two or so years that he spent at this templecum-orphanage, Choi had a particularly miserable time. Endlessly bullied because of his nationality and the fact that he couldn’t speak Japanese very well, he reacted in the only way he was able—with his fists.
Finally, the temple abbot thought to ask Choi where he saw his life going, and the young Korean replied that he was extremely interested in learning a martial art.
By a stroke of good fortune (surely by now deserved by Choi), the abbot—a man named Watanabe—knew the founder of the martial art daito-ryu aiki-jujitsu, Takeda Sokaku.
By all accounts, Choi was next whisked by Sokaku to a dōjō on Shin Shu mountain, where he and his sensei lived and trained for the following thirty years. During this time, said Choi later, he grew to have a complete understanding of Sokaku’s style.
Following the end of the Second World War, Choi returned to Korea, where for a time he earned his living raising and selling pigs. However, a local brewery chairman happened to see him in action when a heated discussion he’d been having with several men turned ugly. In the ensuing skirmish, Choi quickly saw the men off.
‘Hey, you’re pretty good,’ said the brewery chairman, a man named Suh Bok Sub (who was himself a first dan in judō). ‘Why don’t I pay to have a dojang (the Korean for training hall) built on my premises, so that you can teach there? I can be your first pupil!’
And so it was; in 1951 the two men opened a school named the Korean Yu Kwan Sool Hapki Dojang, followed, in 1958, by Choi’s very own school—which for the first time bore the shortened title ‘Hapkido’.
Having travelled as far as North America to teach his new martial art, Choi died in 1986 at the age of eighty-two.
CHOU, SENG
Seng Chou (480-560 AD) was feeble, slightly-built, and often bullied by the other monks who were resident at the Shaolin Temple. Greatly peeved by all of this, Seng Chou went one night into the Temple’s great hall, where there stood before him a massive statue of the Buddhist military god Jingangshen.
‘If you can hear me, great one,’ whispered Seng Chou in prayer, ‘please help me. Make me strong, and big, so that I can defend myself when next the other monks chide me.’
This continued for several further nights, with Seng Chou praying alone to the fearsome-looking statue. Finally, after almost a week had passed, Seng Chou’s prayers were answered.
‘What’s the matter with you, mouse?’ mocked Jingangshen in great, booming tones, suddenly appearing in his divine form before the cowering monk.
‘The other monks are always mocking me—they call me weak, and useless,’ protested Seng Chou in a faltering voice, wholly unable to meet the god’s fiery gaze.
‘But you are weak, and you are useless!’ laughed the god, swiping Seng Chou around the head. It was the mildest of blows, and yet it knocked the monk flying.
‘I know I am,’ nodded Seng Chou as he picked himself up slowly off the floor, tears appearing. ‘That’s why I need your help to change.’
So obvious was his misery that Jingangshen felt something stir in his otherwise hardened heart.
‘So be it,’ said the god solemnly.
‘You’ll…you’ll help me?’ stammered Seng Chou, wiping his eyes.
‘In a way,’ answered Jingangshen cryptically. ‘But first you must help yourself.’
‘How do you mean, master?’ the monk wanted to know.
‘You must eat flesh.’
Seng Chou recoiled as though stung.
‘Master,’ he said breathlessly, ‘you must know that it is forbidden for a monk to eat the meat of any creature. That is a sacred commandment to us.’
‘Eat flesh,’ shrugged Jingangshen, ‘or be damned all your life. There is no other way.’
‘I…I cannot,’ Seng Chou said miserably. ‘You ask too much.’
At once a great blade appeared in one of the god’s hands, its blade pressed against the monk’s throat. In the god’s other hand was a great sinewy lump of meat.
‘Eat this,’ said Jingangshen, ‘or die by this blade. You asked me for help, and now you must accept what I tell you. There is no other way, except for that of death.’
Hesitatingly, Seng Chou reached out for the meat. He felt sick to the stomach as he began to chew—and yet it tasted considerably better than he’d expected.
And all at once he felt a warm glow start in his arms, legs, and chest. Suddenly he realised that he was stood at least a foot taller than he had before, and he looked gratefully at Jingangshen.
‘I have granted your wish,’ said the god, the meat and sword now absent. ‘Never trouble me again.’
And with that, all that remained was the statue with its fixed, fathomless gaze.
Dawn was breaking as Seng Chou returned to the dormitory he shared with the other monks. They were starting to awaken, yawning and washing with the aid of a water jug as they prepared themselves for the morning’s prayers.
‘Seng Chou, you little maggot, where have you be—’
The usual tirade of abuse stopped the moment the monks took notice of the fact that Seng Chou was a good foot taller than he’d stood before, and that his arms and legs were now like tree trunks.
‘Never mock me again,’ said the monk quietly. ‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the other monks together, wondering just how such a transformation could have occurred overnight. They knew better than to ask, however.
From that moment on Seng Chou became one of the Shaolin Temple’s most skilled martial (fighting) monks. He was fond of jumping onto rooftops and lifting great weights, while his friend Hui Guang (who hadn’t been given any special powers by Jingangshen) could apparently kick a shuttlecock 500 consecutive times with his feet while stood on a thin iron beam suspended several feet in the air.
CONSTERDINE, PETER
One name consistently mentioned by such premier British martial artists as Kevin O’Hagan, Brian Seabright and Geoff Thompson is Peter Consterdine’s. From the age of fifteen he has been a practitioner of many different martial arts, including karate (in which he is currently ranked seventh dan, and a former England International) and Wing Chun kung-fu, Consterdine also honed his fighting skills in the decade he spent working ‘on the door’ of some of Manchester’s roughest nightclubs.
Like Geoff Thompson (with whom he is joint Chief Instructor of the British Combat Association), Consterdine’s ‘real-life’ experiences of violence have led him to reject a great deal of what is traditionally taught in the dōjō. So many techniques look good in practise, but are (to quote Geoff Thompson) ‘about
