Sansin

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Walk up behind almost any Buddhist temple in Korea, past the great gilded hall where the Buddha sits in the smoke of incense, and the path keeps climbing. Where it ends, set against the slope and often the highest-standing roof on the grounds, is a small hall scarcely larger than a tool-shed. Inside hangs a painting: an old man with a long white beard, seated at his ease beneath a red pine, a tiger crouched against his knee or curled beneath his open hand. He is the lord of the mountain. The Buddha below is a guest of his hill. The monks who chant in the great hall come up here too, with rice wine and fruit, to pay him what is owed.

This is the sansin — the mountain-god, the spirit of the high places, the most widespread and the most enduring of the gods of Korea. He is older than the imported faiths and was never displaced by any of them. He is also, strictly, not one god but many: there is a sansin for every peak.

The lord of each height

The word sansin (산신; 山神) means simply “mountain-god,” and in the native religious world of Korea — the practice-complex usually called musok — the mountain is not a backdrop to divinity but a body of it. Korea is a country of mountains, ridge folded against ridge across nearly the whole peninsula, and each significant height has its own resident lord. The sansin of one mountain is not the sansin of the next. There is no single mountain-god ruling all summits from a throne; there is, rather, a great dispersed company of them, each sovereign over his own ground, each addressed by the villages that live in his shadow and the travelers who must cross his pass.

The figure who lords the height is pictured, more often than not, as a serene old man. The standard icon — repeated on a thousand shrine walls with only local variation — shows him white-bearded and unhurried, in the robes of a Confucian scholar or a king, seated against the mountain beneath a Korean red pine. He holds a long staff, or a fan of crane feathers, the emblems of unhurried age and of a being who has all of time. A boy attendant may stand near, bearing fruit or a peach. And always, in the canonical painting, there is the tiger.

The tiger is the sansin’s servant and his messenger, the agent through whom the mountain acts upon the world below. In the old understanding the tiger is the mountain’s own roving power, the thing that comes down from the height to take a beast or to test a man; and to honor the sansin is, in part, to keep that power benign. The peninsula was tiger country within living memory, and the great cat was the one creature a villager might meet on the upper paths that could end him in an instant — so the animal that made the mountain dangerous became the animal that proved the mountain had a master. The relation runs deep enough that the two figures bleed into each other. In many paintings the tiger is the spirit’s mount or his familiar; in some the tiger is the sansin, the old man and the great cat two faces of one mountain. The peninsula’s folk art is full of the tiger for this reason — comic, fierce, magpie-flanked — because the tiger was the most immediate shape the mountain’s god could take.

Not every mountain-lord is male. On a number of the most important peaks the sansin is a goddess — a Sanshin-halmoni, a “mountain-grandmother,” the female sovereign of the height. The great southern massif of Jirisan is ruled by such a one, the Seongmo or “Holy Mother,” the Cheonwang-halmae of its summit, a goddess old enough that medieval kings traced their own descent to her. Scholars of the tradition argue that the female form is in fact the older one — that the mountain-mother is the original sansin, and that the white-bearded patriarch of the temple paintings is a later overlay, the goddess masculinized as the Confucian centuries pressed the language of male authority over every sacred thing. The two forms coexist still. There are grandfather-mountains and grandmother-mountains, and which a peak carries is a matter of its own long memory.

Mountain Spirit (Sanshin), Korean shrine painting, 19th century. Brooklyn Museum, no known copyright restrictions (public domain).

At the root, and never uprooted

To understand the standing of the sansin one has to see how far down he goes. He sits at the root of the religious life of the peninsula, beneath the faiths that came from outside it. When Buddhism arrived from China in the fourth century, and when the Confucian order followed it into the bones of the state, neither found an empty country. They found a land already full of gods, and at the head of the local gods stood the lord of the mountain. What is remarkable is that neither incomer abolished him. They absorbed him.

The clearest sign of this is architectural. Across the Buddhist temples of Korea — and this is a feature peculiar to Korea, found in no other Buddhist country — there stands behind the main sanctuary a small separate hall built for the native mountain-god. It is the sansin-gak (산신각), the “mountain-spirit pavilion.” It is set apart from the Buddhist halls and, characteristically, placed behind them and higher up the slope, so that the mountain’s own lord looks down on the imported worship as the mountain itself towers over the roofs. Often the sansin shares this back hall with two companions in a single samseong-gak, the “three-saint pavilion”: the sansin, the seven stars of the Dipper (Chilseong, drawn out of Daoist sky-lore), and the lone arhat Dokseong. The three together are a compressed history of Korean religion — the native mountain, the borrowed Daoist heaven, and the Buddhist saint, all served on the same ground at the temple’s edge.

In Buddhist terms the mountain-god was reclassified as a dharmapala, a protector of the Teaching — a courteous demotion that let the monks keep him without admitting a rival to the Buddha. But the courtesy ran both ways, for the practice tells a different story than the theology. At many temples the monks themselves climb to the sansin-gak with offerings, and the offerings are not the bloodless incense of the Buddha-hall alone. To the candles and the water and the fruit is added, characteristically, a bowl of makgeolli, the cloudy unfiltered rice wine of the countryside — a country god’s drink, set before a country god. The Buddha is offered what a Buddha is offered. The mountain is offered what the mountain has always wanted. On the same grounds, on the same morning, the foreign Buddha and the native height are both served, each in his own manner, and the monk sees no contradiction in it. This is the deep grammar of the layered religious world of the Koreans: the new faith does not erase the old god; it builds him a hall and goes on feeding him.

