Kang Uk Lee's book has many inaccuracies...
You said it, Josh. For one thing, he repeats thoroughly debunked pseudohistory about the evidence base for `ancient' KMAs, managing to cram into a couple of pages the standard myths about the physical, documentary and philological data cited for these ancient lineages (I've summarized these in a different thread
here, if anyone wants to follow this point up—every last little ounce of detail is there, so there's no point in dwelling on it). There isn't even a little bit of critical reflection on the nature of these specious arguments. I know that people tend to regard anything supporting their agenda as good news, but in the end, this sort of thing comes back to bite you on the ***: you lose credibility because people, once they look at the facts from a broader and deeper knowledge base, start thinking: if he's got this stuff so badly messed up, just how reliable is he on the technical side? You can't help it, you start being unwilling to give an author who makes these kinds of elementary errors—including ignoring research (such as Dakain Burdick's, already mentioned) that was readily available, in print or e-accessible, at least two years before their book appears—the benefit of any doubt at all.
Only in the Moo Duk Kwan do we find the snake representing the form Bal Sae (Bassai, as many other forms similar, Ship Soo -the bear, Pyong Ahn - the turtle etc. These were innovations and characteristics devised by GM Hwang Kee founder of the MDK and go back no further than that. These characteristics as applied by GM are cumbersome in that they lead students away from the true history of the forms. These should only be looked at with regards to the spirit of the form as understood by GM Hwang Kee, no more, no less...Look to Japan to begin your research into the history, then Okinawa, China etc..
Happy Hunting!
--josh
I think Josh's point summarizes the situation very well, and all I want to do here is bring up a possible explanation for the snake/Bassai (and other animal linkages) unique to HK's tradition in the development of the MAs. So here goes...
HK was particularly avid to dissociate the KMAs from identification with the hated Japanese occupiers. He therefore emphasized the origins of his interpretation of the KMAs with the Chinese, another victim nation of Japanese racist genocide; but he came to grief, as we are all pretty much aware, over his attempt to pass off the Pyung-Ahn forms as Chinese in origin... at least, that's what he appeared to be claiming, in his earlier assertions that he had brought them back from China. This seems totally absurd, given the fact that the Pyung-Ahns, transparently related to the Pinan katas (though their sequence reflect the Heian ordering) are known, and abundantly documented, to be the product of Anko Itosu's thinking, maybe his greatest single creative work. But as pointed out by John Hancock
in this article, there is a way for both solid history and HK's assertions to be reconciled, though it implies a very high degree of disingenousness on HK's part: yes, he brought the Pinans back from China,
but he did not learn them from exposure to CMAs. Rather, he learned them from an acquaintance of his when he was stationed as a railway worker in Manchuria—the somewhat enigmatic Gogen Yamaguchi, the Cat, founder of the Japanese avatar of Gojo-Ryu, who was well aware of the Pinans and other Okinawan kata, and was serving as an intelligence officer in Manchuria, stationed in the same specific area where HK was working. You can read Hancock's detailed, well-supported arguments in the link I provided; I myself find them quite convincing, and so does Dakin Burdick, who cites them in his seminal 1997
Journal of Asian Martial Arts article, `People and events of Taekwondo's formative years'. The crucial point is that HK in a sense succeeeded—by formulating things in a way which inevitably would lead people to draw false conclusions—in telling something like the truth while making it seem as though Tang Soo Do owed nothing to Japanese sources for its technical content, particularly its hyungs.
This is where the snake, and other animal iconography in HK's treatment of the TSD hyungs, comes in, I believe. In marked contrast to the Japanese kata, the use of animal names and other naturalistic imagery is a marked feature of Chinese hsing patterns. I very strongly suspect that, as part of the disingenousness already documented in the way HK told a deliberately misleading story about the source of the Pyung-Ahn hyungs, he created out of whole cloth the snake/Bassai association and other animal name associations with TSD forms specifically to reinforce the Han/Korean connection in his art and obscure the historically demonstrable origins of the postward KMAs in the Okinawan/Japanese fighting systems grouped together under the rubric Karate, one interpretation of which translates directly into Korean as Tang Soo Do. The end result has nothing to do with martial content and everything to do with the political symbolism which different Asian martial arts came to embody in the wake of Japanese colonial expansion and defeat in the postwar era... and I seriously doubt that any significance
beyond this for the snake/Bassai connection in TSD is going to emerge.
—is that, if HK himself was the source of the story that he had `brought the [Pyung Ahn hyungs] back from China', as HK's own son insisted to Hancock, then he wasn't just being disingenuous, but was completely fabricating the Chinese connection. And fabricating Chinese-style names for Bassai and other hyungs taken over directly from Okinawan/Japanese kata would simply be more of the same. The whole point was to cover over TSD's origins in O/J karate with a Chinese-tinged facade, and imposing animal style names or associations on Japanese kata which completely lacked these would be part of the show.
