practitioners – Cheongnyong-yu Taekwondo

Sahyun and sasung – unravelling the mystery

If you’re fortunate to be the owner of a copy of Choi Hong-hi’s condensed or full Encyclopaedia of Taekwondo, and you’ve wandered through some of the pages at the back of the book concerning belts and ranks and titles, you might have seen a section describing the Korean titles given to black belts of various degrees.

In this section there are some very familiar words such as sabeom (written sabum in the book), which means ‘instructor’. The hangeul for sabeom is 사범, and you can look this word up in any reasonably comprehensive Korean-English dictionary. The word is also listed on many websites about Taekwondo as meaning ‘instructor’, and is used in lots of Taekwondo schools every week around the world.

However, also in this section of Choi’s book, you’ll also see words such as sahyun and sasung. Choi describes these words as being used to refer to high-ranking Taekwondo practitioners; however, if you try to look these words up in a Korean dictionary, they are nowhere to be found.

I’ve done this many times over the last few years to try to figure out what the hangeul and hanja for these words are, but have never found anything in any dictionary to suggest that they even are Korean words. Part of the difficulty in doing this is guessing at what the hangeul might be. In his various books, Choi uses his own system of romanising Korean text that is largely based on the American pronunciation of English letters. Knowing this I would guess that the hangeul for sahyun would actually be 사현 and the hangeul for sasung would be 사성; however, putting these words into good online Korean dictionaries (such as dic.naver.com) reveals nothing.

I concluded that these words were simply too obscure to be included in a normal Korean dictionary. I reached a dead-end. Until that was I discovered this page http://www.masterhoward.com/news/342-explanation-of-itf-tkd-titles.html by a Dublin Taekwondo instructor called Robert Howard, which finally gave me the answers I was looking for.

The reason these terms do not appear in standard Korean dictionaries is because they are new terms invented by Choi. This perhaps shouldn’t be surprising – Choi studied calligraphy from a young age, and seemed to like inventing new words (he came up with the name ‘Taekwondo’). I think this is even evident in the names he chose for the Changheon-yu forms, which I think are far more interesting than those of the Kukki-won forms.

The information on the page linked above reveals that sahyun is actually 사현 師賢 sahyeon. 사 師 sa means ‘teacher’, ‘master’, or ‘expert’, and 현 賢 hyeon means ‘a worthy or virtuous person’ or ‘moral’, thus sahyeon means ‘moral teacher’ or ‘wise teacher’. The syllable 현 also appears in words such as 현자 賢者 hyeonja and 현인 賢人 hyeonin, both of which mean ‘wise man’ or ‘sage’.

Similarly, sasung is actually 사성 師聖 saseong. 성 聖 seong means ‘sage’, and thus saseong means ‘sage master’ or ‘sage teacher’ – a title so honorific it could pretty much only be used for Choi himself. The syllable 성 聖 seong also appears in the word 성현 聖賢 seonghyeon, which means ‘sage’.

사현 師賢 sahyeon; moral teacher, wise teacher
사성 師聖 saseong; sage-master

These two words reflect the idea that Taekwondo is not just a method of combat – it is also a moral culture. They also show that high-ranking Taekwondo practitioners should not just be skilled fighters, but should be moral teachers and leaders.

These two words also, to an extraordinary degree, show the presence of Confucianism in Taekwondo. Korea was, for a very long time, a model Confucian society, and Confucian ideals still permeate modern Korean culture. One of the central ideas in Confucianism is that of the sage-king – the idea that the leader of a nation (and leaders in general) should aspire to be like the great sage-kings of antiquity – benevolent rulers who embodied Confucian ideals. The fact that Choi has chosen words here that seem to specifically refer to sagehood shows the influence of Confucianism on Taekwondo.

These two words will be added to the next edition of Taekwondo Terminology (whenever that comes out).

Why do we practise forms in Taekwondo?

Forms are practised in all styles of Taekwondo, and they are practised by students of all grades and degrees. Clearly they are central to Taekwondo training. Some people (like myself) like forms, and like practising them, but a number of people dislike forms. I’ve met a number of people over the time I’ve been training in Taekwondo who strongly dislike forms, and who vastly prefer to do other kinds of training such as sparring and self-defence training, and who wonder why we train in forms at all in Taekwondo. It is to those people that this post is written – I aim to show that even if you don’t like forms, there are good reasons why they’re such a big part of Taekwondo.

1. Body Control

This, I think, is THE most important reason to practise forms. Body control is just the ability to move your body into a specific position and know, without looking to check, that your body is in the correct position. It’s the ability to perform a punch and to know that your wrist is straight and that the opposite hand is on your waist without having to look to check, or without having an instructor come along and adjust the position.

This might sound like a very basic ability – and it is – but a lot of people, when they first start training in martial arts, do not have this ability. This is especially true with older students (30 years and older), who – if they have never done any physical activity that requires precise movements of the body, such as martial arts or dance – will have become used to a certain way of moving. When they first start training in martial arts they have to unlearn the way they have learnt to move over the first few decades of their life.

