Jirisan

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The ridge does not end. From the crown of Cheonwangbong the eye runs west along a sawtooth of grey summits that fades only where the haze takes it, twenty-five miles of high ground laid out in a single unbroken wall. There is no one peak that is Jirisan; there is a country of peaks, a massif so wide that a fit walker needs three days to cross it. The highest of them, Cheonwangbong, the Heavenly King Peak, stands at 1,915 meters — the loftiest ground anywhere on the Korean mainland, taller than anything between this point and the far northern border. On its bare summit, until quite recently, stood a small stone figure of a woman, and to that figure, far older than any temple on the slopes below, the mountain owes its deepest name.

The mountain of the wise

Jirisan spans three provinces. Its bulk sits in South Gyeongsang, where Cheonwangbong rises; its long western shoulders reach into North and South Jeolla, so that the range is shared ground among the southern provinces and belongs wholly to none. The name is usually read as the mountain of wisdom or of the wise — and a second, older folk reading takes it as the place where even the dull-witted, dwelling on its slopes, are made wise. Either way the mountain is understood as a teacher, a presence that works on those who live beneath it.

In the old reckoning of the land, the peninsula carries three great spirit-mountains, the samsin-san — the three holy summits where the powers of heaven and earth are most concentrated. The northern one is Baekdu, the white-headed origin-mountain on the far border. The island one is Hallasan, the volcano at the heart of Jeju. The third, the spirit-mountain of the southern mainland, is Jirisan. To stand on Cheonwangbong is to stand on one of the three poles of the sacred geography of the Korean people — and the only one of the three that a southerner could reach on foot and return from in a season.

The mountain is reckoned in geomancy as the terminus of a great vein of force. In the pungsu reading of the land — the Korean form of the siting-science that the Chinese call fengshui and that belongs in spirit to the world of Daoist cosmology — the energy of the peninsula flows south out of Baekdu down the long spine of the eastern ranges, and Jirisan is where that current gathers and comes to rest. It is the end of the road and the holding-place. A mountain of that standing does not merely shelter the holy; it generates it, drawing rite and refuge and devotion to itself across the whole reach of recorded time.

The physical scale of the place underwrites its standing. The range is not a ridge but a watershed: the rivers that water the southern provinces — the Seomjin among them — rise on its flanks and run down to the sea, so that the mountain is the source from which the lowland country is fed. Cheonwangbong is the eastern anchor; far to the west the ridge falls to Nogodan, and between them runs a chain of high points — Banyabong, Samsinbong, the Three-Spirits Peak — that together make the long traverse Koreans call simply the ridge-walk. Snow lies late on the heights, and the weather changes by the hour; the summit is bare and wind-scoured where the lower slopes carry deep old forest. It is a mountain that asks something of those who climb it, and that scale of effort has always been part of why the climb counted as a pilgrimage and not a stroll. The VisitKorea record of Cheonwangbong notes the sunrise from the peak among the celebrated sights of the range — a sight that, for the worshippers who once kept the summit shrine, was less a view than an audience with the dawn.

The Holy Mother of the peak

What lords Jirisan is not, in the first place, a god of the kind that rules a single rock or grove. Each Korean peak has its own Sansin, the mountain-lord, most often pictured as a white-bearded elder seated with his tiger; but the great spirit of Jirisan is a goddess, and a mother. She is the Seongmo, the Holy Mother — known more fully as the Cheonwang-halmae, the Grandmother of the Heavenly King, or simply as the Halmae, the Grandmother of the mountain. In the wider folk imagination she shades into Mago, the primordial grandmother-goddess of Korean myth, the great Halmi who is older than the gods and shaped the land itself. On Jirisan she is the mother of the peak, the matriarch from whom the mountain’s whole sacred order descends.

