Preception of True TKD

[FieldDiscipline]

I wholeheartedly agree with Last Fearners superb post.

My understanding of Tae-kyon is that it was originally a combative sport, enjoyed at festivals and the like. However part of the reason the name TaeKwonDo was chosen was to clearly differentiate it from Tae-kyon which had developed a bad reputation as a streetfighting art used by gangsters and criminals. As we have seen, General Choi, Kim Bok Man and other founders of TKD practiced this art when young. To quote from GM Kim's book Practical TaeKwonDo:

'In 1948 at the age of 16 he was introduced to the ancient Korean foot-fighting art of Tae-Kyon, forerunner of TKD. This intoduction changed not only Kim's athetic career but also the pattern of his life.'

In his recent book on Chun Kuhn Do he also talks about To-San which he was secretly taught from the age of seven in 1941 by a buddhist priest at his temple.

No mention is made of Karate or any other Japanese arts.

 

[rmclain]

Changmoo-Kwan/Kangduk-Won article
http://www.arlingtonkarate.com/articles/CMKstory.pdf

Interview
http://www.arlingtonkarate.com/articles/KoreanMAtruth.pdf

R. McLain

 

[exile]

Well, my position on some of these topics being discussed in this thread is no secret, and most of you know how I feel. The same old arguments, opinions, and lack of verifiable "proof" to back claims seems to keep everyone guessing, and relying on sparse details to form their own beliefs, or mimic those that they have heard from others.

LF---

there are some important points you raise that need addressing. I want to begin by questioning the use of scare quotes here around the work proof. Historians recognize that when a claim is made about an historical event, or a series of historical events that one is trying to give an explanation for, a certain standard of documentation is called for. This is what professional historians spend years learning to achieve—it's the core of their training in graduate school—and while it doesn't have the same status as a proof in mathematics or logic, it does have about the same status as a proof in a hard science like physics: if you have enough of certain kinds of documentation, there burden of proof is on those who challenge your interpretation. As you go down the scale, with less and less of that documentation, the burden of proof starts shifting back to you; at the very end, if all you have are unverifiable reports and assertions and minimal contemporary evidence, you've still got the burden of proof for your assertion. Scare quotes aren't necessary: if you have enough evidence, you have what historians regard as proof, period; if you don't have that evidence, you may have suggestions and hypotheses, but not proof. Asking for hard documentation is no more unreasonable in the history of martial arts than it is in the history of anything else. In the days when Erik van Daniken went around raving about various monuments all over the world having been built by aliens, he brushed aside the lack of any evidence at all for that claim by referring derisively to those who insist on `proof'—in scare quotes—but it was obvious to pretty much everyone that he was trying to eliminate the criterion of sufficient evidence in getting acceptance for his ideas, because he had nothing that would count as evidence. I don't think it helps anyone's argument to appear to be suggesting that those who dispute that argument are asking for anything unreasonable when they insist on documentary evidence bearing on the argument—as I say, that's common practice in the normal practice of history.

I have made my opinion fairly clear before that there are three distinct eras of Taekwondo's history.

First is that time period of Korea's development, from the 1st century B.C. until the Japanese occupation in 1910. Most historians believe that the term "Taekwondo" was not used during this time period to describe the unarmed combat that was used in the old Chosen peninsula, however, if there is any doubt that a unique native unarmed combat existed, you only need to observe the fact that the Korean people are still here to know this.

Sorry, but I don't see how this follows. The fact that the Korean people are still here tells us they could fight, and fight well enough to survive. It does not tell us, however, that a `unique native unarmed combat' [system?] existed. The Basque people survived the overrunning of their peninsula by elements of the original Indo-european population. Are we allowed to infer the existence of a `unique Basque unarmed combat system' from this face? The Jewish peoples, the Romani peoples and many others survived centuries, or millenia of violent persecution and, in some cases, violent and sustained efforts to exterminate them. Are we justified in inferring the existence of a `unique Jewish/Romani/... combat system' simply because the Jews, Gypsies and .... survive to this day?

Obviously, all of the aforementioned peoples could fight. But the point you're making hinges critically on the notionn unique—specific to them, that is, systematic and developed, part of their own cultura identity. And that is a deduction that in no way follows the simple fact of their survival.

They were not soldiers, warriors, or armed militia by trade, and survival from the 1st through the 19th century depended greatly on their Martial Art skills.

Again, if by `Martial Art skills' you mean, fighting skills, no argument; but the fact that none of the people I've mentioned were `soldiers, warriors, or armed militia by trade' in no way allows you to deduce the existence of a specific structured unarmed fighting system unique to their respective cultures.