Forms are excellent for teaching body control, because they are a choreographed sequence of movements, and they should be performed in a very precise way. Importantly, the transitions between movements in forms are very specific – you have to move a specific foot, you have to turn a specific direction, you have to start the next technique at the correct point, and you have to maintain balance throughout. All of this forces you to think about how you are moving, and this is how forms train you in body control.

(This point isn’t so relevant if you’ve been training in Taekwondo or another martial art for several years. After a few years of training, you will have learnt body control, and it’s not an ability you will forget quickly. However, for beginners, learning body control, and hence practising forms, is essential.)

2. Competitions

Some people dislike the ‘sport’ side of Taekwondo: the style of fighting that’s used for competition sparring – which is often criticised as unrealistic – and the performance of forms. However, Taekwondo practitioners want to be able to compete, so there should be a part of Taekwondo which allows them to do that (even if it doesn’t completely emulate a real fight).

Forms are an excellent way of judging a Taekwondo practitioner’s ability. They are a test of balance, flexibility, and just the ability to accurately perform any given technique. Since everyone in a given style of Taekwondo will learn the same forms, they are a standardised way to compare the abilities of a group of practitioners. Indeed, so useful are forms for competitions, Kukki-won created a set of 10 new forms specifically to be used in competitions.

3. Forms are the lexicon of a martial art

This is another very important reason for practising forms. The forms of a particular style of a martial art contain all of the techniques that are part of that martial art. They are a dictionary of techniques – if you learn all of the forms, then you have learnt all of the techniques taught in that martial art.

This idea is arguably somewhat undermined by the fact that people like Choi Hong-hi and Hwang Ki wrote encyclopaedias for their styles of Taekwondo, and those encyclopaedias are far more detailed and specific than the forms are. Nevertheless, it is still the tradition, in the martial arts that are related to Karate, that each generation of students teaches forms to the next generation, and that knowledge is passed down through those forms, which encapsulate all of the knowledge of that style. Forms form a kind of ‘oral history’ – a ‘choreographic history’ or a ‘choreographic lexicon’ – and passing that from one generation to the next is part of the traditions of Taekwondo.

4. Fitness

Forms are not performed particularly fast, but practising them does improve your fitness. Forms often involve performing low stances and various different kicks, which improve your flexibility and strength. They often also involve one-leg stances, which together with any high kicking techniques improve your balance.

One could argue that there are plenty of general exercises you could do to improve these aspects of fitness, but forms do all of them at the same time. Forms are excellent for improving your general fitness.

Forms do not teach you how to win a fight, but they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to be a foundation of training from which other forms of training – free sparring, self-defence training – develop.

Are you still a black belt even if you stop training in Taekwondo?

This is an interesting question, and one to which the answer does not seem to be agreed upon by all Taekwondo practitioners. In this post I will give my opinion.

I generally believe that if you have achieved the level of black belt in Taekwondo, that you remain a black belt even if you stop training in Taekwondo. I also believe that you retain your degree of black belt – i.e., if you are a fourth degree black belt, and you stop actively training in Taekwondo, you remain a fourth degree black belt, even if you don’t train for several years. (However, I believe that if you are a colour belt, and you stop training for several years, you do not necessarily retain your grade.)

There are many people who disagree with this point of view, arguing that if you are a black belt, and you stop training for several years, you will then no longer be able to do what a black belt Taekwondo practitioner can do – and should be able to do. A black belt should be an indicator of a certain level of ability, and if, through not training for several years, you lose the level of martial skill required of a black belt, then you should no longer be a black belt in Taekwondo.

However, if we were to revoke the status of those people who no longer have the level of skill required of a certain degree of black belt, this would cause some problems. For example, perhaps someone trains in Taekwondo for fifty years, starting at age 20 and finishing at age 70; they reach the level of grandmaster, but at 70, for health reasons, they have to retire from Taekwondo. Should such a person no longer be considered a ninth degree black belt and a grandmaster because they no longer retain that level of skill? It is generally the precedent in Taekwondo that such a person would be a ninth degree grandmaster for the rest of their life (and may even be promoted to tenth degree (in some organisations) posthumously). It would seem evident from this example that in Taekwondo a person’s degree is not revoked when they stop training.

But let’s consider a different example: consider someone who starts training in Taekwondo at age 20, and at 25 becomes a black belt. Upon becoming a black belt, they then quit Taekwondo altogether. By the time such a person is 50 or 70, are they still a black belt in Taekwondo? To say that they are might seem preposterous – by the time they are 30 they will have already not been doing Taekwondo for as many years as they were training in it. By the time they are 50, they are very unlikely to have retained much of the skill that they developed.

However, even in this second example, I would say that such a person still retains their status as a black belt in Taekwondo. A belt in Taekwondo is primarily a symbol of what you have achieved, and secondarily an indicator of your current skill level. And someone who has achieved black belt in Taekwondo, but who hasn’t trained in it for a long time, and who no longer has the level of skill required of a black belt, will be aware that they are no longer at that level of skill. Such a person probably should not go around saying ‘I’m a black belt in Taekwondo’, as this implies currency. However, they are, in my view, technically still a black belt. And this is, I think, the convention followed by the vast majority of Taekwondo organisations around the world.