The Koreans

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A single household on the southern peninsula keeps three calendars at once. In the cold weeks after the lunar new year the family sets a table for the dead — rice and soup and wine arranged by a fixed grammar, the men bowing in order of seniority before the spirit-tablets of their fathers. In the warm months some of them climb a forested ridge to a temple, leave their shoes at the hall, and bow again, this time to the Buddha. And when a child will not recover, or a business fails, or a death has left the house unquiet, they send for a woman who is not a priest of any of these things — who comes with drum and bell and bright robes, and lets the gods speak through her body. None of the three errands cancels the others. The Koreans, across a long history on one peninsula, built a religious world in which the literate faiths were laid over an older one without erasing it, each kept in its own office, and a person could move among them without contradiction.

A people of one ancestry

The Koreans are the people of the Korean peninsula and its islands, together with a wide diaspora — roughly eighty million across the two Korean states and abroad, in China, the Americas, Japan, and Central Asia. They speak one language, hold to a long sense of common descent, and name themselves the han minjok, the one people or one nation, a phrase that carries the weight of centuries lived on a single body of land bounded by sea and by the great mountains of the north.

That sense of one ancestry has a charter. In the language of the foundation story, the Koreans are the children of Dangun, the heaven-descended founder who established the first kingdom of Gojoseon. The fullest telling survives in the Samguk Yusa, the “Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms,” compiled by the Buddhist monk Iryeon (1206–1289) in the late thirteenth century, and in the nearly contemporary Jewang Ungi of 1287 — both, as the textual record makes clear, set down more than three thousand years after the events they relate, by literate men working in a Buddhist and Confucian world. In that telling the heavenly king Hwanin sends his son Hwanung down to a peak with three thousand spirits and the powers of wind, rain, and cloud, to rule the world of men under the charge of hongik ingan — to broadly benefit all mankind. A bear and a tiger beg to become human; the bear, enduring a long ordeal in a cave on mugwort and garlic, becomes the woman Ungnyeo, and from her union with Hwanung is born Dangun, who founds the kingdom and, after a long reign, withdraws into a mountain to become its god. The traditional date of that founding, 2333 BCE, and the reign of many centuries are tradition-internal reckonings, not the dated history of the kingdom of Gojoseon that archaeology and the Chinese annals record. Held as charter rather than chronicle, the story gives the people a single origin: a nation descended from heaven, rooted in a mountain, born of the bear who endured.

The mountain at the center of that story is no accident. The peninsula is some seventy percent mountain, and the oldest layer of Korean religion is the worship of those mountains and the spirits that hold them. Each significant peak has its lord, the sansin, the mountain-god, pictured in the shrine-paintings as a white-bearded elder seated against the rocks with a tiger at his side. The greatest of the mountains, Baekdu on the northern border, is the ancestral peak from which, in the myth, the line descends. To this substratum belong also the household gods — the guardian of the house-frame, the spirit of the kitchen hearth, the protectors of gate and storehouse and even the privy — and above them the powers of sky and sea and the seven stars of the northern Dipper. This is musok, the Korean folk religion, and it is the one tradition that the Koreans did not import. It arrived with the first people of the peninsula and has never since been wholly absent.

Sansin, the mountain-god, with his tiger: a nineteenth-century Joseon panel painting, ink and color on cotton. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.2000.15.12); public domain.

The layered house

Onto this indigenous ground the literate religions arrived in turn, and the distinctive thing about Korean religion is the manner of their arrival: each was laid over what lay beneath without displacing it, the way a house gains rooms without tearing down its foundation.

