Budo international Martial Arts Magazine Jul.-Aug. 2014 | Page 64

Styles Koreans

manner to the Hwa Rang Do? Where
does such devotion come from?, Chief
Instructor Mark Mattiucci, high rank
officer of the Carabinieri and responsible
in Italy replies:
"Certainly, not for money! I've been
lucky enough to have had the freedom
and chance to practice and teach the
Hwa Rang Do ® for a long time without
any constraints of economic nature
since I don't live out of its revenue. In
practice, I can select my students with
extreme hardness, subject them to
constant and heavy exams regarding
cultural as well as physical and martial
as pect s and therefo re I can keep
myself stuck to the original culture
"Hwarang" (hard training of body, mind
and spirit)."
All this doesn't seem to affect the
strong structure of the Italian Branch of
WHRDA, which has been g ro wing
steadily year by year to finally have
expanded
abro ad;
recent ly,
Luxembourg has also opened to the
study, and aspiring instructors to other
EU countries are going through the
tough selection process that the chief
instructor submits them. When asked
why, the colonel answered as follows:
"I wo n't be t riv ial repeat ing what
everyone knows: that is, we live in a
society where everything is considered
temporary and then it fades in time.
The Hwa Rang Do ®, when practiced
the way we do it, is a movement that
opposes to all this by posing a model
of thought in which the motivation to
do it bet t er an d f or t h e g o o d o f
ev ery o n e i s do mi n an t , i n wh ich
physical and mental excellence are our
training goals. It's natural that, as
human beings, as years go by, we will

become weak, unable and we will
finally die, but this, according to the
ethics of the Hwa Rang Do ® doesn't
justify our laziness today and indulging
in doing nothing.”
Of course, hearing these words we
feel a strong emotional charge, but a
movement is simply a way of thinking
and then we wonder, why making a
martial art? Or, at least, why study a
martial art to follow an ethical and
certainly legitimate movement? This
question finds a great part of its
response in the approach of the Chief
Instructor of Hwa Rang Do ®, in his own
words:
"My story is not different than that of
the majority of the instructors who,
coming from other martial arts, have
decided to join me and the Hwa Rang
Do ® in the past 10 years. I was
already a self-defense teacher with
years of martial studies on my back
and I was basically unhappy with what I
had become: just a container of
techniques, vast and diverse, but
disconnected from each other. I felt the
need of substance, something that
would link everything that I had
studied, giving it a higher path and a
wise direction. My meeting with the
Hwa Rang Do ® happened by chance,
as well as my decision to contact the
WHRDA, but it was the subsequent
meeting
with
the
Supreme
Grandmaster Dr. Joo Bang Lee, a living
legend of Korean Martial Arts, what
finally convinced me it was my way."
T he C h ief In s tructo r gav e up
practising any other Martial Art and
threw himself headlong into the study
of the Hwa Rang Do ® to become
with enormous sacrifices a black belt

in a very short time, if compared to
that o f co mmo n s tudents (it is
estimated that a normal student of
Hwa Rang Do ® needs at least 7 years
to achieve a 1st dan black belt). It
resulted in the closure of his selfdefense course and the opening of a
new course of Hwa Rang Do ®, the
first of its kind in Italy. The beginning
was difficult, he had very few students!
The special nature of the Art itself
along with the unmistakable hardness
o f the teacher was an explo s iv e
combination that turned the practice
very difficult for beginners:
"I can't avoid saying that many of my
students, although they were fascinated
by my teachings, soon abandoned the
idea to stay with me because of my way
of being. My way of incorporating the
Hwa Rang Do ® in the life and teachings
don't make it suitable for beginners. But
I insisted, and over time, dozens of
schools have been opened in Italy and
today thousands of students appreciate
this art. The approach of the Hwarang
culture is strong and it involves the
whole person. This is what brings me
close to this art and it makes me stay
being its student and teacher." And then
he adds: "If getting to know Dr. Joo
Bang Lee tied me to the Hwa Rang Do
®, meeting his son, Grandmaster
Taejoon Lee, has over the years built
and refined all the culture and
philosophy of the Hwarang of which I'm
feeding myself now. Being a humble
disciple of a master of this level requires
you to revise many of your basic
convictions and perhaps become a new
person, but such effort opens up so
many prospects as to make it
immensely rewarding."