Climb to almost any Buddhist temple in Korea, walk past the main hall, and somewhere near the back, often a little higher up the slope, you will find a small pavilion. Inside hangs a painting of a kindly old man with a long white beard, sitting in a mountain landscape with pine trees and a waterfall. Beside him, sometimes curled up like a giant house cat, is a tiger. This is Sansin (산신), the mountain god, and he is older than Buddhism in Korea by a very long way.
Korea is a land of mountains, and its people have always looked to them with awe. The mountain god is their guardian: the spirit who watches over a peak, the villages at its foot and, in the old days, whole kingdoms.
A country of sacred mountains
The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture describes mountain worship as one of the main pillars of Korean nature religion, alongside the worship of heaven, earth and the stars. Mountains were where the gods came down from the sky and where they lived. The oldest Korean myths say so. In the founding myth of Gojoseon, the god Hwanung descends from heaven onto a mountain beneath a sacred tree. And at the end of the story, Dangun, the founder of Korea’s first kingdom, does not simply die. He goes into the mountains and becomes a mountain god.
Ancient Chinese records describe the customs of the Ye people, who lived in the northeast of the peninsula. The Book of the Later Han notes that they honoured mountains and rivers, that each community’s mountains had borders others could not cross, and that they made offerings to the tiger and worshipped it as a god. The encyclopedia suggests that this is the earliest root of the close bond between the tiger and the mountain god that runs through Korean tradition to this day.
Mountains and kings
Korean kingdoms built their religion around their mountains. Silla held great state sacrifices at its “three mountains” and “five peaks”, along with offerings at more than twenty other mountains across the country, to protect the kingdom and pray for rain. The encyclopedia records legends of Silla kings who saw mountain gods with their own eyes. King Heongang is said to have watched the god of Namsan, the southern mountain of the capital, appear and dance, and to have copied the dance himself.
Some royal ancestors were believed to be mountain gods. The legendary Silla king Talhae, who arrived from the sea, was worshipped after his death as the god of Tohamsan, the mountain near Gyeongju. Several mountain goddesses were honoured as the mothers of royal families, such as the Holy Mother of Seondosan, who was linked in legend to Silla’s founder.
The founders of Goryeo believed their dynasty itself had been born from the power of mountains. The encyclopedia quotes the story of the monk Doseon, an expert in geomancy, who passed the house of Wang Geon’s father near Songaksan and told him exactly where to build so that a holy son would be born, a son who would unite the Three Han. Goryeo kings gave honorary titles to mountains to thank them for their help, and the Joseon dynasty carried on the tradition of state offerings to the great mountains.
The old man and the tiger
In village belief, the encyclopedia says, the mountain god was above all a local guardian. People called him sansillyeong or simply sillyeong, and imagined him either as an old man or as a tiger. Sometimes the tiger was the god, and sometimes it was the god’s steed or messenger.
When the mountain god is pictured as a white-bearded old man with the air of a Daoist immortal, he blends with the Korean love of hermits and sages who went into the mountains and never came back. In many places, the mountain god was the main god of the village rites, and the village ritual was sometimes simply called the mountain god rite. Mountain goddesses were honoured too. On Jirisan, for example, a stone statue of a guardian goddess, the Holy Mother of Jirisan, has been worshipped for generations.
How the mountain god moved into temples
When Buddhism spread through Korea, it did not push the mountain god out. It made room for him. The encyclopedia explains that because the mountain god was so central to local religion, Buddhism absorbed him, and from the sixteenth century onwards he appears in Buddhist ritual texts. By the late Joseon period most temples had a sansingak, a mountain god shrine, or a samseonggak, a “hall of three sages”, where his painting hung beside other popular deities. People came to the mountain god to ask for children and for luck in life.
The paintings themselves, called sansindo, have a recognisable style. The earliest dated examples come from the late eighteenth century, such as a painting of 1788 at Yongchusa temple in Hamyang, and more than 150 are known, most painted between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The god usually wears red robes and holds a feather fan, a palm-leaf fan, a mushroom of immortality or a fly whisk. Young attendants may stand beside him, brewing tea or carrying peaches, pomegranates and peonies. Behind him rise pines, strange rocks and waterfalls, and in later paintings deer and cranes.
And then there is the tiger. The encyclopedia notes that in mountain god paintings the king of beasts is often drawn with a cute, playful face, much like a cat, recalling the goofy tigers of Korean folk painting. Only in the twentieth century, influenced by Japanese art, did some painters give it bared teeth and a fearsome roar.
Meet the tiger of Korean folklore →
Meeting the mountain god today
Korean hikers still pass mountain god shrines on the trails, often without a second glance, but the shrines are still tended. Folktales often feature a mysterious white-haired old man who appears in a dream or on a mountain path to reward a good person or warn a foolish one, and many readers will recognise him as the mountain god. It is a gentle reminder that, in Korean tradition, the mountains are not empty. Someone has always been watching over them.
Quick facts
Sansin is the Korean mountain god, a local guardian imagined as a white-bearded old man, as a tiger, or as an old man with a tiger at his side. Mountain worship goes back to Korea’s earliest myths, in which gods descend onto mountains and Dangun becomes a mountain god. Kingdoms from Silla to Joseon made state offerings to great mountains. Buddhism absorbed the mountain god, and most Korean temples have a small shrine with his painting, often showing a friendly, cat-like tiger.