The second era of Taekwondo's history is that time period during the occupation when most of the aforementioned "Kwan founders" were born, grew up, and started learning about the Martial Art in the first place. Naturally, there was not much option during this time period but to become a student of "Japanese Martial Art," and gain any certification of "Dan" rank from a Japanese system. These students of Shotokan, and other variations were undoubtedly 100% influenced by Japanese and Okinawan Martial Karate, judo, jujutsu, etc. The operative word here is "influenced." This condition of being "forced" to learn Japanese culture did not change Korean history, nor did it make the future creation of Taekwondo of Japanese origins. However, the influence on these people, and their own personal skills is undisputable

I'm sorry, but I don't follow the last part of this. Every one of the early kwan founders studied MAs in Japan and came back with a set of skills and combat strategies and tactics, embedded in the forms—because kata were the foundation of karate teaching at that time—and used these forms as the technical basis of their own methods: the Pinan/Heian kata, Naihanchi, Bassai and many others were taken over literally, with acknowledgement to the Okinawain sources (as when Hwang Kee of the Moo Duk Kwan identified Anko Itosu as the source for the MDK's poomsae). This isn't just influence; it's a huge importantion of technical content.

Korean Martial Art did not begin in 1910, and did not stop developing in 1945.

As per the above, we have no hard evidence of just when a specifically Korean martial art began. So to say that Korean MA didn't begin in 1910 begs the question: to make that claim, you have to have a reason to believe it began at some earlier date, and if your only evidence is the reasoning you presented above, then your conclusion is unsupported—we have no documentation for a systematic Korean unarmed combat system from any earlier time, and the continued survival of the Korean people in no way allows the safe inference of a specifically Korean MA. As far as the further development of KMA after 1945, it's fairly obvious that it did develop. What Terry's post is about is the desirablilty of those developments. Like him, I think that a lot of that development was undesirable, from the point of view of combat effectiveness.

I do not judge the content of an entire Martial Art by the "forms" they use, nor the terminology exchanged, nor the documentation of its participants' ranks. For example, I might have a diploma from a ballet school, but if I prefer to dance to rock and roll, and that is what I teach, then the paper certificate only shows what else I know. Forms are only tools for training and practicing skills. Skills that existed long before the Japanese influence. Japan has their native Martial Art, China has their's, and Korea has its own. Each will eventually be influenced by the other.

The forms are a lot more than just training and practice skills. As Iain Abernethy has documented, they were originally regarded by the founders of the Okinawan MAs as actual fighting systems on their own. They contain the technical content of those arts, and training in those arts consisted of intensive study and experimentation with applications within the confines of one or two of those forms. Funakoshi spent nine years exclusively studying and training in the applications of the the Naihanchi kata. That's how his students and the students of the other Okinawan expatriate masters in Japan learned their MAs. And part of what they learned, therefore, was that the forms embody the fighting system. The fact that their own hyungs reflect almost literally the Japanese kata they learned means that they had made the fighting systems embodied in the kata the basis of the arts they themselves taught.

Much of the rest of your post deserves to be answered in detail, but the main points can be summarized as follows: General Choi talked about tae kyon a lot, he referred to it as ancient, therefore it must have been an important part of his training and must indeed be ancient. Historians of KMA have combed all available records and found very little specific information on just what tae kyon consisted of, how widely it was practiced and what its condition was by the 1930s. But as for the agenda underlying Gen Choi's statements, consider the following, from Combat magazine, cited in Stuart Anslow's new book on the ITF tuls:

(Interview from the 1970s) `Without karate, there would have been no Taekwondo.'

(Interview from the 1980s) `Karate was simply a reference tool that helped'.

(Interview from the 1990s) `Karate had only a minor or no impact on Taekwondo'

This is a reliable witness?? Contradictions in testimony like the above, in a court of law, would get a case thrown out of court so fast it would be a blur! General Choi hated the occupying Japanese, and he wasn't alone in that respect amongs the kwan founders. Many of the latter, however, and their senior students, were much more candid about the central place of the Okinawan/Japanese arts in their systems; S. Henry Cho, in his 1968 masterpiece Taekwon Do: Secrets of Korean Karate, states unequivocally that `the modern karate of Korea [his characterization of TKD throughout his book], with very little influence from tae kyun, was born with the turn of the 20th century...' [emphasis added].

One last point:

This does not mean that these things did not happen because you can not find a specific standard of historical documentation, and I would not go so far as to discount it because of this lack of evidence. Folklore might be more accurate, in some cases, than the lies told by those who won wars, and dominate other cultures.

