Yongwang

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A boat leaves a harbor on the long indented coast before first light, and someone has already gone down to the water’s edge with a bowl. Rice, wrapped in white paper and tied, is set on the surface and let go; fruit and a little wine follow; the offering drifts out past the breakwater toward the place where the sea floor falls away. The gesture is older than any of the people making it, and it is addressed to a particular person — the lord who keeps a palace down where the light does not reach, and in whose hands lie the calm of the water and the run of the fish and the safe return of the boat. He is the Yongwang, the Dragon King, and along this coast the sea is still his.

The lord of the waters

The dragon, in the East Asian imagination, is not the hoard-keeping reptile of the European bestiary but the master of water — of the rain-cloud and the river and the deep sea, a benevolent power coiled at the source of everything that grows. In the Korean reckoning the dragon, the yong, is overwhelmingly auspicious: a being of Korean dragon lore associated with water and agriculture, a bringer of rain and cloud, credited in the old stories with speech and with the human feelings of devotion and gratitude. Lesser water-serpents, the imugi, are held to live a thousand years in river or cave and may yet rise into true dragonhood by seizing the yeouiju, the wish-fulfilling orb. The full dragon, ascended, lords the element on which both the fisherman and the farmer depend.

Of these dragons the chief is the Yongwang — the Dragon King, the wang of the yong. He rules the sea and the rivers and the rain from a palace beneath the waves called the Yonggung, a hall of jade and coral peopled by the creatures of the ocean and ordered, in the telling, like a royal court: a king down there with his ministers and his retinue, mirroring the kingdoms of dry land. From this undersea seat he disposes of the things the sea disposes of — the weather over the water, the abundance or the emptiness of the nets, the fate of the men who go out on it. The Dragon King is, in the broad East Asian pattern, the dispenser of rain and the divine ruler of the seas, rivers, and water bodies, commanding over all bodies of water; in Korea he is petitioned by name.

He is also frequently multiplied. The single Dragon King resolves, in much of the tradition, into four — one for each of the four seas and the four directions, the Yongwang of the East Sea pre-eminent among Koreans, for whom the eastern water is the open and dangerous one. The figure who reigns over the eastern sea draws to himself the most story. The seventh-century king Munmu of Silla is said to have asked, at his death, to become a great dragon of the East Sea so that he might guard the kingdom against the raiders who came across it; his ashes were given to the water near a rock still called his undersea tomb. The dragon, here, is the form a protecting king chooses to take — the sea itself enlisted as a sovereign’s afterlife.

The single name covers a layering. Three streams run together in the Yongwang. The first is the Chinese dragon-king, ruler of the four seas and the courts beneath them, the rain-bringer of an agrarian empire. The second is the Buddhist naga — the serpent-king of Indian cosmology, the nagaraja, absorbed into Buddhism as a guardian of the teaching and the protector of bodies of water, and rendered, when the scriptures crossed into China, as the “dragon king” by translators who reached for the nearest native figure. The naga who shelters the Buddha and guards the dharma arrived in Korea folded into the dragon already, so that a Yongwang painted on a temple wall is at once the Chinese sea-lord and the Indian serpent-guardian. The Buddhist inheritance is why his image recurs inside the monasteries of a tradition that has no native need of a sea-god: the dragon-king who guards the teaching, and who in the scriptures comes to hear the Buddha preach, has a settled place in the temple’s economy of protecting powers. His hall is often raised over a spring or a well within the compound, the water-lord lodged at the water. The third stream is the oldest and the least documented: the indigenous water-spirits of the Korean peninsula, the powers of the spring and the well and the river-bend that were there before either the Chinese cosmology or the Buddhist scriptures arrived, and into which the imported Dragon King settled as into a prepared place. What the coast worships is the sum.

That sum sits inside the wider order of Korean musok, the indigenous religion, in which the powers of the natural world are each given a lord and each still served. The mountain has its Sansin, the old man with his tiger who lords a particular peak; the northern sky has the Seven Stars of Chilseong, who measure out lifespan and grant children; and the water has the Yongwang. The three are kin in function and are often housed together: at many Buddhist temples a small auxiliary hall, the Samseong-gak or “Hall of the Three Sages,” shelters paintings of the Mountain Spirit, the Seven Stars, and the Dragon King side by side — the indigenous gods given a room within the Buddhist compound, the older religion lodged inside the newer one. Where water rather than mountain or star is the governing presence, the Dragon King gets a hall of his own, the Yongwang-gak, set by a spring or a well or above the shore.

What the sea is asked

The devotion to the Yongwang is the devotion of people whose lives the water governs, and it has two great faces, according to whether the water in question is the sea or the rain.

The first face belongs to the fishing villages — and the Korean coast, long and broken and strung with islands, is a country of fishing villages. The boats go out onto a sea that gives and kills in the same season, and the Dragon King is the one who decides which. To him the villages hold the yongwang-gut, the Dragon-King rite, performed by a shaman — a mudang on the mainland, a simbang on Jeju — to ask for calm seas and full nets and the safe return of the boats. The shape of the rite is consistent along the coast even where its details differ. The community gathers at the shore; offerings are laid out for the god — rice, fruit, dried fish, wine, set out at the water’s edge; the shaman, in the great robes of the office, calls the Dragon King and the other gods of the sea, conveys to them the village’s petitions, and brings back their answer. Rice wrapped in paper, the yonggung-bap, is given to the water; a bundle of straw may be lit and floated out bearing food to draw off the malevolent dead; and at the close a small boat of straw, loaded with offerings, is launched and let go toward the open sea — the village’s request carried out to the palace beneath it. The catch the boats bring back, and the men they bring back with it, are understood to come by the king’s leave.

