Dangun, the Bear Woman and the First Kingdom

Long, long ago, before there were any kingdoms in the land that would become Korea, there lived in heaven a great god named Hwanin, the Lord of Heaven. Hwanin had many sons, but there was one who was different from the others. His name was Hwanung, and instead of gazing up at the heavens like his brothers, he spent his days gazing down.

Far below the clouds lay the world of people. Hwanung watched them plant their fields and lose their harvests to drought, fall sick with no one to heal them and quarrel with no one to judge between them. The more he watched, the more he longed to go down and live among them.

He saw a child crying beside a dried-up field, and an old man lying sick in a hut with no one to tend him. He saw two villages arguing over a stream until the argument became a fight. Each time, Hwanung turned away from the bright halls of heaven and looked down again, and each time the longing grew.

His father saw what was in his heart. Hwanin looked down from heaven over the whole world below, and his eye came to rest on Taebaeksan, a mountain with three great peaks. “There,” he said. “From that mountain, my son could broadly benefit all humankind.” So he gave Hwanung three heavenly seals as signs of his authority, and sent him down to rule.

The old book does not say what the three seals were. Later storytellers have guessed a sword, a mirror and a bell, or a drum, but nobody knows for certain. What mattered was that they showed heaven’s blessing, and that whoever carried them came with heaven’s authority.

Hwanung came down with three thousand followers and landed on the summit of Taebaeksan, beneath a sacred sandalwood tree, the sindansu. There he founded a city and called it Sinsi, the City of God, and the people called him Hwanung Cheonwang, the Heavenly King. He did not come alone. With him came the Earl of Wind, the Master of Rain and the Master of Clouds, and with their help he took charge of everything that matters in human life: grain and harvests, life and death, sickness and healing, punishment and the difference between good and evil. Altogether, the old book says, he looked after three hundred and sixty human affairs, and the people of the mountain flourished.

The bear and the tiger

Not far from the sacred tree there was a cave, and in that cave lived a bear and a tiger. They shared their den and their hunting grounds, and they had both watched the people of Sinsi with growing envy. The people had fire and houses, songs and festivals, and a king from heaven who cared for them. The bear and the tiger had only the forest.

One day the two animals came to Hwanung together and bowed low before him. “Lord,” they said, “we have one wish. Please let us become human.”

They had argued about it for a long time first. The tiger said the god would laugh at them. The bear said they would never know unless they asked. In the end they went together, side by side, up the path to the sacred tree.

Hwanung looked at them for a long time. Then he handed them a gift: one bundle of mugwort, bitter and grey-green, and twenty cloves of garlic. “Eat these,” he said, “and stay out of the sunlight for one hundred days. If you can do that, you will take human form.”

The bear and the tiger carried the bitter plants back to their cave, and the long darkness began.

They rolled a stone across the entrance so that not a single ray of sun could get in. Inside, it was so dark that they could not see their own paws.

The mugwort was harsh on the tongue and the garlic burned. The cave was cold, the days were long, and outside they could hear birds singing and smell the sun-warmed pines. The tiger paced. He scratched at the walls. He lay down and got up again. “A hundred days,” he growled. “A hundred days of sitting in the dark, eating weeds.” The bear said nothing. She chewed her mugwort slowly, kept to the back of the cave and waited.

Before long the tiger could stand it no more. With a roar he bounded out of the cave into the bright daylight, and he never came back. He stayed a tiger, and he roams the mountains to this day.

The bear kept the taboo. She stayed in the dark, ate what she had been given and did not complain, and on the twenty-first day, a little sooner than anyone expected, something happened. Her thick fur fell away. Her claws softened. When she finally stepped out into the light, blinking, she was no longer a bear but a young woman. She was called Ungnyeo, the Bear Woman.

She stood in the sunlight with her new hands held out in front of her, turning them over and over, as if she could not believe they were hers. Then she laughed out loud, and the sound surprised her, because it was a human laugh.

The son of heaven and earth

Ungnyeo had a human body now, but she had no husband, and no one to marry. So every day she went to the foot of the sacred sandalwood tree and prayed that she might have a child.

Hwanung heard her prayers. He took on a human form for a time and married her, and before long she gave birth to a son. They named him Dangun Wanggeom.

He had been watching her, the old storytellers say, ever since she came out of the cave, and he had been moved by her patience, which was greater than any he had seen in heaven or on earth.

Dangun grew up between two worlds. His father had come down from heaven; his mother had come up out of the earth, out of the dark of the cave. When he became a man, he did something his father had never done. He left the sacred mountain and founded a kingdom. He set his capital at Pyeongyang and called his country Joseon. It was, the old records say, the very first kingdom of the Korean people.

He ruled it the way his father had ruled the city on the mountain, by the idea his grandfather had spoken when he first chose Taebaeksan: hongik ingan, to broadly benefit all humankind. Fields were planted, laws were made, and people who had once lived scattered through the forests and valleys gathered together under one king. Even today, those two words are written into the founding principles of Korean education.

Later Dangun moved his capital to Asadal, beneath Baegaksan mountain, and ruled from there for an astonishing fifteen hundred years. At last, when a new age began and a newcomer named Gija was sent to rule the land, Dangun moved away to a place called Jangdanggyeong. In the end he returned to Asadal, went into the mountains and became a mountain god. He was one thousand nine hundred and eight years old.

People say he is still there, in the mountains, watching over the land he founded. And whenever Koreans talk about the beginning of their history, this is where they begin: with a god who looked down, a bear who could wait, and a tiger who could not.

Why mugwort and garlic?

Both plants were valued in Korea as medicine, and mugwort especially, called ssuk (쑥), has long been used in traditional cooking and healing. Many readers point out that the pair also makes sense as a test. Neither is pleasant to eat raw, and a hundred days of nothing else would try anyone’s patience. Some scholars note that the plant written as “garlic” in the old text may have been a wild relative, since the cultivated garlic we know today may have arrived later, but in modern Korea the story is always told with garlic.

Talk about it

Why do you think the bear succeeded when the tiger was the stronger animal? Was the test fair? And why might a people choose a story about a god and a bear, heaven and earth together, to explain where they came from?

Words to know

Hwanin (환인) is the Lord of Heaven, and Hwanung (환웅) is his son who came down to earth. Ungnyeo (웅녀) means “bear woman”. Sindansu (신단수) is the sacred sandalwood tree on the mountain. Gojoseon (고조선), “Old Joseon”, is the name historians use for Dangun’s kingdom. Hongik ingan (홍익인간) means “to broadly benefit humankind”. Gaecheonjeol (개천절), 3 October, is Korea’s National Foundation Day.