On the basis of this reasoning, you have equal reason to believe any number of things that there is no documentation for. It is virtually impossible to prove that X didn't happen. But it's equally impossible to prove that Y didn't happen, or Z, or... So what counts in not what you can't disprove, but what you have some evidence for, that sets X apart from Y, Z, ... and gives it a priviledged status among hypotheses. That's why historians—and natural scientist— demand certain standards of evidence before granting a certain degree of plausibility to a given hypothesis. And folklore, over and over again, has been shown to be unreliable as a matter of historicala record; there's a whole subliterature in history devoted to the often bizarre relation between folk belief and verifiable sequences of events.

In any case, the founding relation between Okinawan/Japanese MAs and TKD hardly constitute `lies told by those who won wars, and dominate other cultures.' It is attested by the writing of kwan founders and their students, and in the living testimony of the hyungs, the technical core of TKD, constructed almost completely, in both ITF (see Anslow's book) and WTF (see Simon O'Neil's forthcoming book) on the basis of the kata of Okinawan/Japanese systems of karate. Of course there has been cultural imperialism and oppression and all sorts of genocidal horrors throughout history—but that doesn't alter the fact that all available evidence supports the centrality of karate as the foundation for the modern KMA of TKD.

 

[FieldDiscipline]

The fact that the Korean people are still here tells us they could fight, and fight well enough to survive. It does not tell us, however, that a `unique native unarmed combat' [system?] existed.

As to documentary proof:

Social documents from the Koguryo dynasties include the words Soo Bak.

Documentary evidence from the Paekje period (18 B.C. - 600 A.D. approx) exists in the form of a document called the 'Jae Wang Un Ki' This document states that a martial art was used and practiced by the common people and the military. The martial art entailed the use of hands and feet.

It is documented in the 'History of Koryo' (935 AD - 1392 AD) that King Chung Hae required his soldiers to practice Soo Bak and appointed the very best as high government officials.

During the Yi Dynasty (1392-1910) the ministry of national defence (Byung Jo) sponsored Soo Bak contests for the purpose of choosing soldiers. Slaves spent lots of time practicing as should they defeat their opponents they would be released from slavery and appointed as soldiers. Shield soldiers and guards were also chosen in this manner. These occurances were recorded in 'Sae Jo Shil Lok' or the Authentic records of the King.

Also from the Yi dynasty the 'Hae Dong Juk Ji' records make considerable reference to Su Sul (the Tae-kyon of those days), the techniques, forms etc. Also mentioned was the martial art of Su Byuck Ta in which opponents faced each other sitting on the ground. The competition involved a series of scored punches and striking movements.

In 1790 King Chongjo asked General Lee Duck Mu and two scholars to compile a book of all types of martial arts that were known in Korea. The book was known as the Mu Ye Do Bo Tong Ji and was to be used as a martial arts reference. It includes illustrations of movements and forms of several martial arts including Soo Bak, Tae-Kyon and numerous armed techniques. The book is still used as a reference and many of the techniques have been intergrated into modern Tae Kwon Do.

In 1958 Masters Song Duk Ki and Sung Hwan of Tae-Kyon and TKD gave a demonstration for the presidents birthday. The purpose was to show the many differences between TKD and karate. The masters felt their main objective was to purify TKD and return to the traditional unarmed form and technique that was free from the influences of other martial arts.

According to the WTF Tae Kwon Do has gone by many names, Tae Kyon, Soo Bak Do, Kong Soo Do, Tang Soo Do and others.

I must state that I have quoted heavily from Kim Jeong Rok's textbooks here.

Now, to rmclain's interviews...

 

[exile]

As to documentary proof:

Social documents from the Koguryo dynasties include the words Soo Bak.

Documentary evidence from the Paekje period (18 B.C. - 600 A.D. approx) exists in the form of a document called the 'Jae Wang Un Ki' This document states that a martial art was used and practiced by the common people and the military. The martial art entailed the use of hands and feet.

It is documented in the 'History of Koryo' (935 AD - 1392 AD) that King Chung Hae required his soldiers to practice Soo Bak and appointed the very best as high government officials.

During the Yi Dynasty (1392-1910) the ministry of national defence (Byung Jo) sponsored Soo Bak contests for the purpose of choosing soldiers. Slaves spent lots of time practicing as should they defeat their opponents they would be released from slavery and appointed as soldiers. Shield soldiers and guards were also chosen in this manner. These occurances were recorded in 'Sae Jo Shil Lok' or the Authentic records of the King.

