Friday, 18 April 2025

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.

Monday, 14 April 2025

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

Thursday, 10 April 2025

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. 

Wednesday, 2 April 2025

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.