Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

CHAPTER XXXVII.

RELIGION.

A careful study of the common names applied to the mountains, rivers, valleys, caves, and other natural features of the soil and landscape of any country will lay bare many of the primitive or hidden beliefs of a people. No words are more ancient than the aboriginal names given to the natural features of a country amid which the childhood of a nation has been spent. With changing customs, civilization, or religion, these names still hold their place, reflecting the ancient, and often modified, or even vanished, faith.

Even a casual examination of the mountain, river, and other local names of places in Corea will give one a tolerably clear outline of the beliefs once fully held by the ancient dwellers of this peninsula. Against the tenets and influences of Buddhism these doctrines have held their sway over the minds of the people and are still the most deeply-seated of their beliefs. The statements of ancient Chinese, and later of Japanese writers, of foreign castaways, and of the French missionaries all concur in showing us that Shamanism is the basis of the Corean’s, and especially the northern Corean’s, faith. In the first historic accounts of Fuyu, Kokorai, and the Sam-han, we find the worship of the spirits of heaven and earth, and of the invisible powers of the air, of nature, the guardian genii of hills and rivers, of the soil and grain, of caves, and even of the tiger. They worshipped especially the morning-star, and offered sacrifice of oxen to heaven. From such scanty notices of early Corea, especially of the northern parts, we may form some idea of the cultus of the people before Buddhism was introduced. From the reports of recent witnesses, Dutch, Japanese, and French, and the evidence of language, we incline to the belief that the fibres of Corean superstition and the actual religion of the people of to-day have not radically changed during twenty centuries, in spite of Buddhism. The worship of the spirits of heaven and earth, of mountains and rivers and caves, of the [[327]]morning star, is still reflected in the names of these natural objects and still continues, in due form, as of old, along with the sacrifices of sheep and oxen.

The god of the hills is, perhaps, the most popular deity. The people make it a point to go out and worship him at least once a year, making their pious trip a picnic, and, as of old, mixing their eating and drinking with their religion. Thus they combine piety and pleasure, very much as Americans unite sea-bathing and sanctification, croquet and camp-meeting holiness, by the ocean or in groves. On mountain tops, which pilgrims climb to make a visit for religious merit, may often be seen a pile of stones called siong-wang-tang, dedicated to the god of the mountain. The pilgrims carry a pebble from the foot of the mountain to the top. These pilgrims are among those held in reputation for piety.

The other popular gods are very numerous. The mok-sin, the genii of the trees, the god of rain and of the harvest, are all propitiated, but the robust Corean, blessed with a good appetite, especially honors Cho-an-nim, the tutelary genius of the kitchen. To a Corean, the air is far from being empty. It is thickly inhabited with spirits and invisible creatures. Some of these figments of imagination, and the additional powers for good and evil, which the Corean attributes to animals of flesh and blood, are treated of in a former chapter on Mythical Zoölogy. Even the breezes are the breath of spirits, and “a devil’s wind” is a tempest raised by a demon intent on mischief. When a person falls dead suddenly, heart-disease is not thought of; he has been struck by a devil’s arrow. There are not wanting sorcerers who seek to obtain supernatural force by magic, which they use against their enemies or for hire, direct the spirits to wreak malignity against the enemy of him who fees them. These sorcerers are social outcasts, and reckoned the lowest of humanity.

The unlucky days are three in each month, the figure of ill-omen being five. They are the fifth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth. On all extraordinary occasions there are sacrifices, ceremonies, and prayers, accompanied with tumultuous celebration by the populace. The chief sacrifices are to heaven, earth, and to the King or Emperor of Heaven[1] (Shang Ti of the Chinese). [[328]]

The various superstitions concerning the direction of evil, the auspicious or the ill-omened lay of the land, the site for the building of a house, or the erection of a tomb, will be well understood by those who know the meaning of the Chinese term, Fung Shuy, or the Corean Pung-siu. This system of superstition has not only its millions of believers, but also its priests or professors, who live by their expertness and magnify their calling. The native vocabulary relating to these pretenders and all their works is very profuse. Among the common sights in Corea are little mounds raised on eligible, propitious places, in which a pole is planted, from which little bells or cymbals are hung. These jingled by the breeze are supposed to propitiate the good spirits and to ward off the noxious influences of the demons. The same idea is expressed in the festoons of wind-bells strung on their pagodas and temples. Pung-siu means literally “wind and water,” but in a broad sense is a rude cyclopædia of ideas relating to nature, and bears nearly the same relation to natural philosophy as astrology does to astronomy. Its ideas color every-day speech, besides having a rich terminology for the advanced student of its mysteries.

Upon this system, and perhaps nearly coeval in origin with it, is the cult of ancestral worship which has existed in Chinese Asia from unrecorded time. Confucius found it in his day and made it the basis of his teachings, as it had already been of the religious and ancient documents of which he was the editor.

The Corean cult of ancestor-worship seems to present no features which are radically distinct from the Chinese. Public celebrations are offered at stated times to ancestors, and in every well-to-do house will be found the gilt and black tablets inscribed with the names of the departed. Before these tablets the smoke of incense and sacrifice arises daily. In the temple also are rooms for the preservation of duplicates of the tablets in the private houses for greater safety. Like the iron atoms in his blood, the belief in ancestral piety and worship is wrought into the Corean’s soul. The Christian missionaries meet with no greater obstacle to their tenets and progress than this practice. It is the source, even among their most genuine converts, of more scandals, lapses, and renunciations, than are brought about by all other causes.