JIN JUNG KWAN HAPKIDO: ORIGIN

The roots of Hapkido began with the Hwa Rang warriors of the Silla dynasty (57 BC to 936 AD), which helped unite the Eastern Asia peninsula near Japan that eventually became Korea. The Hwa Rang were nobles akin to the Knights of Europe or the Samurai of Japan and so were also well-educated in arts and the philosophy of Buddhism.

However, the introduction of Confucianism, which discouraged the study of martial arts, forced its practitioners to join the Buddhist monks isolated in their monasteries high up in the mountains.

The Buddhist monks of China and Korea shared ideas with each other, maintaining and refining their martial arts. During this time, recurring war with Japan across the Korea Straight eventually led to the conquest of Korea by Japan, which attempted to eliminate Korean culture with the goal of incorporating Korea entirely into the Japanese empire. Korean martial arts were forbidden, while Japanese styles were permitted, but many Koreans began to learn their own arts from the Buddhist monks and practiced them in secret.

After the defeat of Japan at the end of World War II and Korea's return to independence, the open study of Korean martial arts also returned. One of the practitioners was Ji, han Jae, who learned the techniques brought back from Japan buy Choi, Yong Sool and combined them with traditional Korean kicking and weapons techniques which he learned from a master known as "Taoist Lee", and spiritual philosophy from a woman monk known as "Grandma", to define the modern form of Hapkido.