Modern day Tae Soo Do/ Hwa Rang Do has no connection with Taekwondo and one should not be mistaken for the other.

Very few people who practice Taekwondo today will recognize the name except for its modern use with the Hwa Rang Do community.

In the west, the art was always referred to as "Tae Kwon Do" (or "Taekwondo", the western form of the name), due to that the controversies that happened in Korea during the early 1960s never made their way over to the United States aside from a very select few, who chose to watch eastern culture and events closely in order to keep traditions alive and accurate.

Today, the name Tae Soo Do (Way of the Warrior Spirit, Korean: 태수도; Hanja: 太手道) refers to a martial art program created in 1990 by the World Hwa Rang Do Association as a beginners program to the martial art system Hwa Rang Do.

The World Hwa Rang Do Association decided to use the name because functionally it expressed what they were working to achieve with the students who participate within the program and since it had been rejected outright by General Choi and the Taekwondo community decades earlier, they didn't see an issue using it.