Her seat was the summit. Near the crown of Cheonwangbong, by tradition, stood a Seongmo shrine and a carved stone image of the goddess, and to that image the people came. The written record of the statue is old: an account from 1187 already describes worship at a stone Holy Mother on the heights of Jirisan, which places the cult, in documented form, deep in the Goryeo period — and the rite it records was plainly older than the record. David A. Mason, who has spent decades cataloging the mountain-spirit shrines of Korea, gathers the threads of the Seongmo tradition and sets Jirisan among the few great peaks whose presiding spirit is unambiguously female and maternal — a survival, many scholars hold, of an archaic goddess-and-fertility layer beneath the later, male, elder-and-tiger image of the mountain-god.

The summit ridges of Jirisan, viewed from Cheonwangbong, the Heavenly King Peak. Photo Kma6446, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Around the goddess gathered the layered identifications that a long-worshipped figure always draws to herself. One strong tradition makes the Seongmo none other than the mother of Wang Geon, the founder of the Goryeo dynasty — so that the spirit of the southern mountain becomes the ancestress of a royal house, and the cult of the peak is bound to the legitimacy of a kingdom. Other strands name her Nogo, the Old Woman, or fold her wholly into Mago the world-grandmother. The identifications do not cancel one another. They are the sediment of centuries, each age adding the meaning it needed, all of them resting on the one constant: a great mother holds the mountain, and the mother is honored on its highest ground.

To this goddess the mudang resort. Jirisan is, and has long been, one of the densest shaman landscapes of the southern mainland — its springs, its rock-clefts, its lesser peaks and its great one each the site of rites without number. The kangsinmu, the god-descended shaman of the central and northern style, and the practitioners of the southern hereditary line alike have come to the mountain to serve its spirits; the worship that musok carries — Korea’s indigenous shaman religion, the practice-complex in which the gods descend to ride the shaman in the rite called the gut — finds in Jirisan one of its supreme natural sanctuaries. A mountain whose own goddess is a grandmother is fit ground for the mudang, most of whom are women, and many of whom hold the Seongmo of Jirisan among the highest of the mountain-spirits they petition. The annual homage to the goddess, held by tradition on the third day of the third lunar month, has drawn worshippers to the heights for as long as anyone can trace.

A mountain that holds the whole of Korean religion

What makes Jirisan singular is not that it is holy to one tradition but that it is holy to all of them at once, layered up its flanks like the strata of a cliff. Beneath the goddess of the peak, the mountain carries some of the oldest and greatest temples in Korea.

On the western slopes, in Gurye in South Jeolla, stands Hwaeomsa, by tradition founded in 544 by the monk Yeongi and grown into one of the head temples of the Jogye order, the great trunk of Korean Buddhism. Hwaeomsa holds a cluster of National Treasures — among them the towering Gakhwangjeon hall, a four-lion three-story stone pagoda, and a stone lantern more than six meters high cast in the Unified Silla age. Most of its buildings were burned to the ground in the Japanese invasions of 1592–1598, and the great hall that stands today was completed in 1701, under King Sukjong — a rebuilding, like so much on this mountain, of something the wars had taken.

Hwaeomsa, one of the great Buddhist temples on the slopes of Jirisan, founded by tradition in 544. Photo eimoberg, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

On the southern foothills, above the twin streams that give it its name, stands Ssanggyesa, the Monastery of the Twin Streams, founded in 722 in the reign of the Silla king Seongdeok and renamed in the ninth century by the meditation master Jingam. In its precinct stands a stele to Jingam composed by Choe Chi-won, the great Silla scholar — itself a National Treasure, and a meeting-point of Buddhist devotion with the Confucian literary culture that prized such inscriptions. These are only the two largest of seven major temples on the mountain, with hermitages and lesser halls scattered through every high valley.

