|
From 1910 to present
Many events led up to the formation of the current
martial art system known as Kuk Sool Won™, But perhaps the best place to
begin would be 1910, with the dissolution of the Korean Royal Court by
the occupying Japanese forces. During this period of foreign rule (from
1910 until the end of World War II), the Japanese attempted to suppress
virtually every aspect of Korean culture and replace it with their own.
They even suppressed Hangul (the Korean language) making Japanese the official
spoken language. Needless to say, the traditional martial arts of Korea
were also banned.
As a result, many prominent martial art instructors
were forced into hiding, including Myung-duk Suh. But before Japan took
over, Suh was well-noted for teaching three types of Korean martial arts;
kwun sool: a kicking and hard punching style, yoo sool: a soft style with
emphasis on joint-locking and throwing techniques, and yoo-kwun sool: a
combination of the two which could be either hard or soft but never used
force against force.
Many of the martial art techniques native to Korea
were jealously guarded and therefore had always been taught in a secretive
manner. This aspect became greatly intensified due to the fact that practice
of any Korean martial art was strictly forbidden by the Japanese government.
In fact, anyone caught teaching them faced severe punishment under an extremely
harsh
legal system. Because of the severity of this repression, very few Koreans
actually participated in martial art activities for fear of reprisal.
Master Instructor Suh Myung-duk was one such patriot,
who refused to be intimidated from honoring a family tradition that stretched
back sixteen generations. He returned to his hometown near Taegu in Kyung
Sang province and set about the task of preserving his vast martial art
knowledge. He continued practicing martial arts, teaching his techniques
in the strictest privacy to immediate family members. Finally, the time
had come to pass along the heritage of the previous 16 generations. Myung-duk
Suh carefully selected one child to whom he would give the entire scope
of his knowledge. That child was his grandson, In-hyuk Suh, the future
founder of Kuk Sool Won™. |
|
| A serious martial arts education began for the
young Suh when he was only five years old and his training continued uninterrupted
until the middle of the Korean conflict, when his grandfather was fatally
wounded by North Korean soldiers. It then continued through arrangements
made by his grandfather’s foresight. Letters of introduction, plus his
grandfather’s reputation as a master instructor of the Korean Royal Court,
opened many doors that otherwise would have remained firmly shut. Now the
heir to the Suh family’s martial legacy began to visit and to learn from
many different instructors, and by the time he was 20 years old, In-hyuk
Suh had traveled to hundreds of Buddhist temples and private martial art
teachers.
Studying the many aspects of Korean martial arts
was no easy task. Buddhist temples are no longer used as martial training
grounds, but serve instead as repositories where libraries of many ancient
training books lay hidden away. Kept safe in the neutral holy temples,
the Japanese were prevented from confiscating or destroying these valuable
texts, but Suh had to search out and find volumes that in some cases had
been totally forgotten about.
The martial art masters also proved to be somewhat
of a challenge. Sometimes a teacher had a wealth of information to impart
and yet others might yield only a single but important technique. For instance,
Suh learned an important joint locking angle from an old man who was the
last descendant of a famous martial arts family. This old man was reputed
to use just his thumb in order to break the long Korean smoking pipes made
of steel. But he refused to teach the technique, preferring to take it
with him to the grave. Suh tried persuading him for nearly an hour before
he realized the old man had been holding just such a pipe in one particular
position, with his elbow at the same exact angle the entire time. Suddenly,
he became aware that the old man had been testing his wisdom and that the
secret technique was the elbow angle itself. |
|
| During this intensive training period, Suh met
an old Buddhist monk named Hae Dong Seu Nim (Great Monk of the East Sea).
This monk became Suh’s second most influential teacher, disclosing special
breathing skills, meditation techniques and esoteric knowledge about internal
power or ki.
It was now the late 1950's and In-hyuk Suh had
begun the monumental task to organize and formulate the many scattered
martial art techniques of Korea into a single system, which he named Kuk
Sool. Officially founded as Kuk Sool Won™ in 1961, it is now Korea’s largest
organized martial art (while Tae Kwon Do is larger, it is considered by
the Korean Government and the World Tae Kwon Do Federation to be a sport
based on martial art and not an actual martial art system).
In contrast to other popular martial arts in modern-day
Korea, Kuk Sool Won™ uses radically different spinning techniques and low
stances. So it took the public some time to adjust, but eventually its
popularity grew to epic proportions. Then in 1974, when Kuk Sool Won™ was
highly esteemed by the public, In-hyuk Suh took his martial art out of
Korea to the United States, forming the World Kuk Sool Association®
in 1975.
Originally headquartered at San Francisco, California,
the demands of an expanding global presence dictated moving to a more central
location, and in 1991 the World Kuk Sool Association® was relocated
to Houston, Texas. Presently located in Tomball, an outlying district of
Houston, the WKSA® headquarters is equipped with traditional training
grounds covering over 20 acres of land.
The facilities include a spacious dojang (training
hall), outdoor training area, knife-throwing & sword-cutting areas,
three different archery ranges, a meditation center, as well as the capability
to practice some of the aforementioned skills from horseback. |
|
|