Also from the Yi dynasty the 'Hae Dong Juk Ji' records make considerable reference to Su Sul (the Tae-kyon of those days), the techniques, forms etc. Also mentioned was the martial art of Su Byuck Ta in which opponents faced each other sitting on the ground. The competition involved a series of scored punches and striking movements.

In 1790 King Chongjo asked General Lee Duck Mu and two scholars to compile a book of all types of martial arts that were known in Korea. The book was known as the Mu Ye Do Bo Tong Ji and was to be used as a martial arts reference. It includes illustrations of movements and forms of several martial arts including Soo Bak, Tae-Kyon and numerous armed techniques. The book is still used as a reference and many of the techniques have been intergrated into modern Tae Kwon Do.

According to the WTF Tae Kwon Do has gone by many names, Tae Kyon, Soo Bak Do, Kong Soo Do, Tang Soo Do and others.

I must state that I have quoted heavily from Kim Jeong Rok's textbooks here.

What you've shown, FD, is that (i) there were references to things called Su Bahk, Tae Kyon and other entities that had martial significance in ancient Korean documents and (ii) that there is a modern MA whose practitioners call it Tae Kyon. What you haven't shown—and what there isn't any documentary support for—is any particular relationship between what these two historically (widely) separated uses of these terms. You might be interested in the conclusions of Marc Tedeschi, whose monumental surveys of the technical content of several different KMAs include a careful study of their historical relations based on the textual evidence, including the observation that

During the [Three Kingdoms] period, Korean artial arts did not possess a single umbrella-name. Instead, it is believed that specific skills were grouped into technique areas, which were labelled using generic terms. Some of these terms were

Su Bahk (punching and butting)
T'ae Kyon (kicking)
Kag Ju (throwing)
Kung Sa (archery)
Ki Ma Sa Bop (horse archery)
Tan Gom Sul (short knife)
Kom Sul Bop (sword skills)
Su Yong Bop (fighting in water)

Note that these are not the names of specific martial arts styles or systems, although they are often used incorrectly in this context
(M. Tedeschi, Taekwondo: Traditions, Philosphy, Technique, 2003, Weatherhill Inc., p. 27; emphasis added).

So what you have, basically, is a set of generic vocabulary items for certain kinds of actions that are, in some cases at least, universal in any fight: people kick, head-butt, punch and try to throw each other down on the ground. From ancient Egypt to Dodge City in its glory days, that's the
way people fight hand-to-hand. To establish your point, you've got a lot more work to do than just reporting the existence of archaic terminology for fighting moves that were also carried out by all of the Kingdom's ancient Asian neighbors, not to mention the rest of the world—you have to present evidence that what is called Tae Kyon and Su Bahk in the Three Kingdoms era and what is called Tae Kyon in the late 18th c. and what is called Tae Kyon today have anything to do with each other, other than that they involve, well, kicking. And you're not going to be able to do this, because, as Tedeschi goes on to observe directly, `there are are unfortunately no surviving written accounts describing these native martial systems or their specific techniques'. So you have, to put it plainly, no contemporary evidence for what any of these items from the ancient Korean lexicon actual denote. And it is as plausible to think that what calls itself tae kyon in the 20th c. had any technical roots in the 7th c. as it does to think that what was practiced in the ancient 9th c. Shaolin temple as a result of the very possibly legendary Bodhidharma's visit is the technical root of what calls itself Shaolin Kenpo Karate (there are some threads around that cover this topic pretty thoroughly!) in late 20th c. America. The point is, nothing you've offered has the status for documentary proof of the roots of modern TKD in ancient indigenous combat systems called Su Bahk and Tae Kyon.

In 1958 Masters Song Duk Ki and Sung Hwan of Tae-Kyon and TKD gave a demonstration for the presidents birthday. The purpose was to show the many differences between TKD and karate. The masters felt their main objective was to purify TKD and return to the traditional unarmed form and technique that was free from the influences of other martial arts.

Exactly Terry's point and mine. Political agendas led to the purging of Okinawan/Japanese content from the kwan era arts, the abandonment of the (many, many) poomsae from that era which derived from kata, and so on. You are helping me make one of my main points...

