Martial Arts Without Philosophy Is Street Fighting: What Jhoon Rhee’s TRUTOPIA Still Teaches School Owners

Grand Master Jhoon Rhee’s 2010 book TRUTOPIA: The Taekwondo Philosophy is part memoir, part manifesto and part school-owner manual. Its central claim is that a martial arts school is in the business of changing behavior, and that technique without a philosophy behind it is just fighting. This eight-part series, written by one of his black belts, pulls out the parts of the book a school owner can put to work on Monday morning, and is honest about the parts that read as idealism.

Disclosure: Grand Master Jhoon Rhee awarded the author his 1st Degree Black Belt in 1978 and his ranks through 6th Degree, and the author was head manager of the Jhoon Rhee Institute in 1980. Quotations from TRUTOPIA are brief and attributed.

Jhoon Rhee awarded me my black belt in 1978 and my ranks through 6th Degree. I opened my own school under his system in 1975, at fifteen, and in 1980 I was head manager of the Jhoon Rhee Institute while I was a student at Georgetown. So I have no claim to neutrality here. What I can offer is fifty years of watching which of his ideas survive contact with a real school, a real payroll and real parents.

Most owners under forty know him as a name: the “Father of American Taekwondo,” the man in the “Nobody Bothers Me” commercials, the instructor who taught members of Congress for free. For the full record of his life, read this journal’s definitive history of Jhoon Rhee. This series is narrower. It reads his 2010 book the way he would have wanted it read: as instructions.

What is TRUTOPIA?

TRUTOPIA: The Taekwondo Philosophy was published by TBL Publishing in McLean, Virginia, first in 2010, with a 2011 copyright. The name is his own coinage: true plus utopia. He used it for the society he believed would follow if enough people simply stopped deceiving one another.

The book has two halves. The first, presented by former Congressman Toby Roth with a foreword by former Congressman Bob Livingston, both of them his black belts, is a list of what Roth calls Rhee’s “21 Miraculous Achievements”: the Washington school, the Congressional class, the safety equipment, Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, the Soviet seminars. The second half is Rhee writing in his own voice, in seven chapters, about his childhood in Korea and the philosophy he taught for half a century.

It is not a polished book. It repeats itself, it mixes a business seminar schedule with theology, and some of its dates disagree with the public record. (Where they do, this series follows the record, and our history of Rhee lists the corrections.) But it is the only place where he set down, in one volume, the whole system he used to build schools.

Why should a school owner read a philosophy book?

Because Rhee’s philosophy was his business model. He said so plainly. Early in the 1970s, the editor of Black Belt magazine, where Rhee had a column, asked him to justify the claim that taekwondo was a philosophy and not just kicking and punching. Rhee admits in the book that he didn’t know what to say. He spent three months on it and came back with “Seven Qualities of a Champion,” the framework that became his curriculum and that we take apart in Part 2.

His conclusion from that exercise is the sentence I would put on the wall of every school in America: martial arts “without philosophy is merely street fighting.”

Think about what that means commercially. A parent is not buying a side kick. A parent is buying a child who stands up straighter, finishes homework and does not quit when something gets hard. If you cannot explain, in plain words, how your kicks produce that child, you are selling street fighting with a uniform, and you will compete on price with every other school selling the same thing. Rhee could explain it. That is why he ran his schools as professional businesses from the day he opened in 1962, long before most of the industry did.

What did Rhee actually believe?

Stripped of the cosmology, the book makes five claims that matter to a school owner:

1. The purpose of life is happiness, and children can understand that. He asked audiences of every age the purpose of life and found that children could often answer when adults could not.
2. Three values produce it: Truth, Beauty and Love. He called them TBL and built a short recitation around them that begins “When I am truthful, my heart is beautiful.” Their opposites, Deceiving, Ugliness and Hatred, he called DUH. We take this on in Part 5, where it turns out to be a surprisingly hard-headed argument about trust and money.
3. Character is a physical habit before it is a belief. He leaned on a simple psychological point: a motion triggers an emotion as much as an emotion triggers a motion. Stand at attention and you become attentive. Bow and you feel respect. That is the whole case for formality in class, and it is Part 4.
4. The teacher has to be the proof. He called his system the Lead by Example Action Philosophy, and his own line for it was that if a picture is worth a thousand words, an action is worth a thousand pictures. He did a hundred push-ups in sixty-two seconds at the United Nations at seventy-five, after a stroke. Part 6.
5. Big things are built one model at a time. One model student, then one model school, then a city. His answer to “which came first, the chicken or the egg” is really a growth plan. Part 8.

Former Congressman Livingston submitted his essay “My Vision for the Third Millennium,” the short version of all this, to the Congressional Record on March 25, 1998, summing it up as strength in the body, honesty in the heart and knowledge in the mind.

Which parts should you not take literally?

A fair reader should say this out loud. TRUTOPIA’s later chapters describe a world without lawyers, police, accountants or locksmiths, where nobody owns a car and a one-hour working day leaves fifteen hours for the arts. He committed to living to at least 136 and to seeing that world arrive before the end of this century. He died in Arlington, Virginia, on April 30, 2018, at eighty-six.

I am not going to spend this series defending the one-hour workday. Rhee himself expected readers to call him crazy and said so in the book, with a smile. What I will defend is the operating system underneath the vision, because I have watched it build schools for five decades. Owners who ran his curriculum, his formality, his honesty about money and his habit of being the fittest person in the building did well. Owners who kept the uniforms and dropped the philosophy usually ended up competing on price.

What does this series cover?

Eight parts, one a week. Each takes one idea from the book, tells you what Rhee actually said and did, checks it against the record, and ends with what to do about it in your school:

1. This introduction.
2. The Seven Qualities of a Champion, the curriculum that turns physical skills into human ones.
3. Fort Worth, July 1985: the first martial arts business seminar, and the question Rhee asked owners who taught for free.
4. The Three Golden Rules for teaching children, and why he refused to yell.
5. Truth, Beauty and Love as a business case: deception as the most expensive thing in your school.
6. “100 Years of Wisdom in a Body 21 Years Young”: the instructor as living proof.
7. “Fool Master”: what musical forms and foam safety gear teach about innovating in a traditional industry.
8. One model student, one model school: Rhee’s plan for building something large.