Buddhism came first, from the continent in the fourth century — to the northern kingdom of Goguryeo in 372, when the monk Sundo was sent from the Former Qin to the court of King Sosurim, and to the southern kingdoms soon after. It came as part of the apparatus of a literate, centralized court, and over the following centuries it was made thoroughly native: the Buddhism of Silla became a center of Mahayana thought that the wider East Asian world read back. Yet Buddhism did not arrive into empty country. Where it built its temples in the mountains it had to come to terms with the lords already there, and the terms it reached are written into the architecture. Behind very nearly every Korean Buddhist temple stands a small subsidiary hall, the sansin-gak, the shrine of the mountain-god, and often beside it a chilseong-gak for the seven stars of the Dipper — gods of the older and the Daoist orders, given a room within the Buddhist compound. The mountain spirit keeps his hall behind the Buddha’s, and the worshipper who has bowed in the main hall climbs a little higher to bow to him as well.

Confucianism, present from early on, became under the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897) the framework of the state and of the family. The dynasty took Neo-Confucianism as its orthodoxy and remade Korean public life in its image: the civil examinations, the lineage organized around the eldest male line, the household ordered by filial piety and seniority. Its most enduring deposit in ordinary life is the ancestral rite. To keep the dead is a Confucian duty, and the Koreans keep them with care — the charye, the holiday rites offered at the lunar new year and at the autumn Chuseok, and the gijesa on the anniversary of a death, the table set with its ordered dishes and the descendants bowing in their ranks. This is jesa, and it is not worship of a god but the continued service of the family’s own dead, who remain in some measure present and owed. Confucianism in Korea governed the relations of the living and the dead more than it spoke of heaven; it was less a faith one believed than an order one inhabited.

Daoist and geomantic lore threaded through both. The seven stars of the Dipper, lords of lifespan and of children, are a Daoist inheritance that passed into the Buddhist temple-yard and into the shaman’s pantheon alike; the reading of the land for the flow of its vital force, the siting of graves and houses and capitals by the lie of the mountains and the water, shaped where the Koreans built and buried. No Daoist church ever established itself as an institution on the peninsula, but the Daoist sense of the cosmos — of qi, of the stars, of the auspicious and inauspicious arrangement of the world — is everywhere diffused through the other traditions.

Beneath all of these the indigenous current ran on. The Joseon state, in its Confucian rigor, ranked the shaman among the low and barred her from the capital; the literate despised her rites as the credulity of women and the unlettered. And yet the rites went on, in the villages and the back rooms and the foothill shrines, because the literate faiths had left a province unattended. Buddhism offered release across many lives; Confucianism offered an order for this one. Neither answered the urgent present need — the sudden sickness, the run of bad luck, the death that would not settle, the dead who came back hungry. For that the Koreans kept the shaman.

The shaman’s office

That figure is the mudang, most often a woman, who mediates between the living and the gods. There are, in the standard account, two roads into the calling. Across the north and center the kangsinmu, the god-descended shaman, is seized by the spirits in an affliction — the sinbyeong, the “spirit sickness,” a wasting illness no medicine cures, which lifts only when the sufferer accepts the god and is initiated. Across the south the office ran in hereditary lines, the sesumu, the craft passed within a family. On Jeju the practitioner is called the simbang; a male shaman is a baksu. The rite the mudang performs is the gut, an offering of song, dance, drumming, and trance by which the gods are invited to descend, to feast, to speak through the shaman’s mouth, and to set right what has gone wrong — a naerim-gut to initiate a new shaman, a yongwang-gut to the Dragon King for a safe and full catch, a ssitgim-gut to wash and release the dead. Among the great shaman narratives sung in these rites is the story of Princess Bari, the abandoned seventh daughter who journeys to the land of the dead to fetch the medicine that will save her parents and becomes thereby the patron of the shamans who guide souls across.

A mudang in shamanic dance, from the genre album of Shin Yun-bok (Hyewon, 1758–early 19th c.), Joseon dynasty. Kansong Museum of Art, Seoul; public domain.

The deep grammar of the household, then, sorted the traditions by office. One family across a single year might keep the Confucian ancestor-rite at its proper seasons, climb to a Buddhist temple to pray for a son or to commemorate a death, and call a mudang when crisis broke — and feel no strain in any of it, because the three were not asked to agree. They were asked to do different work. The Buddha governed the long passage of death and rebirth and the soul’s ultimate release; Confucius governed the order of the family and the service of its dead; the shaman governed the turbulent present, the gods and ghosts who acted now. The Koreans did not reconcile their religions into a single system. They kept them in their separate rooms.

