http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=747
So, I went digging into all of the threads that were here way back when I joined MT and I found the above. There is a lot of good stuff here including a good challenge to the 2000 year claim. Maybe Cirdan, this thread will pull in a series of other discussions on this topic and we can crank out a better description right here and now...
Guys... the whole 2000 year claim is based on exactly the same non-evidence that people who claim a technical lineage going back to the Three Kingdoms era for Taekwondo base
their claims on: archæological, philological and documentary evidence whose invocation on behalf of these ancient claims has been thoroughly debunked in genuinely scholarly, peer-reviewed historical sources. I'm beginning to feel a bit like a broken record, but the following, assembled from different posts I wrote earlier in different contexts, contains the crucial discussions pertinent to the decisive debunkings of these separate bits of evidence (stuff from these earlier posts is in italics):
(i) the physical evidence:
In one of his papers on the origins of Taekwondo, for example, Dakin Burdick notes that
Although Taekwondo is a modern art, many Korean practitioners claim that the art began in the Koguryo dynasty (c. 37 B.C.). They claim that various Koguryo dynasty royal tombs contain murals of men practicing Taekwondo. Interpretation of these postures, which seems to be mere wishful thinking, apparently began with Tatashi Saito's "Study of Culture in Ancient Korea." Saito said that:
"The painting either shows us that the person buried in the tomb practiced Taekwondo while he was alive or it tells us that people practiced it, along with dancing and singing, for the purpose of consoling the dead."
None of the Koguryo tomb murals can be definitively identified as the practice of a kicking & striking art. The murals on the ceiling of the Muyong- chong are said to show "two men practicing a sort of Taekwondo." They actually show two men -- both with goatee, moustache and long hair -- wearing loin cloths. They are at least four feet apart (their outstretched hands are a foot away from each other). The positions could be stretching, dancing, or possibly wrestling Mongolian style, but they certainly do not resemble modern Taekwondo stances or techniques.
The ceiling of Sambo-chong shows a man in deep horse stance who appears to be pushing the walls apart. The WTF claims that this is "Poomse practicing of Taekwondo," something that would be hard to determine from a single figure, and certainly not the simplest explanation of the position. Similarly, the paintings on the ceiling of Kakchu-chong shows two men either dancing or Mongolian wrestling (the figures date from the age of San-Sang, the tenth King of Koguryo), but Dr. Lee Sun Kun (President of Kyung Puk University) tries to say that the mural "shows sparring of Soo Bak."
(See article at http://budosportcopelle.ml/gesch.html)
The absurdity of this kind of long post-hoc rationale for such claims emerges especially clearly when one learns that, according to Burdick `the martial arts depicted in Koguryo tomb murals closely resemble those in the tomb murals of the Eastern Han, located in what is now eastern China. This suggests that the form of Koguryo era martial arts emerged because of Chinese cultural influence, rather than independent development by the future Koreans'. (See Burdick's 1997 version of this paper, `People and events of Taekwondo's formative years' in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts)
Of the second-most-often cited piece of material evidence bearing on the existence of an ancient Korean combat system which contributed tothe current MAs TKD/TSD, Burdick comments that `the statue of Kumkang-Yuksa at Sokkuram, which is often cited as the figure of an ancient warrior practicing taekwondo, is in fact a Buddhist guardian figure found throughout East Asia, and thus cannot be said to be unique to Korea either.' (1997 paper.) Stanley Henning's 2000 JAMA article `Traditional Korean Martial Arts' echoes this observation, noting that these guardians are in the style common to contemporary Tang China (618–907), on which they were most assuredly modeled. Even some reputable Korean sources refer to these figures as `wrestlers' rather than `boxers', but they are most commonly called `strong men' (lishi in Chinese or ryuksa in Korean).'
(p.10; my emphasis). The problems these historians have exposed with the interpretation of the physical evidence involved are general in nature: how do you know what's being depicted? Consider the fact that it's not only the WTF claiming this physical evidence on behalf of the art it promotes and to a large extent controls; we also find exactly the same archæological artefacts invoked by Kang Uk Kee (Tang Soo Do: The Ultimate Guide to the Korean Martial Art, Orange, CA: Unique Publications, 1998, pp.8–12) on behalf of Tang Soo Do, and by Hui Son Choe (Hapkido: The Korean Martial Art of Self Defense, Thousand Oaks, CA: Hui Son Choe Publishing, p.8) on behalf of Hapkido!!. You can imagine TKD and TSD claiming the same physical evidence—they're fraternal if not identical twins, split from the same Moo Duk Kwan in the mid/late 1950s, but Hapkido??
