Hwanung descending from heaven

At a Glance

• Central figures: Hwanin, the Lord of Heaven; his son Hwanung, who descended to rule the human world; a bear and a tiger who sought to become human; Ungnyeo, the bear-woman who endured.
• Setting: The peak of Mt. Taebaek (traditionally identified with Mt. Baekdu), in the age before the founding of Gojoseon; the account survives in the Samguk Yusa of 1281.
• The turn: Hwanung descended from heaven with three thousand followers and the authority over wind, rain, and cloud, then set a trial of darkness and mugwort for the bear and tiger who begged to become human.
• The outcome: The bear endured twenty-one days in the cave and became a woman, Ungnyeo; the tiger could not bear it and fled. Ungnyeo married Hwanung, and their son was Dangun Wanggeom, founder of Gojoseon.
• The legacy: Dangun’s founding of Gojoseon in 2333 BCE, the oldest kingdom of the Korean people, and the identification of Mt. Baekdu as the sacred origin-mountain of the nation.

Hwanin had many sons. One of them, Hwanung, kept looking down. He stood at the edge of heaven and studied the world below - the mountains with their fog caught in the passes, the rivers running brown and silver through valleys where humans lived short, difficult lives. He did not watch idly. He watched the way a man watches land he means to govern.

Hwanin noticed. He took Hwanung to the place where three great peaks could be seen through a gap in the clouds and asked him which mountain he wanted.

Hwanung pointed to Taebaek.

The Descent to Taebaek

Hwanin gave his son three Heavenly Seals - cheonbuin - marks of divine authority. What exactly they were, the old texts do not say. They were proof. Hwanung carried them, and with him went three thousand spirits, his retinue, his court-in-waiting.

They came down through the clouds and arrived beneath a great sandalwood tree on the summit of Mt. Taebaek. Hwanung named the place Sinsi - the City of God. He set it up like a proper kingdom. He appointed the Earl of Wind, the Master of Rain, and the Master of Cloud. These three ministers governed the essential forces: when the rain fell, when the wind turned, when the clouds opened or closed over the fields. Under their administration Hwanung oversaw grain, life, illness, punishment, and the distinction between good and evil. Three hundred and sixty affairs of the human world fell under his rule.

This was not paradise brought down. It was administration brought down. Hwanung did not come to make the world gentle. He came to make it ordered. The people who lived on and around Mt. Taebaek had their crops and their sicknesses and their disputes, and now they had a sovereign who could command rain.

The Bear and the Tiger

A bear and a tiger lived in a cave near Sinsi. They prayed constantly. Every day they came to the sandalwood tree and prayed to Hwanung, asking the same thing: make us human. Let us live as people live.

Hwanung heard them. He gave them each a bundle of mugwort - twenty cloves of garlic and a sheaf of sacred mugwort - and told them what must be done.

Eat only this. Go into the cave. Do not see sunlight for one hundred days.

The bear and the tiger went into the cave together. The darkness was absolute. They ate mugwort and garlic, and the taste was bitter, and the days did not pass. Time in darkness does not pass the way time passes under the sky. Each hour lies flat and featureless against the next.

The tiger endured it for a while. How long, the sources disagree - some say twenty-one days, some say less. The tiger paced. The tiger snarled. The tiger could smell the air outside the cave, green and moving and alive, and the garlic burned its mouth, and the mugwort was nothing like meat. The tiger left. It pushed past the stones at the cave mouth and ran into the forest and was a tiger still.

The bear stayed.

Twenty-one days. Crouched in the dark, eating what Hwanung had given, not once stepping into the light. On the twenty-first day, the bear’s body changed. The fur thinned and fell. The claws shortened. The broad flat face narrowed. When the bear walked out of the cave, she was a woman.

She was called Ungnyeo.

Ungnyeo Under the Sandalwood Tree

Ungnyeo was human, but she was alone. She had no family, no lineage, no husband. She had come out of the cave into a world of people who had been born from other people, and she had been born from herself - from endurance, mugwort, garlic, and darkness.

She went to the sandalwood tree again and prayed. This time she did not ask to become human. She asked for a child.

Hwanung considered it. He looked at this woman who had once been a bear, who had done what the tiger could not, who had held still in the dark until her nature transformed. He took her as his wife.

Their marriage was not a love story in the way later pansori singers would tell love stories. The Samguk Yusa records it plainly: Hwanung assumed a temporary human form. They married. She conceived.

The Son of Heaven and Earth

The child was a boy. His name was Dangun Wanggeom.

Dangun - the Altar Prince, or the Sandalwood Prince, depending on which character is read. Wanggeom - the king. He grew to manhood in Sinsi, under the sandalwood tree, between a father who had come down from heaven and a mother who had come up from the animal world. He was neither fully divine nor fully earthly. He was both, and he was the first.

When Dangun was grown, he left Mt. Taebaek and went to Pyongyang. There he established the kingdom of Joseon - later called Gojoseon, Old Joseon, to distinguish it from the Joseon dynasty that came thousands of years after. The year, by traditional reckoning, was 2333 BCE. He ruled for fifteen hundred years.

At the end of his reign, when the Chinese sage Jizi came east, Dangun moved his capital to Asadal. He did not die, or if he did, the text treats it strangely. The Samguk Yusa says he became a mountain god - a sanshin - and lived to be 1,908 years old. He went into the mountains, which is where Korean spirits have always gone, and he did not come back.

The Tree on the Peak

Mt. Baekdu still stands on the northern border, half in Korea, half in China, with its crater lake at the summit - Cheonji, the Lake of Heaven. The sandalwood tree is gone, if it was ever a single tree and not a name for the forest itself. But the mountain is still the place Hwanung chose when his father asked him which peak he wanted.

The bear endured. The tiger did not. The kingdom was founded by their son. Koreans have remembered this for a very long time - not because it is a comfortable story, but because it is theirs. The oldest one. The first descent, the first transformation, the first king.