 

[Kacey]

I have nothing to add to the discussion at this point, except to say how much I am enjoying the information and viewpoints that are being posted in this thread - especially the civility with which the debate is taking place. Thank you all for allowing us into this discussion, and for the citations, which are giving me ideas for my reading list. :asian:

 

[TraditionalTKD]

Something else to consider:
The founders of Ji Do Kwan, Chang Moo Kwan, Moo Duk Kwan, and most of the others were Japanese karate/Chinese kung fu practitioners. If you studied Ji Do Kwan, Chang Moo Kwan, or most of the other kwans, you were essentially learning Japanese karate. S. Henry Cho states "Tae Kwon Do is identical to Japanese karate". Why? I suspect it is because he is Ji Do Kwan, and essentially learned Japanese karate in Korea.
Now, Chung Do Kwan, Oh Do Kwan, Song Moo Kwan were founded by men who had indeed learned karate, but also quite possibly learned Tae Kyon. Some of the few that had. These kwans were also largely at the forefront of Tae Kwon Do's emergence in modern Korea. I don't believe the Kwans aside from Chung Do Kwan, Oh Do Kwan, and Song Moo Kwan were respected as much as the aforementioned three, since CDK, ODK, and SMK wanted very much to make Tae Kwon Do reflect Korean history and philosophy. And since it is quite possible that the founders had studied Tae Kyon, they would have brought that Korean sensibility to their arts, as opposed to merely teaching Japanese styles in Korea the way the others seemed to be doing. There is a reason why only Chung Do Kwan black belts were accepted as is by the Korean military. Choi apparently felt that the others were not up to par.
Which is not to say that Chung Do Kwan and Oh Do Kwan were merely reflections of Japanese karate. Influenced? Yes, a little hard not to be considering the circumstances. Mere imitations or reflections? Hardly. From what I've read about Chung Do Kwan and some of the others, even in the old days, it was a style different from karate in both practice and philosophy.

 

[exile]

Something else to consider:
The founders of Ji Do Kwan, Chang Moo Kwan, Moo Duk Kwan, and most of the others were Japanese karate/Chinese kung fu practitioners. If you studied Ji Do Kwan, Chang Moo Kwan, or most of the other kwans, you were essentially learning Japanese karate. S. Henry Cho states "Tae Kwon Do is identical to Japanese karate". Why? I suspect it is because he is Ji Do Kwan, and essentially learned Japanese karate in Korea.
Now, Chung Do Kwan, Oh Do Kwan, Song Moo Kwan were founded by men who had indeed learned karate, but also quite possibly learned Tae Kyon. Some of the few that had. These kwans were also largely at the forefront of Tae Kwon Do's emergence in modern Korea. I don't believe the Kwans aside from Chung Do Kwan, Oh Do Kwan, and Song Moo Kwan were respected as much as the aforementioned three, since CDK, ODK, and SMK wanted very much to make Tae Kwon Do reflect Korean history and philosophy.

Again, one of the key points at issue here: the degree to which martial systems became counters in a political/cultural battle—very reminiscent of the eras in skiing when the Austrian government heavily promoted counterrotation and their chief rivals the French pushed avalement as the favored ski techniques, reflected in their instructional practice and pumped up with some of the finest extreme rhetoric that you could ever want. Funnily enough, the French and Austrian racers, the technical elite for whom efficiency and economy left nationalism trotting behind in the dust, were using virtually exactly the same methods to get through the gates in the shortest time. Part of what this thread is about, I think, is just this issue of the degree to which considerations of martial effectiveness have become compromised by the political symbolism of certain technical features, the origins of formal patterns encoding combat-applicable information, etc.

And since it is quite possible that the founders had studied Tae Kyon, they would have brought that Korean sensibility to their arts, as opposed to merely teaching Japanese styles in Korea the way the others seemed to be doing.

Again, though, we have no good idea of what this `tae kyon' they supposedly studied really was, nor what that `study' actually consisted of.

There is a reason why only Chung Do Kwan black belts were accepted as is by the Korean military. Choi apparently felt that the others were not up to par.

Which is not to say that Chung Do Kwan and Oh Do Kwan were merely reflections of Japanese karate. Influenced? Yes, a little hard not to be considering the circumstances. Mere imitations or reflections? Hardly. From what I've read about Chung Do Kwan and some of the others, even in the old days, it was a style different from karate in both practice and philosophy.

Well, my own TKD lineage is Song Moo Kwan (my instructor Allen Shirley <--- Greg Fears <--- Joon Pye Choi <--- Ryo Pyung Chik). And our technique, from everything I've been able to learn, as well as the view of combat I've been taught, seems awfully close to what I've been able to learn about Shotokan (apart from the consistently open-hip approach we take to all kicking techs)! As you say, not exactly the same, but close enough that you can see a clear relationship.

 

[rmclain]

As to documentary proof:

In 1958 Masters Song Duk Ki and Sung Hwan of Tae-Kyon and TKD gave a demonstration for the presidents birthday. The purpose was to show the many differences between TKD and karate. The masters felt their main objective was to purify TKD and return to the traditional unarmed form and technique that was free from the influences of other martial arts.

quote]

Hello FieldDiscipline,

I'd like to clear up this story. I asked Grandmaster Kim Soo about this, since he was there on March 26, 1958 for this event. He told me that they weren't there to compare anything. Duk Ki-song wasn't there.

