Samjae

The meaning of Samjae can be explained as "Three Essential Materials". 'Sam" means 'Three" and 'Jae' means 'material'. Those three materials have been symbolized as Heaven, Earth and Man. This SamJae is a fundamental frame of all kinds of changes in oriental philosophy. Thus the Kwae(trigram) is composed of three yin or yangs obeying this frame. Yin&Yang symbolize the change or the thing that changes while SamJae means the meta-frame of those change.

So the concept of SamJae is more abstract, so more metaphysical than that of YinYang. Thus it can be said SamJae is the foundation of YinYang. But the concept of SamJae couldn't have been explained logically and extinctively so that even the YinYang is still somewhat mythical in philosophical respect.(Any way, it is not the objective of this page to explain the logical foundation of SamJae and Yin-Yang, so let me skip it.)\

Also in Taekwondo SamJae means the fundamental frame of changes, i.e. the skills. Since SamJae is somewhat metaphysical it might be understood as abstract and ambiguous like another difficult metaphysical concepts. But unless you can understand it you may not able to understand the whole principle of TKD.

The way of Heaven in Taekwondo is that "everything of yourself should be kept on its own place, i.e. its most proper position in continuous change". The most proper position of everything moves in interrelations with everything else, so everything of yours has to keep moving in the best harmony with all anothers.(Ch.6)

Have your opponent opposed to the world harmonizing yourself in it; This is called "the way of Earth", which is the right principle of every skill in Taekwondo.(Ch.11)

it is important that you should always keep yourself as what you are without being biased to an extremity in a battle against your opponent, which is the third principle, called "the way of Man".(Ch.12)

This SamJae is also the frame of poomsae(Ch.51) and also of ethics(Ch.18) in Taekwondo.