Looks like the whole topic of the post changed because you didn't understand what I was trying to write. I was just saying that Hwang Kee wrote that Bassai was snake form, however, I haven't seen any other style of Karate (Tang Soo or Kong Soo) use the snake to represent it.
And what
I'm saying, Muwubu, is that there is good reason to believe that the
reason HK `wrote that Bassai was snake form', when no other style of karate—Okinawan, Japanese or Korean—makes that association is because HK had a particular agenda, which was to minimize or wipe out the Japanese associations with the hyungs he taught and to substitute Chinese associations instead, in order to help cancel out the memories of a hated occupier and also, very likely, to increase the credibility of the `ancient KMA' associations of Tang Soo Do (given the links between China and Korea in the Three Kingdoms era); and that's where the discussion of his original fabrication of the Chinese origin of the Pyung-Ahns comes in. And that by introducing the `snake' meaning, he was consciously using the Chinese naming convention of linking techniques and hsing forms to animals in order to add further support to the supposed Chinese roots of the TSD practiced in the MDK. And that other schools of Tae Soo Do (which eventually split into TSD and TKD) either didn't have the same denial program (Song Moo Kwan, e.g.) or carried it out in a somewhat different fashion (Ć la General Choi's Oh Do Kwan, etc.) And that
that's why Hwang Kee's development of what was once Tang/Kong/Tae Soo Do includes the snake/Bassai identification but other TMAs which have Bassai in their repertoire do not. Now this suggestion might be right or it might be wrong, but can you please point out exactly where any of what I've said represents a misunderstanding of the original question? Or how the `topic' of the OP has changed?
On another note, Tang SOo is just the korean pronounciation of Tode, or Karate, using the original characters of the name Tang(from Tang dynasty CHina) and Soo(hand, "te" in Japan and Okinawa). Some older styles in Okinawa use the old name still, just different pronounciation.
This point has been repeatedly noted in threads going back several years on MT by many different posters.
Indeed. Its a good thing people are investigating now, before the last traces of the truth die out. At least we can pass on what we know.
Yes, I agree, we're running out of time fast. The first generation students of the original Kwan founders are getting very, very long in the tooth, and their memories can't be expected to be all that reliable at this point. And crucial questions—such as, `did you guys actually study bunkai for your forms? How did you approach kicking? What kinds of training for combat did you do, apart from sparring...' and so on, things really important to understand the transition from the Shotokan to the Kwan-era roots of the KMAs and then the separate developments after the splits in the early 1960s—may never get answered if people don't start going after the answers right now. These fellows are getting pretty thin on the ground as it is...