Survival and recasting

That layered world has come through more in the last century and a half than in the thousand years before it, and it has not come through unchanged.

Christianity arrived late and grew fast. Catholic practice took hold from the late eighteenth century, Protestant missions from the 1880s, and in the second half of the twentieth century the churches surged in the South: by the 2015 census something like a quarter of South Koreans were Christian, more than the Buddhists, in one of the most successful Christian expansions of the modern era. The new faith was the one tradition that would not take its place quietly among the others. Protestant practice in particular refuses the ancestral rite as idolatry of the dead and condemns the shaman’s gut outright, and so for the first time the layered house met a tenant that would not share its rooms.

The North took the opposite road. After the 1945 division and the war that followed, the northern state set itself against religion as such; organized faith was suppressed, the temples emptied or turned to other use, and the public practice of the old traditions driven out of sight. The peninsula that had held a single religious world now held two divergent ones, the South plural and contending, the North officially without gods.

The diaspora carried the layering abroad and reweighted it. The Koreans of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dispersals — the laborers and the displaced who settled in Manchuria and the Russian Far East, the families deported under Soviet order to Central Asia, the migrants to Hawaii and the American mainland and to Japan — took with them the same braided inheritance, though the strands came out in different proportions on different soil. In the immigrant congregations of North America the Korean church became the center of communal life, Christianity carrying the language and the memory of home as much as the creed; among the Goryeo-saram of Central Asia, severed from temple and shrine, the ancestral rite and the holiday foods outlasted the doctrines around them. The mountain-gods do not travel well — they are tied to their peaks — but the keeping of the dead, and the recourse to the shaman, followed the people where they went.

Even in the South the old religion was nearly campaigned out of existence. Under the modernization drives of the 1970s, the New Community Movement — the Saemaul campaign — set out to clear away what it called misin, superstition; shrines were pulled down, the spirit-trees cut, the shamans harassed as relics of a backward past. It was the old Confucian and colonial contempt in a new, developmental key. What saved the tradition was a reversal of judgment. From the late 1970s the very practices that had been despised were reclaimed as national heritage — the gut studied by Korean and foreign scholars as a living art, taken up by the minjung democracy movement as an authentic voice of the people, designated under the law as Important Intangible Cultural Property and entrusted to named bearers. In 2009 UNESCO inscribed the Jeju Chilmeoridang Yeongdeunggut — a village shaman-rite to the wind goddess, the Dragon King, and the mountain gods — on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The shaman who had been ranked among the low became a custodian of the nation’s oldest soul.

A mudang conducting a gut, rural Korea, 2007. Photograph by ReSearcher; CC BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons.

The Dangun myth and the old folk religion served, through all of this, as marks of a continuous identity across every upheaval. The recovery of the foundation story as a national charter, the keeping of Gaecheonjeol, the “opening of heaven” commemorated as a national day, the standing of the mountain-gods and the shaman’s rite as heritage rather than embarrassment — these gave a people broken by colonization, war, and partition a thread of descent that ran beneath the breaks. A century of Japanese rule, a war that gutted the peninsula, a border that severed it, and a headlong industrialization that emptied the villages did not erase the indigenous current. The mountain-god still keeps his hall behind the temple; the household still sets the table for its dead; the drum still sounds in the gut when the present grows unquiet. Across some eighty million people in two states and a far diaspora, beneath the Buddha and the sage and the cross, the oldest layer holds — the one religion the Koreans never had to be given, because it was theirs before the others came.

→ Related: The Mudang · The Jeju Islanders · Dangun · Hwanung · Sansin · Chilseong · Yongwang · Mani San Chamseongdan · Taebaeksan · Jirisan · Gyeryongsan · Gojoseon · Baekdu Mountain · Korean Silla Buddhism · Buddhism · Confucianism · Taoism · Pure Land Buddhism · Reincarnation · Soul · Divination