The tragedy of Ji Do Kwan

I have often written about the roots of Ji Do Kwan, and I have "talked them up" because I am biased when it comes to Ji Do Kwan coming fra a Ji Do Kwan background myself through one of my first primary teachers in Taekwondo; Grandmaster Cho Woon Sup. In this post I will try to give a more balanced view and talk a little about the link in the lineage problem. I might do another post where I discuss this more thouroughly because this is not only a Ji Do Kwan problem, but I am going to gift Ji Do Kwan practisioners with a small treasure (in my view) that I happened to come across in my research, but before gifting it, I want to give a little perspective so people can appreciate what I am giving. 

Part 3: The evolution of Hwarang Hyung/Tul/Poomsae 1950s onward

If you are reading this series on another webpage other than the traditional taekwondo ramblings blog it has been stolen without my permission. This has happened a lot lately. 

I started a little blogpost on Taekwondo's birthday (11th April) looking at the evolution of Hwarang Hyung seeing as this was the first Korean Taekwondo form created. I meant to cover movement 1 and possibly movement 4 within the form, but once I got started and realized that the version I am practising (which I dubbed the 1965 version after Choi Hong Hi's 1965 book) was different from the modern ITF rendition of Hwarang Hyung (or Tul which is ITF's preferred term for form/pattern). I have kept saying this but I will say it again; there is no "best version" unless you define in what context you would measure against. They are simply different, and different lineages and Dojang will have different versions of it. ITF has done a great job curating the creators final versions of his forms (although some ITF orgs has tempered with them after his death), my personal interest in Choi's Chang Hon Ryu forms is as they were done in the Oh Do Kwan before he left South Korea, so my personal "best version" would not be the "latest version", and that is OK for me and should be for anyone else :-) Now with that caveat out of the way, let us look at Hwarang Hyung movement 5 through our sources which in this blog post would be Choi Hong Hi's 1959 book (Korean language only), Choi Hong Hi's 1965 book, an instructional video made under the supervision of Choi Hong Hi in 1968 and Choi Hong Hi's 15 volume Encyclopedia (volume X or 10) from the 1980s.

Part 2: The evolution of Hwarang Hyung/Tul/Poomsae 1950s onward

On Taekwondo's birthday (11th April) I posted a blogpost discussing the evolution of the very first movement in the very first Korean martial arts form/pattern; Hwarang Hyung. I teased that therewere more changes from the original version which the oldest documentation we have is from 1959, and that a few of these changes might surprise some. Well in this part we will jump ahead to movement 4 in Hwarang Hyung, what was in the 1965 version called the twin forearm block, or in Kukki Taekwondo terminology a momtong keumgang makki (double diamond block perhaps in english?). In the version of Hwarang that I learned this technique is done roughly the same as in Taebaek Poomsae but with the middle block portion of the technique turned outward, so the palm of your blocking hand is turned away from you, not pointed towards you like in Taebaek Poomsae. Was this the original way to do it? How is it done in modern ITF Chang Hon Ryu? I'll make use of the same sources as in Part 1, and I advice you to read that part first if you have not done so :-) Click here to read it

Part 1: The evolution of Hwarang Hyung/Tul/Poomsae 1950s onward

Happy birthday Taekwondo (11th April 1955) I was careful to post at this day :-)

I recently got my certificate from the Oh Do Kwan and I am now a proud 3rd dan :-) Oh Do Kwan was one of the Kwan who merged to lay the foundations of Kukki Taekwondo, so I still do Taegeuk and Judanja Poomsae and use Kukkiwon movement standard, but I also picked up Chang Hon Ryu as I was told to do Gaebaek as well as Taebaek Poomsae as part of my grading. Being the kind of man that I am I did not want to pick up a single form without understanding it in context so I started with Chon-Ji Hyung and worked my way up. Hwarang Hyung however I did not need to study much to pick up because I already knew the framework so to speak. You see I am a history nerd (if you have read more than one post of this blog you should not be surprised by that) and Hwarang Hyung was THE FIRST Korean pattern made closely followed by Chung-Mu Hyung, U-Nam Hyung (a form discontinued before the 1965 book by Choi Hong Hi), Ul-Ji Hyung and Sam-Il Hyung (all presented in the very first taekwondo book published in 1959. 

Let's remove the Shaolin Temple and Bodhidharma from Taekwondo history

Every so often I see the Shaolin temple and Bodhidharma

mentioned in Taekwondo history. I once held a lecture on taekwondo history where I was approached after it was finished and told that the lecture was good, but I had completly neglected to mention how martial arts were invented in China in the Shaolin temple by Bodhidharma and then spread to the rest of Asia. I could not take that critisism seriously but kept a straight face and told him politely that I did not subscribe to that myth, and quickly departed. I was recently reminded of this tie in with Taekwondo history when I was asked to consult on a taekwondo organisations history on their web page. The first draft contained the Bodhidharma myth in it, and I adviced it to be removed which it was. I therefore thought that a post tackling how the Shaolin/Bodhidharma myth has no place in Taekwondo (and should not even be considered "canon" in Chinese martial arts) could be useful for some. Before starting the actual post however I have to credit the book "Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals; A Historical Survey" written by Brian Kennedy and Elizabeth Guo which has shaped much of my thinking on this subject and especially page 69-72. The author credits Chinese Martial Arts Historian Tang Hao and Stanley E. Henning. I found and read a few articles by Henning in preperation to this post but in the end I found page 69-72 in the aforementioned book to be a great sumary and I did not find much written by Tang Hao. 

Why does "ITF" forms feel so much more "advanced"?

This last year I have done a deep dive and really focused on

learning all ITF forms up to and including Gae-Baek Hyung. I say "ITF forms" but I should probably call them either Oh Do Kwan (that is where my "project" took me) or Chang Hon forms. I do not do Sine Wave (and I do not think I will ever do that), and the forms I have been learning is far too outdated to be called ITF forms, as the ITF have done a lot of changes. The standard I am keeping as close as possible to is the 1965 book by Choi Hong Hi. After that book was published a lot of things were changed, and over time Sine Wave which was possibly the biggest change was implemented in the 1980s. After he died the ITF splintered into an insane number of different ITFs and they in turn made their own changes. I am going off a tangent here:-P What I wanted to write about was the feeling I had when learning these forms when I had a firm Taegeuk and Judanja/Black Belt Poomsae background. I talked with a fellow Taekwondoin (Taekwondo person) about the feeling I had when learning the forms that every single one after Chon-Ji Hyung felt like learning a black belt poomsae. 

Kyeongdang Yedo 24 Se part 2; Point Sword Posture

Way back in March 2024 we looked at the first posture, the Keonjeongse (Lifting the cauldron posture), we looked at two different translations, one by Jack Chen who translated the source material for the Yedo chapter in Muyedobotongji, and one from Sang H. Kim's translation of the Muyedobotongji. I shared the illustration from both sources, and a video of how it was performed and practised in modern Kyeongdang (in the group I work with). In addition to this I shared a few thoughts on application in text only. This is also pretty much what we will be doing with the second "posture" in the system, and that is the "Jumkumse" as it is transcribed in Sang H. Kim's work. The "Jum" part of the name means "period", or "dot" in Korean, the "Kum" part of the name is Geom, Keum, Kum meaning "sword" and the "Se" part can loosely be translated as "posture. Together we get the loose translation of "Point sword posture", but the translation I was first given was inspecting the sword posture, as the initial posture seems like your holding the sword in a manner that you might take to inspect a sword.