When claims are made about the history or technique of a particular MA, the general requirement of meeting a burden of proof applies as much as it does anywhere else. The claim that TKD has a 2000—or 1000 or 500 or whatever—year old history is subject to the requirement that there be positive evidence making the likelihood of the claim superior to the alternative, that TKD is no more than 70 or 80 years old, say.
(ii) The documentary evidence:
One of the frequently repeated bits of evidence intended to meet the burden of proof for the `ancient KMA' assertion has been, for a long time, the Muye Dobu Tong Ji. It's worth pointing out at this point that the MDTJ says almost nothing about empty hand techs—something pointed out in the in-depth scholarly literature on the subject I've cited, but not in [a recent BB magazine article claiming an ancient lineage for TSD based in part on the MDTJ] nor in virtually any of the KMA texts I've read which allude to it; the sheer fact of this book's existence seems to be taken as sufficient evidence for ancient indigenous empty-handed techs somehow ancestral to those in modern TKD. But let that go, for the moment; the point is, the MDTJ is, as Dakin Burdick observed in his 1997 JAMA article, one of the three pillars of the claim for the roots of modern KMA in a distant antiquity....
What we now have is a body of detailed, linguistically and philologically well-informed critical literature which has shown—by meticulous side-by-side textual examination of both the MDTJ and several other still earlier Asian treatises on combat techniques—that the MDTJ is in essence a literal translation of a Chinese military text written ten generations before the MDTJ appeared. The content thus represents Chinese weapon and their use, Chinese strategic and tactical concepts, and is in effect a presentation in the Korean language of a substantial chunk of Chinese military culture and practice. There is no martial content in the MDTJ which does not appear first—by 250 years!—in the New Book of Effective Discipline. Exhaustive documentation for this claim is provided by the JAMA articles by Burdick, Henning and Androgué [2003: `"Ancient Military Manuals and Their Relation to Modern Korean Martial Arts'] The conclusion which follows—and note, by `conclusion', I mean nothing other than a deduction based on the total set of available evidence—is that the MDTJ, by virtue of its completely Han military content, has no bearing on the antiquity of modern KMA's origins, and therefore fails to meet the burden of proof for any claims that these origins are ancient.
In order to restore the MDTJ as a source meeting that burden of proof, it would be necessary for supporters of ancient KMA to counter the translations, analyses and documentation of the scholars I've cited, at the same or a superior level of detail. Burdick, Henning and Androgué have amassed an enormous body of evidence on behalf of their assessment of the MDTJ's provenience and content. To meet the burden of proof for the CLAIM that [the MDTJ has any relevance to an ancient lineage for modern KMAs] would require a demonstration, at the same level of detail, that a book with completely Chinese content tells us something about the KMAs. If the MDTJ is, as the mass of evidence alluded to substantiates, a manual, written in Korean, consisting of Chinese military techniques taken text-for-text from a Chinese source, then the default inference is that the KMAs of the time consisted of Chinese military techniques, a point discussed in detail in Burdick's article. In other words, the claim that the MDTJ most clearly does support is that, at the time it was written, Korean military techniques were the same as those practiced throughout the vast Han empire 250 years earlier. To try to use the MDTJ to support the existence of an ancient (or even contemporary) native KMA set of traditions, a rather crushing burden of proof therefore needs to be met.
(iii) the philological evidence is discussed in Stanley Henning's 2000
JAMA paper, `Traditional Korean Martial Arts', focusing on the misidentification of
taekkyon with early documentary references to
takkyon `push-shoulders'; see also Marc Tedeschi and the erroneous belief that terms like subak and takkyon refer to specific techniques, rather than generic tactics of unbalancing, striking etc.
The point of all of this is just that the supposed evidence which is hauled out at various points by advocates of ancient KMAs, including TSD, turns out to offer no support at all for such claims. The status of a two-millenia history for any of these arts is roughly comparable to claims that Atlantis really existed, or that the moon is made of ice. The status of this evidence is on the table, offered publically in the only strictly refereed journal of MA history we have, representing a convergence of lines of investigation by independent historians, and so far there has not been a single peep in contradiction to their joint critique, let alone anything like well-reasoned argumentation undermining their results. Given that situation, what's left to discuss, at this point?