Korean Mythology

Korea has no creation scripture. The Samguk Sagi and the Samguk Yusa are dynastic histories; when the Samguk Yusa opens its Dangun entry, heaven and earth are already standing, and what follows is the founding of a state, not the beginning of a world. The creation narratives survive only in the oral chants of shamans, and those chants were not written down until folklorists recorded them in the twentieth century: the Cheonjiwang Bonpuri of Jeju Island, the fullest of them, and the Changsega of Hamhung on the mainland. Nothing older exists in writing, and the oral tradition behind them cannot be dated.

Recitations differ from shaman to shaman. Whether the surplus sun and moon are shot out of the sky or taken apart and reused (in the Changsega, Mireuk breaks up the spare sun and moon and makes the stars from them, one moon becoming the Northern and Southern Dippers), which brother draws the bow, whether the episode of the wicked rich man Sumyeongjangja appears at all and how he is punished, what the brothers compete at and in what order: none of this is fixed. Where the shooting belongs in the sequence is unsettled as well. The order below is the one in which Cheonjiwang hands his sons a bow and the surplus lights come down there and then; in other recitations nothing is shot until Sobyeolwang has swapped the flower pots, taken the living world, and found that he cannot hold down a sky with two suns and two moons in it, so that the shooting becomes the first of the repairs his brother comes down to make. The sequence below follows the common Jeju order and takes the majority reading where versions disagree, rather than pretending a single authoritative text exists.

The mainland Changsega tells the same story with different actors. Mireuk, the Buddhist Maitreya, parts heaven from earth and raises copper pillars at the four corners of the world; Seokga, Shakyamuni, takes the world of the living from him by the same trick, swapping the flowers while his rival sleeps. The names are Buddhist, the plot is all but identical to the Jeju brothers', and scholars generally read them as one narrative laid down in different regions. The zi and chou formula that dates the opening of the sky in the Jeju chant is likewise imported, from the Chinese cosmology of Shao Yong's line. The outer layers are visible; how old the layer underneath them is cannot be told.

Human origins are simply missing. In the Jeju chant people are already there when Cheonjiwang comes down, and the text never says where the first ones came from. The stage below therefore borrows the gold and silver worms of the Hamhung Changsega and says so in the body text. It is a splice across regions, not something the Jeju chant contains.

The Dangun story has rival versions too. The Samguk Yusa, quoting the lost Gogi, has Hwanung father Dangun on the bear-woman. The Jewang Ungi, quoting a different lost source, has Hwanung give a drug to his granddaughter to make her human and marry her to the god of the sandalwood tree, with no bear, no tiger, no cave and no mugwort. Iryeon dates the founding to the fiftieth year of the reign of Yao, a gyeongin year, then notes himself that Yao's first year was a mujin year, which would make the fiftieth a jeongsa year and not gyeongin, and that he doubts the figure. The date of 2333 BCE now in circulation was calculated by later historians from the cycle; it is not in the Samguk Yusa.

Two other bodies of story are left out. The Jeju legend of Seolmundae Halmang explains the island rather than the cosmos: she carried earth in her skirt to heap up Mount Halla, and the soil that fell through the holes in it became the three hundred-odd volcanic cones scattered over Jeju. It is legend, not chant. The folktale of the brother and sister who became the sun and the moon is a separate tradition with its own account of the two lights. And once the world of the dead falls to Daebyeolwang, it is a further Jeju chant, the Chasa Bonpuri, that says who fetches the souls to it: Gangnim, sent below to bring King Yeomna up to the world of the living, and kept on afterwards as the officer who comes for the dying. The Bari Gongju, the chant of the cast-out seventh daughter who goes west for the medicine that revives her parents and becomes the guide of the dead, belongs to the mainland shamans of Seoul and the east coast, not to Jeju.

These chants are still recited in Jeju ritual, in the Great Gut and elsewhere. What follows is drawn only from published transcriptions.