And behind nearly every one of those temples, on the slope at its back, stands a small subsidiary shrine, the sanshin-gak, the hall of the mountain-god — a hall in which the Buddhist establishment houses the older spirit of the peak it has built on. This is the layering made visible: the temple takes the mountain, but it does not displace the mountain’s god. It gives the Sansin a roof within its own walls. On Jirisan the arrangement runs the length of the range, the indigenous mountain-spirit and the imported Buddha sharing the same holy ground, each with its hall — and above them both, on the summit, the goddess older than either. The mountain has also drawn the third of the great currents: Confucian scholars came to its valleys to study and to write, reading the wild ground as a place of self-cultivation, and Daoist and recluse traditions found in its remote hollows the kind of hidden, energy-charged terrain that such seekers sought. The mountain holds, on its single great body, the whole of the Korean religious world — the shaman’s goddess, the Buddha’s temple, the Confucian’s retreat, the Daoist’s hidden valley — not in competition but in strata, each resting on what came before.

Refuge and sorrow

A mountain this vast and this rough is, in the plain order of things, a fortress. Its ridges are barriers and its valleys are hiding-places, and across Korean history Jirisan has been the ground that the desperate fled to. Defeated armies, rebels, bandits, and the simply hunted have gone up into its folds; its remoteness made it a place where a person or a movement could vanish. The sanctity of the mountain and its use as a stronghold are not separate facts. A place set apart from the ordinary world is, by the same token, a place beyond the ordinary world’s reach.

That double character turned to grief in the country’s modern division. In the years around the Korean War, the dense forests and high ridges of Jirisan became a base for partisan fighters; North Korean forces moved through the region after 1950, and guerrilla resistance held out in the mountain’s depths until 1955, two years after the armistice. The campaigns that cleared the partisans from the slopes were long and harsh, and the mountain villages caught between the armies suffered as such villages do. The mountain that had always been a refuge became, for a generation, a place of fear and of bitter loss — and the memory of it settled into Korean consciousness, into novel and song, as a landscape of national sorrow. The sanctity of Jirisan, for those who carry that memory, is inseparable from its history: holy ground that has also been ground soaked in the hardest passage of the country’s recent past.

The first park, and the goddess after the fall

On December 29, 1967, the Republic of Korea declared Jirisan its first national park — the inaugural entry in a system that the following year would add Gyeryongsan and in time most of the country’s great mountains. It remains the largest of Korea’s land parks, the whole massif set aside as one protected expanse. The designation gave the mountain, in the language of the modern state, the status it had held by custom for a thousand years and more: a place set apart, not to be built over, kept whole.

The high ridges of Jirisan under winter snow. Photo Lcarrion88, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The goddess of the peak met a harder fate in those same decades. In 1972, in the years when state-backed campaigns against what they called superstition were pressing hardest on the old folk religion, the ancient stone Holy Mother was thrown from the summit of Cheonwangbong into a ravine — the cult that had stood on that ground since before 1187 driven off its own mountaintop. The image was not lost for good. Some fifteen years later a Buddhist monk, Hyebeop, recovered and restored the broken statue, which now rests at the foot of the mountain near Jungsan-ri, no longer on the summit but no longer in the gorge either. The toppling and the recovery together tell the mountain’s modern religious story in miniature: an old maternal cult driven down from the heights by a state that had learned to despise it, and then, when the temper of the age had shifted, gathered up again and given back its dignity — the same revaluation by which musok itself passed, within a single lifetime, from a thing the campaigns tore down to a heritage the nation guards.

Statue of the Jirisan Seongmo, the mountain-mother goddess of Jirisan. Academy of Korean Studies, Korea Open Government License Type 1, via Wikimedia Commons.

The worship did not end with the statue’s fall, and it has not ended now. The rite to the Holy Mother is still kept; shamans still climb to the mountain’s springs and clefts and high places to serve its spirits; the sanshin-gak halls behind the temples still receive their offerings to the mountain-god. Hikers in the hundreds of thousands now come for the sunrise from Cheonwangbong, counted among the celebrated sights of the range, and most of them do not know that the bare summit they crowd onto was for centuries the seat of a goddess. But she is not far. The mountain that taught the dull-witted wisdom, that gathered the spine-force of the whole peninsula and held it, that sheltered the hunted and mourned the slain, still answers to the oldest name its people gave it — the Holy Mother’s mountain, the matriarch’s high ground, sacred long before the first temple was raised on its flank and sacred still.

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