Some of the most common questions we receive revolve around the kunja paper requirement for 1st dan. There are lots of ways to tackle the topic, and many students wonder what exactly the judges are looking for.
1. Please start by reading the introduction to the "Kunja" concept on USHF web site.
2. Look at the viewpoint of two different black belts who frequently reviewed kunja papers, that we list below. While options on exactly how to write the paper vary, we hope these commentaries can give students some guidance and perspective.
To my mind, the kunja paper serves three purposes. It makes us write, and although the college students among us find it easy, the other students complain bitterly. When one instructor wrote his paper for 1st dan, he found it more painful than the most excruciating joint lock. When he wrote his second paper, he wrote an exemplary paper in less than a day. Likewise, another black belt's only formal education was up to the sixth grade in France. Despite this, and despite the fact that English was not his native language, he wrote a wonderful paper and greatly enjoyed the personal victory. For these two and the rest of us, the kunja paper tries to balance our training between the physical and the mental. For instructors, this ability to communicate your thoughts on paper is essential, and we hope you all will teach someone someday. The second purpose is to remind us of the code of ethics that should underlay martial arts practice. Kunja is the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese chun-tzu, advocated by Confucius in his Analects. What Confucius meant by chun-tzu (lit, "superior person" or "prince", etc.) is not necessarily what you will mean, but that is ok, because the third reason to write the paper is to express your own set of standards of behavior. This will help the judges understand who you are, and for yourself it will be yardstick to measure yourself by through the rest of your life. If you are black belt already, go back and read your first paper. Have you lived up to your aspirations? Keep on practicing folks!
---Dakin Burdick
Although it may seem the paper is simply an exercise in perseverance, its main purpose is one of introspection on the part of the writer-forcing him/her to evaluate his/her own life and how martial arts can improve it. The approach used to write the paper must ensure that the student contemplates the real issues and learns a valuable lesson from the exercise. Kunja is a rather concrete ideal in Confucian thought that represented many noble concepts. Many people who write the kunja paper state that kunja is a relative term that can mean different things to different people, and this simply shows that they never understood what kunja was to begin with. Of course, it is easier to write a paper when they can simply spew out thoughts about what a good person should be like, making it up as they go along. They get to redefine the concept of virtue and decide what characteristics are represented in kunja. More important than what they include, however, is what they omit. By redefining the qualifications, one will naturally include those attributes that they deem important but will probably leave out those they deem non-essential. It is this ill-defined relative morality concept that has created the moral crises in America today. It is evident that we need a higher standard, an ideal, a benchmark. Kunja is such a benchmark. There may be latitude for interpretation but not a total reinvention. Once can even supplement it with other standards, such as religion and other codes of conduct. The primary concern is that we adopt an external standard against which we measure and evaluate our lives. Then when we write the kunja paper, in our introspection we may be forced to face and address our shortcomings. In contrast, without an objective reference, we are left to simply emphasize our own good points (and neglect our bad ones), and writing the kunja paper becomes an exercise of patting ourselves on the back rather than one of internal reflection. While the reference is external, the perspective is internal to the writer-on how they stack up and how martial arts helps with that process. The subject of the paper is kunja and how it relates to your martial arts path, not kunja and how it relates to your Christian journey (while also important, perhaps a different paper), or kunja and how it relates to various words in Webster's dictionary. By being forced to face our shortcomings, in the end we hope that the paper requirement helps to inspire students to recommit themselves to the pursuit of self betterment through the martial ats and to attain a life emblematic of the kunja ideal.
--- Brandon Sieg