Ken, thanks for your elaboration. But I find the whole set of ideas that you report disturbing nonetheless. I've looked into various sources reflecting the official ideology of KSW history, a number of which claim an ancestry of thousands of year past—a claim which I happen to know, based on the work of current MA historians, has no documentary basis whatever. There is not the slightest evidence of what was happening on the Korean peninusla at the time depths claimed in KSW stories about its ancient origins; there really isn't even any solid evidence that the population occupying the Korean peninsula at that time were the ancestors of the modern Koreans. The inhabitants of the British Isles four thousand years ago were most definitely not the mixed Indo-European group that now constitutes the majority of the UK poplulation. And we haven't the foggiest notion of what the ancestors of the modern Koreans were actually doing in the way of martial arts even 200 years ago, let alone several thousand. For that matter, we have only the sketchiest ideas of just what was being done in the way of training and curriculum during the Kwan-era of the 1940s and 1950s in Korea! The phony legendary histories that various cult-like MA groups construct to claim legitimacy are one of the most absurd aspects of the current MA scene.
So far as I can tell, KSW was put together from bits and pieces of various martial arts in the late 1950s. It is no more ancient or pure than any of the other currently practiced Korean MAs—which owe a huge debt primarily to China; as Stan Henning and Dakin Burdick—both highly respected historians specializing in MAs—have shown in detail by exhaustive examination of Korean, Japanese and Chinese documentary records, the very earliest discussions in Korea of contemporary MA practice, as well as the archaeological, show that ancient Korean fighting arts were at most local adaptations of well-described Chinese fighting styles—not surprising, given the enormous influence and sway of the Chinese empire in ancient Korea. Influences from Okinawa (itself reflecting local adaptations of 17th and 18th c CMAs) and Japan also infused the development of MAs in Korea. TSD/TKD, Hapkido, KSW and other Korean MAs are the lucky inheritors of an incredibly rich mix of combat techniques that should make them the envy of the MA world. But by the same token, let's have none of this garbage about `respecting the purity of the technique' or however the apology for cult insularity happens to be phrased.
The nasty fact is that the notion of `respect for the founder' as a justification for forbidding the practitioners to gain as broad and deep a MA education as possible is a pious fraud. MA systems were created by imperfect human beings, meaning that they share that human imperfection, including incompleteness, in the following sense: there's always something more out there to learn that you haven't yet encountered. Is it `disrespectful to the founder' to study something that the founder didn't teach? Only in the sense that a university professor would consider it disrespectful for a student to read something that that professor didn't write. Ludicrous? You bet! And so is the idea that a true Master would find a student's explorations in the great open world of MA knowledge to be disrespectful. By all means, let's agree: branching out before you have a good, solid grounding in a single well-developed system is almost certainly not a good idea and will very likely yield a `jack of all trades, master of none'. But `disrespectful'? Come on!
