Sigh... I'm not sure why I'm doing this, because it's not going to change anything, apparently. One of the working diagnostics of insanity is the belief that if you do the same thing you've done repeatedly before, you'll get a different result
this time. Since I'm not insane, that must mean I
don't really expect a different outcome in this discussion... which I do think is true.
Nonetheless, some kind of response seems called for, because silence is often taken to give consent, and what the KKW has in its textbook is not history but a 'folk history' story calibrated to the ambitions of the ROK and expoiting the nationalist resonances of the work
taekkyon. The point is developed in detail in Eric Madis' excellent study of the emergence of this constructed history in his article 'The evolution of Taekwondo from Japanese Karate' (for sources of all the citations below, please see
this post). Given the degree of personal resentment expressed by people in these discussions who somehow dislike the fact that a large number of trained historians have examined this constructed history and found it historically baseless—and who then somehow connect those historians' documented, well-supported conclusion with the fact that I've only been training in TKD for five years or so—I feel as though I have to say something explicitly that should be obvious:
I'm just the messanger. None of the research I report here is my original research. Whether or not you like my take on how TKD should be seen, or dislike my indifference to the Korean nationalist, political and economic agendas where these lead to pressure to dilute the combat content of the art, or anything else about me personally,
it's not me you're aguing with, it's a whole slew of historians and investigators, some of them very senior Kwan era Korean Gms including Kim Pyung-soo and S. Henry Cho, as well as the current leadership of the new Taekkyon movement. Many of these people lived for extended periods in Korea and interviewed the 20th century taekkyon pioneers themselves. Many of them are not just literate in the relevant languages—Chinese, Korean and Japanese—but are trained in the examination of ancient documents and in the problems of translation, which are in many cases enormous. And many of them are very advanced practitioners of the KMAs as well.
I've assembled a good chunk of the documentation in the post I linked to above; it's there for anyone to read
and refute, if you can do it. Robert Young and Stan Henning, for example, have assembled considerable evidence, now actually pretty much taken for granted amongst art historians and archæologists , that the physical data that the KKW textbook cites has nothing to do either with MAs or with Korea in particular; that the figures referred to are prototypical
guardian figures of a sort found throughout China, Tibet, and even India. Moreover, as Lee Yong-bok—Son Duk Ki's senior student, and founder of the Taekkyon Research Association; in other words, not some late-coming American dude with nothing better to do than muddy the waters, eh?— has written in his own 1990 book, `the guardians originally held a spear in their hands, but when the images were transplanted [from China and India], artists did not replicate the weapons. The resulting clenched hands resemble closed fists, thus appearing as empty-hand martial arts poses.' [p.47] The Sanskrit names of these guardian deities figures are
Vajradhara, and their iconography precedes the appearance of the Korean sculptures by millenia. And that's just a small sample of what turns up when careful,
non-agenda-driven research based on a wide and deep knowledge of Asian material and literary culture is applied to these physical materials. Young's and Henning's work puts these supposed pieces of evidence of ancient KMAs under the microscope and leaves pretty much nothing left at the end. Nonetheless, the KKW goes on making the same claims, over and over again, repeatedly ignoring the fact that these supposed sculptural depictions of KMAs represent merely a late eastern manifestation of a pan-Asian guardian figure type which appears long before, and far away from, the earliest kingdoms of the Korean peninsula.
Now anyone can go to the library and get the same material I have. And you can form your own conclusions based on the logic of the case. I've repeatedly identified these materials, who's said what, what their evidence is, and so on.
YoungMan, so far as I can tell, has read none of this stuff and pretty clearly has no intention of doing so; and for some reason
still persists in confusing the late 20th/early 21st century material he's seen with the technical content that Song Duk-ki three quarters of a century ago taught to a small handful of students (including Gm. Kim Pyung-soo, who is one of the biggest debunkers of ancient KMAs or TKD linked to taekyon), in spite of the fact that the World Taekkyon Headquarters description of Taekkyon explicitly identifies the high complex techniques
YM keeps alluding to as
tournament practice, NOT the traditional TKD contest methods that Stuart Culin describes in detail in his 1895 ethnography of Korean games and folk sports. And which have little or nothing to do with the Taekkyon that is now a modest tournament sport in Korea, practiced by people who not only never learned from, but possibly never even
heard of Song Duk-ki, as per Rob McLain's post
here. But surely the rest of you, and other readers, should see the value of familiarizing yourselves with the hard-won results of all this research before deciding to buy the KKW fable hook, line and sinker? I mean, if you were going to get into a debate about the causes of WWI, or the fall of the Roman Empire, or the emergence of democracy in ancient Greece, you would familiarize yourself with the best, most carefully vetted and scrutinized research that had been produced up to that time, no? Even if time yielded further evidence on any of these historical phenomena, would you actually neglect any of what had been done to this point on the grounds that, well, new evidence might change the story, so...? I have a hard time believing that. So why is this particular bit of history any different? Yet repeatedly in these discussions of taekkyon, KMA history and so on, I see the same thing: don't bother us with this stuff, and besides, if you'd been doing TKD for as long as we have, you'd know better.
The point is—again—this isn't a matter of MA training or practice or knowledge of technique. It's matter of history, made difficult by gaps in documentation, by the effects of the Occupation and the War, and by the aggressive sponsorship of a particular version of events on the part of the current government of Korea, going back to the first post-Occupation regime. (Remember that, as Gen. Choi reported, it was Syngman Rhee himself—the military dictator, who so far as anyone knows had no knowledge of any Korean MA whatever—who insisted that the famous demo in which Nam Tae-hi, among other things, broke a stack of 13 roofing tiles, was a speciman of
taekyon, and insisted it be publicized as such in spite of the fact that Gen. Choi himself and the other participants had identified it as
tang soo do, one of the common names for the Kwan era art that the founders taught).
So my response to the issues raised by the KKW stuff cited in Terry's OP is, if you want to see what people who have devoted years of careful research to the subject have discovered,
read what they have to say. If you disagree, or have counterevidence,
present it. And try to understand that the content of their arguments, evidence and results
has nothing to do with me personally. I'm just someone who happened to read what they had to say, assessed it based on my general understanding of how premise, data and conclusion should be related in rational reasoning, and found it far, far better in quality than the boilerplate propaganda that the WTF and KKW and their local branch plants have been putting out—and therefore thought it worthwhile to bring to the attention of people who may be interested in these questions. You don't like that conclusion? Fine: argue against it if you can, but please,
leave me out of it, OK?
. What other style goes so far out of its way to identify its nationality or ethnicity? Or what other style makes such a concentrated effort to deny its actual roots because they happen to be connected to another group of people? It seems that the actual art of Taekwondo gets lost in all of this and the focus shifts to nationalism and ethnocentrism. What is wrong with just admitting the art's actual roots and practicing it for the love the art? Why get so heavily invested in another nation's struggle that you are not a part of, and why aid in nationalist and ethnocentrist agendas? I for one am secure in my TKD and don't need to deny the facts or try to change what I practice just because it was influenced by the "wrong" nation and/or ethnicity.