The mountain-spirit hall at Beomeosa temple, Busan, set apart from the main Buddhist sanctuary. Photo by Steve46814, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The founder dissolved into the mountain

There is one more reason the mountain-god sits where he does, and it reaches to the foundation of the country itself. The oldest written account of Korea’s origin — preserved in the Samguk Yusa, the “Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms,” compiled by the Buddhist monk Iryeon late in the thirteenth century — tells of Dangun, the first king, born of the heaven-descended Hwanung and a she-bear made woman, who founds the first kingdom of Gojoseon. The detail that matters here is how the story ends. Dangun does not die in the ordinary way. After a reign of unimaginable length he withdraws into the mountain at Asadal and becomes a sansin — the founder of the nation dissolved, at the close of his rule, into a mountain-god.

It is a closing move with no small consequence. The most local and most lasting of divinities — the lord of a particular hill, the kind of god a single village keeps — is also the form the national founder takes when he passes out of history. The line runs both ways. Some traditions hold that the whole order of mountain-gods descends from Dangun; that every white-bearded sansin on every temple wall is, in some sense, the first king repeated across the peninsula’s thousand peaks. Whether one reads it that way or not, the structure is unmistakable. At the very bottom of the Korean religious imagination, holding up everything later, is a god who is at once the most particular thing in the landscape — this mountain, that ridge — and the founder of the people. The mountain is where the nation begins and where its first king returns.

That Dangun’s reign is reckoned in the tradition at a millennium and a half, and his accession placed at 2333 BCE, belongs to the sacred chronology of the founding story rather than to dated history; the historicity of Gojoseon and the figure of its founder are matters of long scholarly debate. What is not in question is the religious fact the story encodes: that the mountain-god stands at the origin, older than every later faith that came to be served beside him.

The rite on the mountain

The sansin is not a god of paintings only. He is fed. The sansin-je (산신제), the mountain-spirit rite, is among the most widespread of Korean communal observances, kept in villages across the peninsula and at temples through the year. In its village form it is a winter rite of the new year: a community climbs to the sansin-dan, the mountain-altar on the height behind the settlement — often in the first days of the lunar year, between the third day and the great full moon of Daeboreum — to set offerings before the lord of the hill and ask his protection over the year’s planting, its herds, its children, and its dead.

The rite is organized with care. A village will choose its officiants in advance — the jegwan who presides, the chukgwan who reads the invocation, the hwaju who prepares the food — and these are chosen for ritual cleanness, a household free of recent death or pollution, so that the offering reaches the mountain unspoiled. For days before the rite the chosen households keep themselves apart; a rope hung with paper or pine is strung at their gates and at the path to the altar to mark the ground as set aside, and the unclean are kept from crossing it. The mountain is exacting about what comes near it. An offering made carelessly is worse than none, for it risks turning the lord of the height from a protector into an affliction. Liquor is poured, the invocation read, the god asked; and afterward the village shares the offering food in a common feast, the mountain’s blessing distributed through the bodies of the people who climbed to ask for it. The expense is borne in common. The whole settlement, for that day, is the mountain’s congregation.

Beside this communal rite runs the work of the mudang, the shaman, for the sansin is a god of the mudang as much as of the village elder. Many a shaman’s pantheon seats the mountain-god among its high powers, and a gut — the shaman’s full ritual of song, dance, and possession — may call the sansin down to speak and to bless. The same god, then, is served three ways at once: by the Buddhist monk at the sansin-gak with his bowl of rice wine, by the village officiant at the winter altar, and by the shaman in the drumming heat of the gut. Three liturgies, one mountain. Each tradition takes the lord of the height into its own hands and honors him in its own grammar, and the god answers to all of them.

The three-saint hall at Gapsa temple, where the native mountain-god is enshrined beside the Dipper-spirit and the lone arhat. Photo by the Korea Heritage Service, KOGL Type 1 / public domain.

What no later faith could replace

The history of religion in Korea is a history of imported orthodoxies, each in turn the religion of the state. Buddhism rose with the Three Kingdoms and flowered under Goryeo; Confucianism became the iron spine of the long Joseon dynasty, which held the shaman in open contempt and ranked her among the lowest of its people. Under Japanese colonial rule the native practices were surveyed, regulated, and pressed. And in the modernizing drive of the 1970s, the Saemaul (“New Village”) campaigns took the old folk worship as an obstacle to progress and moved against its shrines and rites by name. Through every one of these reversals — through the contempt of the Confucian magistrate and the colonial administrator and the modern reformer alike — the mountain-god did not go.

He did not go because he was never the property of any one institution to suppress. The Confucian magistrate who despised the shaman might still climb the local mountain at the new year, in his own decorous manner, to offer at its altar; the monk kept the sansin-gak; the shaman kept her god; and the village kept its rite. Spread across a thousand peaks and three liturgies, with no central temple to raze and no clergy to disband, the mountain-god was too diffuse to be killed and too useful to be abandoned. The very pervasiveness that made him hard to define made him impossible to remove.

What was once called superstition by those who ruled is now reckoned heritage by the state that descends from them. The communal mountain rites and the shaman’s gut are studied, recorded, and in cases protected as intangible cultural property; the great mountains where the sansin is most strongly felt — Jirisan named a national park in 1967, Gyeryongsan in 1968 — are guarded ground. The white-bearded elder with his tiger and his pine still hangs in the hall behind the temple, and the rice wine is still poured. He has outlasted every faith that came to rule beside him, and the reason is written into his nature: the mountains do not move, and the god is the mountain. As long as the peaks stand over the villages and the temples climb their slopes, the lord of the height has somewhere to be — which is to say, everywhere the land rises, the oldest god of Korea is at home.

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