Hwarang Warrior (from wikipedia.org)

I was going to include this with my new links  post a few days back, but it was so cool I figured it need a posting of it’s own.   Last week I stumbled onto the official website of the Hwarang Do martial arts organization .  If you’ve read anything about the history of the Shilla Dynasty,  you probably ran across at least something about the Hwarang (화랑).

“Hwarang” literally means, “flower youth,” but these guys were the farthest thing from pansies.  The Hwarang were an elite body of aristocratic Shilla youth who trained in the arts military strategy and hand-to-hand combat.  They were also at the top of  Shilla  scholastics and  were well versed in Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, literature, poetry and even music and dance.  Many great figures from the mid to late Shilla period were Hwarang, like General Kim Yu-shin (김유신), who unified the 3 kingdoms, and the Buddhist saints Wonhyo  (원효) and Uisang (의상).

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