The second face belongs to the dry fields. The same lord who runs the sea runs the rain, and when the sky shuts and the rice cannot be transplanted, it is the Yongwang to whom the farmers turn. The dragon’s command over cloud and downpour makes him the natural object of the rain-prayer, the giuje; offerings are made at the dragon-haunted pools and the river-bends and the wells where the water-spirit is held to live, in the hope that the withholding power will relent. The fisherman fears too much water and the farmer too little, and they petition the same king for opposite mercies — which is exactly the measure of how completely the element, in all its moods, is gathered into one hands.

Between the shaman’s great public ceremony and the farmer’s seasonal plea lies a third and quieter register: the private offering. A household with a boat, a woman with a husband or a son at sea, keeps the Dragon King at the shore-shrine and at the home’s own small rites — a bowl set out, a few words, on the days the year marks for it. The devotion does not require the mudang to be present. It can be the whole liturgy of one person at the edge of the water before dawn, which is where the worship began and where, stripped of everything else, it still works. The shaman’s drum and the lone bowl are two scales of the same act.

A mudang performing a gut in rural Korea, October 2007 — the shaman’s rite by which the gods are called and petitioned. Photo by ReSearcher, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nowhere is the sea-devotion denser than on the southern island of Jeju, where the surrounding water is the whole horizon and the gods are reckoned in the thousands. There the Yongwang stands close to the women who make their living in his element: the haenyeo, the diving women who go down without air to harvest abalone and conch and seaweed from the sea floor, holding a single breath and surfacing with the long whistling exhalation that is the signature sound of the Jeju coast. The diver enters the Dragon King’s house each working day, and the rites that ask his protection are in large part the divers’ rites; UNESCO, inscribing the culture of the Jeju haenyeo on its heritage list in 2016, recorded a community whose ranks had fallen from some 23,000 women at their 1960s peak to roughly 4,000, many of them past seventy and still diving. Their shamanic petitions to the sea-gods are part of what the listing was meant to keep.

A Jeju haenyeo, one of the women divers who harvest the sea floor without breathing apparatus. Photo by karendotcom127, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The fullest surviving form of the Jeju sea-rite is the one the world now knows by name. At the Chilmeoridang shrine in Jeju City the community holds, in the second lunar month, the Yeongdeunggut — a rite of the simbang that welcomes Grandmother Yeongdeung, the goddess of the winds who is held to visit the island in that month, together with the Dragon King and the mountain gods, and asks of them a calm sea, a full catch, and an abundant harvest. The Jeju Chilmeoridang Yeongdeunggut comes in two movements a fortnight apart: a Welcome Rite that calls the gods, prays for the catch, and entertains the ancestral powers with a three-act play, and a Farewell Rite that offers them drink and rice cake, welcomes the Dragon King, tells the year’s fortune by the casting of millet seeds, and ends with the village’s senior men launching a straw boat into the sea. It is sustained, above all, by the haenyeo and the ship-owners, who prepare the food and make the offerings. UNESCO inscribed it on its Representative List in 2009 — a state document affirming, in its own register, what the island had been doing at the shore for centuries.

The sea still petitioned

The striking fact about the Dragon King is how little he has receded. The history that bore down on the Korean indigenous religion — the contempt of the Confucian-literate Joseon elite, who ranked the shaman among the low; the colonial period; the anti-superstition drives of the 1970s modernization campaigns, which pulled down shrines as relics of a backwardness to be left behind — pressed on the yongwang-gut as on every other rite. And yet along the coasts and on the islands the sea is still asked, in his name, for the things only the sea can give. Fishing communities still hold the yongwangje, the Dragon-King rite, before the boats go out; the rain-prayer is remembered where it is needed; the bowl is still set on the water before dawn. The durability is not nostalgia. It is the persistence of a worship whose object — the danger and the bounty of the water — has not gone anywhere.

What has shifted is the state’s stance. The very rites the modernizers treated as embarrassment are now the rites the nation enrolls as heritage and protects by designation; the Yeongdeunggut that a 1970s official might have discouraged is the Yeongdeunggut on the UNESCO list. The Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture, compiled by the National Folk Museum, sets out the Dragon King’s lore in a reference work of the state — the same state that once let his shrines fall. A devotion despised for a century as superstition has been re-described, without anyone at the shore changing what they do, as culture worth keeping.

Much of what can be said in detail about the living rite, it should be marked, was set down by outside observers. The systematic recording of Korean shaman practice began under colonial-era ethnography and continued with later Korean and Western scholars who attended the gut and transcribed the shaman-songs; the shore-rite of a fishing village rarely wrote itself down. The lore reaches the page at one remove from the people who keep it, and the careful reader holds the description and the thing described a little apart. What is not in doubt is the continuity of the act. The men still leave before light, and someone still goes to the water with a bowl.

The most legible thing about the Yongwang, in the end, is the way three histories have laid down in a single figure without erasing one another. The Chinese sea-lord, the Buddhist naga, and the old Korean water-spirit are all present in the same dragon, and the coast that prays to him does not need to separate them; the worshipper at the shore is addressing the whole accreted being at once. He belongs, that way, to the larger Korean habit of giving each great power of the natural world its lord and continuing to serve it — the mountain its spirit, the stars their seven kings, the sea its king beneath the waves. The land’s powers are not abstractions in this world but persons with palaces and courts, reachable by offering and by the shaman’s rite. The Dragon King is the one among them whose house a worshipper can stand at the edge of, with a bowl, and watch the offering carried out toward.

A museum depiction of a Jeju gut, a shaman ritual to placate and petition the spirits — the kind of rite by which the Dragon King is welcomed at the shore. Photo by karendotcom127, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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