The demo was by the Taekyun-Kwonbup group (proper name of Kangduk-Won at that time). Main demonstrator was Master Park Chul-hee, assisted by Kim Pyung-soo (3rd Dan).

I have attached a links to photos at the demo for President Rhee. Grandmaster Kim still has the program from this event. Looks like the web master put the incorrect year for the bottom photo, but I'll e-mail and get that fixed.

http://www.kimsookarate.com/gallery-old-days/58_Demo/58_demo.htm

After this event, Kim Pyung-soo became assistant instructor for President Syngmann Rhee's police detachment(bodyguards). I provided a link to photos below.

http://www.kimsookarate.com/gallery-old-days/presGuards/presGuards.htm

This next photo is interesting because it was taken at the Sangmoo-Kwan dojang. In the group photo was Duk Ki-song.

http://www.kimsookarate.com/gallery-old-days/58_blueHouse/blueHouse.htm

R. McLain

 

[exile]

As to documentary proof:

In 1958 Masters Song Duk Ki and Sung Hwan of Tae-Kyon and TKD gave a demonstration for the presidents birthday. The purpose was to show the many differences between TKD and karate. The masters felt their main objective was to purify TKD and return to the traditional unarmed form and technique that was free from the influences of other martial arts.

quote]

Hello FieldDiscipline,

I'd like to clear up this story. I asked Grandmaster Kim Soo about this, since he was there on March 26, 1958 for this event. He told me that they weren't there to compare anything. Duk Ki-song wasn't there.

The demo was by the Taekyun-Kwonbup group (proper name of Kangduk-Won at that time). Main demonstrator was Master Park Chul-hee, assisted by Kim Pyung-soo (3rd Dan).

I have attached a links to photos at the demo for President Rhee. Grandmaster Kim still has the program from this event. Looks like the web master put the incorrect year for the bottom photo, but I'll e-mail and get that fixed.

http://www.kimsookarate.com/gallery-old-days/58_Demo/58_demo.htm

After this event, Kim Pyung-soo became assistant instructor for President Syngmann Rhee's police detachment(bodyguards). I provided a link to photos below.

http://www.kimsookarate.com/gallery-old-days/presGuards/presGuards.htm

This next photo is interesting because it was taken at the Sangmoo-Kwan dojang. In the group photo was Duk Ki-song.

http://www.kimsookarate.com/gallery-old-days/58_blueHouse/blueHouse.htm

R. McLain

Very, very much appreciated, rmcl!

And that interview you posted with Gm. Kim Pyung Soo is a real eye-opener, in all kinds of ways...

 

[FieldDiscipline]

Robert I would like to thank you for posting both your photos, interview and article, which I have enjoyed and found very interesting.

I just find it difficult to believe that General Choi and the WTF would formulate such a huge lie about the '2000 year history', which surely would be glaringly obvious to the Korean people.

On a purely practical side, we know Song Duk Ki to have continued Tae-kyon (Robert feel free to correct me) and that there are practioners today. Watching videos they appear to perform techniques identical to an Axe kick, in my experience I have never seen Shotokan perform an axe kick. We do know however Gen. Choi learned Tae-kyon from his calligraphy teacher. Small example I know, I just feel that the truth must lay between the two poles.

 

[rmclain]

Robert I would like to thank you for posting both your photos, interview and article, which I have enjoyed and found very interesting.

I just find it difficult to believe that General Choi and the WTF would formulate such a huge lie about the '2000 year history', which surely would be glaringly obvious to the Korean people.

On a purely practical side, we know Song Duk Ki to have continued Tae-kyon (Robert feel free to correct me) and that there are practioners today. Watching videos they appear to perform techniques identical to an Axe kick, in my experience I have never seen Shotokan perform an axe kick. We do know however Gen. Choi learned Tae-kyon from his calligraphy teacher. Small example I know, I just feel that the truth must lay between the two poles.

I was told that Master Lee Nam-sok(Changmoo-Kwan) wrote an article in the 1950's about Korean martial art links to the Korguryo Dynasty, etc., and that many, many people believed it - since nobody was teaching history about the backgound of their art during this time. Master Lee Nam-sok later joined with Choi Hong-hi, so who knows who spoke about it first.

