with the work of scholars of Latin, because a lot of what you see in the grammar of French is going to reflect patterns and idiosyncracies present in the grammar of Latin. For those of us who, to a greater or lesser extent, adopt the three-part package I just sketched, reinventing the wheel is exactly what we want to do because, if we succeed, then we'll have the wheel—and with the pressure to teach TKD from a sport-sparring/form performance (as vs. analysis) perspective, we're pretty sure that at the moment we don't actually have the wheel, or at least, all of it.
You said something in an earlier post about people like Abernethy in effect rediscovering what at least people in Okinawa have been doing all along. But those of us in the TKD camp who I'm talking about don't have access to the Okinawan perspectives, any more than the Korean MAists who founded the original Kwans had access to the deepest bunkai when they were learning their MA in Tokyo in the 1930s, under Funakoshi or Kanken (apart from Hwang Kee). Someone like Abernethy or Rick Clark provides concepts and tools of analysis that we can use to get a much deeper insight into the combat meaning of the forms we've learned than is normally provided (given that, as one of our most experienced TKD practitioners on MT, Kwan Jang, has pointed out, the Kwan founders really didn't have a very deep understanding of the combat applications of the kata they brought home from Tokyo were, and that pretty much determined what their students and students' students knew). In a sense, what at least some of us in the KMAs are interested in doing—including, I think the OPer in this thread—is rethinking the KMAs so that they regain the depth of combat content inherent in their descent from a system with both strikes, tuite and kyosho components, but in addition the very well-developed kicking weapons that have developed over the past half-century. I'm not talking about the complex 540s and high-glitz tournament point-scorers, but the basic power kicks, the hard roundhouse, back- and side-kicks using the open-hip biomechanics that so many of practice devotedly.
Let me quote a passage from one of Kwan Jang's posts, part of a reply to a query of mine, where the issue had to do with effectiveness at various fighting ranges:
Kwan Jang said:
(The whole post is here.) This passage expresses nicely my personal 'take' on the kind of TKD I want to do (I am not for a moment saying that I think anyone else must, or needs to, think of things in the same way; it's just my own personal interpretation of TKD that I'm talking about here). In view of that, you can see perhaps just why it is that I, and a few other of us KMA types, hang around karate discussions. We don't feel that we have anything to tell you about your own art, I don't think; on the contrary, we're trying to apply what karateka know (at least, the ones who themselves are similarly minded about their own art) to the understanding and practice of our own....
