Princess Bari

At a Glance

• Central figures: Bari Gongju (Princess Bari), the seventh daughter of a king who abandoned her at birth; the king and queen who cast her out; Mujangseung, the guardian of the medicine-water in the western lands of the dead.
• Setting: An unnamed Korean kingdom in the age of kings and mountain monks, with the journey extending to bukmang - the realm of the dead in the far west - drawn from the shamanic muga narrative tradition.
• The turn: The king falls gravely ill, and no earthly medicine can cure him; a mountain monk declares that only the daughter he abandoned can retrieve the medicine-water from the land of the dead.
• The outcome: Bari Gongju travels to the underworld, endures years of labor and trial, retrieves the medicine-water, and returns to revive her dying parents and her six sisters.
• The legacy: Bari Gongju became the first mansin - the guiding spirit of the dead - and Korean shamans invoke her in the ogu gut, the funeral rite that sends the deceased safely to the afterlife.

The king and queen had six daughters. Each time the queen carried, the court diviners assured them: this child will be a son. Each time, the diviners were wrong. Six girls, one after another, and the king’s patience broke long before the seventh.

When the queen gave birth again and the midwife said daughter, the king did not look at the child. He had her wrapped in silk, placed in a stone box, and set adrift on the river. The queen wept but did not resist. In the palace, the six older princesses grew up never knowing they had a seventh sister.

The Stone Box

The river carried the box downstream past villages and into the mountains. A crane - or in some tellings, an old couple who lived by the water - found the child and raised her. Bari grew up poor, strong, and ignorant of her birth. She gathered firewood. She carried water from the spring on the hillside. She had no name she trusted - the old couple called her Bari, “the discarded one,” because that was what she was.

Twenty years passed.

The Mountain Monk

In the capital, the king collapsed. His skin turned the color of cold ash. His physicians tried every remedy: ginseng root boiled for days, acupuncture along every meridian, prayers offered at every shrine in the kingdom. Nothing helped. The queen fell ill the same week, as though the same shadow had found them both.

A monk descended from the mountains. He was very old and carried nothing but a wooden staff. He stood in the throne room and told the court what was required: the medicine-water of the western paradise, the water that restores the dead and heals the living. It existed beyond the borders of the living world, guarded by the spirit Mujangseung. No soldier could fetch it. No minister, no physician, no monk.

Only the king’s seventh daughter could make the journey.

The six princesses were summoned. Each was told what lay ahead - the road to the land of the dead, the years it would take, the trials no one could describe in advance. Each princess refused. The eldest said she had children. The second said she was afraid. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth said the same things in different words. None of them would go.

Messengers were sent to find the seventh daughter. They followed the river to the mountains, and they found Bari gathering wood on a hillside.

The Road West

When Bari learned who she was - the daughter her father had placed in a stone box and given to the current - she said nothing for a long time. Then she put down her bundle of firewood and walked to the capital.

She entered the palace where the king lay dying. She knelt beside his bed. He could barely open his eyes. She did not reproach him. She stood, and she left through the western gate.

The road to the land of the dead was not a road anyone could draw on a map. Bari walked for what felt like years. She crossed rivers that had no bridges and climbed mountains that had no paths. She passed through a forest of iron trees where the wind cut like knives. She crossed a field of fire where the ground cracked beneath her feet. In one version of the telling, she aged as she walked - her hair going white, her hands roughening, her body bending under the weight of the distance.

She reached the place where Mujangseung kept the medicine-water.

Mujangseung’s Price

Mujangseung was not a demon and not a god. He was a guardian, and he had been alone in that place for longer than he could remember. He told Bari the water existed, and she could take it. But first she must do what he asked.

He asked her to tend his garden for three years, draw his water for three years, and gather his firewood for three years. Nine years of labor. Bari agreed.

She worked. The soil in the garden was not like any soil she knew - pale and cold, growing flowers she had never seen, blossoms with no scent. She drew water from a well that seemed to go down forever. She gathered wood from trees that whispered when she cut them.

In some versions of the muga, she bore Mujangseung’s children during those nine years. In others, she simply endured the time. Either way, the years passed, and she did not complain, and she did not stop.

When the nine years ended, Mujangseung gave her three things: the medicine-water, a flower that restores the dead, and a branch that drives out evil spirits. Bari took them and began the journey home.

The Return

She walked back the way she had come - through the fire, through the iron forest, across the rivers. When she arrived at the capital, the palace was hung with white mourning cloth. The king and queen had both died. Her six sisters lay beside them, also dead - struck down one by one by the same illness.

Bari entered the mourning chamber alone. She sprinkled the medicine-water on her father’s lips. She laid the flower on her mother’s chest. She touched each of her six sisters with the branch. One by one, they breathed again. Their color returned. They opened their eyes and sat up as though waking from sleep.

The king looked at his seventh daughter. He had no words adequate to what he owed her.

The First Mansin

Bari did not stay in the palace. She had walked the road between the living and the dead, and she knew that road now the way a fisherman knows the sea. She became the spirit who guides the dead along that path - the first mansin, the one who stands at the boundary and leads the departed through. Korean shamans sing her story at every ogu gut, the funeral rite, calling her name so she will come and take the soul safely west. The mudang who performs the rite becomes Bari for the length of the song, wearing her suffering, carrying the medicine-water in her voice.

She was the child the king threw away. She was the one who came back.