Duk Ki-song was good friends with Grandmaster Kim Soo. He admitted to Grandmaster Kim that he didn't remember much. I never got the impression that Duk Ki-song never really taught much either. My instructor(Grandmaster Kim Soo) helped him(Duk Ki-song) get recognized as a cultural asset because of preserving some Taekyun. But, I don't think much was preserved. Duk Ki-song always emphasized that Taekyun was really just a friendly game during the Dan-Oh Festival. While this is his story, there is no-doubt, a martial application to Taekyun.

Perhaps during the Yi Dynasty (preceeding WWII) that emphasized Confusionism and intellectual persuits (poetry, art, etc) instead of martial arts(which were considered "low class"), Taekyun changed from the martial aspect into a sporting game with the cultural emphasis.

http://www.kimsookarate.com/gallery-old-days/song-duk-ki.html

R. McLain

 

[FieldDiscipline]

So would I be right in thinking what is practised now as Tae-kyon is a re-invention drawn from the portion that Song Duk Ki could remember and pass on?

What I'd give to know what General Choi knew.

 

[rmclain]

So would I be right in thinking what is practised now as Tae-kyon is a re-invention drawn from the portion that Song Duk Ki could remember and pass on?

Probably. The Korean Taekyun Association has hosted Grandmaster Kim's visit so that he could tell them about Song Duk-ki and the old days. Most Taekyun instructors today are too young to have even remembered Song Duk-ki.

http://www.kimsookarate.com/cyrnews/taek-kyun.html

R. McLain

 

[exile]

Robert I would like to thank you for posting both your photos, interview and article, which I have enjoyed and found very interesting.

I just find it difficult to believe that General Choi and the WTF would formulate such a huge lie about the '2000 year history', which surely would be glaringly obvious to the Korean people.

What is at all difficult to believe about a man who had risked his life in resistance to the Japanese, and come to believe that they had been an unmitigated catastrophe in his countrymen's life—and who was aware of a folk tradition that (on the basis of a bad etymology for certain Korean characters, very possibly; see below) seemed to support the existence of something non-Japanese connected with fighting which was at least referred to in certain ancient document—convincing himself and others that this vestigial relic was the basis of the whole of modern TKD? And why on earth with this fabrication be `glaringly obvious?' to anyone but a historial of the martial arts? The story of ancient Korean culture is confined to a number of complex documents that it's unlikely more than a tiny number of Koreans know the existence of, let alone the content of. Here is a war hero and an educated man of great power and authority who tells them something that they almost certainly want to hear: their national martial art is theirs alone, sui generis, owing nothing to the hated occupiers. Exactly what is `glaringly obvious' about the fact that there is absolutely no documentary support or any other evidence for this two millenia linkage?

On a purely practical side, we know Song Duk Ki to have continued Tae-kyon (Robert feel free to correct me) and that there are practioners today. Watching videos they appear to perform techniques identical to an Axe kick, in my experience I have never seen Shotokan perform an axe kick. We do know however Gen. Choi learned Tae-kyon from his calligraphy teacher. Small example I know, I just feel that the truth must lay between the two poles.

Given that there is strong evidence already cited on this thread that tae kyon, whatever else it might be, is not what General Choi claimed it is, and a tiny anecdotal fragment that suggest there might, possibly, conceivably be a bit more, why would you expect that `the truth must lie between the two poles'? Given the total vast evidence that there is indeed no such thing as cold fusion, and a few largely fabricated quasi-experiments that argued there was, should physicists concluded that the truth must be somewhere in the middle? I don't follow this at all.

This is something I'd meant to include earlier in my reply to you, from an earlier thread; it was easier to just excerpt it than paraphrase it:

`And as far as taekkyon is concerned, you might want to take a look at Stan Henning's authoritative survey of the state of traditional Korean martial arts in the first issue of the 2000 volume of Journal of Asian Marital Arts, where he discusses the term `taekkyon' and shows that this term is based on erroneous interpretations, in early premodern Korean manuals of physical training and combat methods, of the meaning of certain Chinese ideograms. The correct rendition of the item isn't taekkyon, which seems to have a connection to the modern Korean tae `foot', but takkyon, `push the shoulders', about which Manning says `the term originally may only have been meant to describe a specific... technique to put an opponent off balance.' Takkyon appears to have been effectively suppressed by the Japanese in the 19th c.; taekkyon is an essentially modern discipline with no demonstrable connection to anything in Korean (pre)history. Bear in mind that Manning , a respected martial arts historian with degrees from the University of Hawaii, has based his conclusion on an exhaustive perusal of the full set of documentary records we currently possess on the topic---the full set of combat technique manuals published in Korea along with contemporary historical chronicles such as the Koryo History publishhed in 1451, which contains material going back to the 10th century, and the Encyclopaedia of Illustrated Martial Arts Manuals published by Yi Dok Mu in 1790---itself incorporated extensive material form still earlier Chinese sources, an important resource since apparently a huge proportion of Korean combat techniques have Chinese sources, not surprisingly. Mannings authoritative overview, BTW, concludes with the somewhat bleak assessment that `traditional [Korean] martial args... appear to have been almost entirely abandoned by the beginning of the twentieth century'. He rubs the point in that `the evidence does not allow us to say, as some claim, that the traditional military skill, subak, was directly related to taekwondo or that "taekwondo is a martial art independently developed over twenty centuries ago in Korea", citing a very commonly repeated bit of legendary history from a web site on TKD. His conclusion---supported by what looks to me like the most exhaustive survey of the surviving documentary evidence to date---is that `Taekwondo, for the most part,... appears to be a post-Korean War product, developed primarily from what the Koreans call tangsudo (karate) introduced during the period of Japanese rule.' The tradition Korean martial arts are but a vague memory and taekwondo a symbol born in the cradle of modern Korean nationalism...'

There's no question that something called taekkyon (very likely based, as Manning notes, on a Korean folk etymology of the last century) existed in the early 20th century as a combat system and that some of the Kwan founders practiced it, to one degree or another. But there's no evidence tying it to any ancient indigenous martial art of Korea. The vast weight of the evidence---especially the actual technical content of TKD---makes it clear that TKD is... well, karate as practiced in Korea.'
_____________

 

[FieldDiscipline]

The harder we look the more that appears to be the case.

Glad I played devils advocate though, I have learnt a lot from this!

I'd love to know what General Choi knew!

 

[exile]

The harder we look the more that appears to be the case.

Glad I played devils advocate though, I have learnt a lot from this!

I'd love to know what General Choi knew!

FD---it's absolutely vital that someone always play the devil's advocate—that's the only way positions get adequately tested: there's got to be opposition and scrutiny. And I hope I've made it clear that by the very nature of things, we cannot rule out in advance the possibility that there are indeed very ancient, unique and complete martial systems that contributed substantially to modern TKD. It's just that at present, we don't have a basis for giving the status of `plausible' to such possibilities. Given the number of alternative scenarios that all `could have been', we need to stay skeptical till we are given solid evidence one way or the other.

But you can see perhaps why, coming out of all this, I'm so interested in early kwan era history. Because if I'm right about TKD, then there are certain predictions that follow and that could be confirmed, or, equally important, disconfirmed, on the basis of that history. My take on things imples that we should expect to find the early kwans, like the dojos at which the founders of those kwans studies, teaching on a small number of poomsae—very small—where adepts were expected to study those few poomsae (again, I'd predict these would be literal or somewhat reorganized kata) for a very long time, till they understood the martial applications very well. That what my model of the development of TKD very strongly implies should be the case; but is it?.... so that's one reason I'm so interested in Robert's research and what it might show, and that of others who, I hope, will pursue that kind of investigation.

 

[terryl965]

I do appreciate all the Honor and respect everyone has given to this thread and to Master McLain for providing some great articles and phote's, I will take the time to go over everything tonight and give my perspective to it but I thank you all for all your efforts on his thread.

 

[exile]

I do appreciate all the Honor and respect everyone has given to this thread and to Master McLain for providing some great articles and phote's, I will take the time to go over everything tonight and give my perspective to it but I thank you all for all your efforts on his thread.

Terry, yes, I am very curious to know what you yourself think about the questions you posed when you first started the thread, and I suspect, though I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, that that goes for all the other thread participants as well. So please do share your thoughts with us, when you've got them ready to post!

 

[Mark Lynn]

Great thread!

This topic has long fascinated me since my instructor had first told me of the Japanese karate influence years ago on TKD, and combined with my love for history I have always sought out articles, books etc. etc. and information on the formation of the martial arts.

With that in mind I believe that by denying the infuence or any part of a history of a martial art or system is wrong. Because by acknowledging the connection you can go back and research what the art was like when the founders of the systems were studying and what their influences might have been. For instance several founders of the early kwans studied Japanse karate, knowing this you can then read about the training that was going on during the years they trained, about the teachers of that time period and so on and so on, in the end I believe having a wider prespective instead of having the narrow party line view. Even trying to understand what the political situation was like back then helps shed light on how things were developed.

A friend sent me this site that shows a comparasion of the TKD forms. If you look at the forms on the right side (I forget the names) they are clearly versions of the Japanese karate katas (Heians/Pinans). If you look at the ITF forms you can see the influences of these katas.

http://www.natkd.com/tkd_forums.htm

with respect
Mark