The Sacred and Profane: From Seoul to Anmyeondo

The only tourist site I had time to see in Seoul was Inwangsan, a sacred mountain where for generations Korean shamans (analogues to China’s Taoists and Japan’s Shinto) have evoked the spirits of the mountains with famously piercing, supernatural songs.

Like most sacred mountains in Asia’s great cities, the foot of Inwangsan had been quickly filled by networks of eddying alleyways early, so now the way up is hard to find, unmarked, and along curving spaces between tight housing. At last mounting a great concrete stair, you find the lower slopes have been packed tight with towering and dismal super-block apartment buildings, clustered in a group of at least twelve, the sides of the buildings numbered, colossal, faceless as steel shipping crates and making of the landscape aisles in a big-box store. The road up is steep, well paved, with the apartments stone silent to one side and a massive concrete retaining wall leaving you about three feet of sidewalk. The wall rivals the towers in size, rough to the touch as though a sticky grey gum had been smeared on the mountainside with a cake knife, and left to bulge and sag.

At length, up a nearly-vertical driveway, a temple joins the road and the mountain path. Like any number of I’ve seen in Taipei, the ungainly buildings and uneven walkways fold into themselves layers of traditional gates, clay eves, rusting sheet metal and recycled rebar, drawing the elements from the city like fumes, all the while nestling deeper into the mountain.
The first mountain trail out of the ramshackle cloister climbs quickly with bitingly small stone steps, before opening into thickets of squat junipers and running across granite boulders big as cars. I stopped and looked out over Seoul, which filled the lowlands and swelled around green mountains, cropping up higher in pockets of towers indistinguishable from those passed on the way up, their corrugated sides mauve and drab. Into this scene I thought I heard a shaman’s singing (as promised by the guidebook), so set myself to listening, hoping to catch a sense of the mountain. The wind carried snatches of the song nearer, and slowly a melody resolved. Paul McCartney was singing Michelle, my bell from the squeaky single speaker hooked on the hip of a solo hiker.On the way down I caught sight of an old women in bright sweatpants spitting mouthfuls of rice wine into the concrete-lined stream. Her movements were smooth and exaggerated, part of a ceremony I had no way of understanding.

The next day, the ride in Sunchaul’s Korean SUV was a fury of discussion, with Jesse’s childhood friend Barret’s arrival the night before setting the three of us into hurried and dauntless conversation. There was little space in the discussion for the two Koreans, Sunchual and his cousin, who sat in front in virtual silence.

Feeling the need to include our host, I leaned forward and told him what I’d thought of Inwangsan and its disappointments. In his typically brusque way, he told me we’d be going to a different mountain temple, a very old one, and that this one would be better. Four hours later, we parked the car in a glen just off the road and proceeded towards Sanghangsan on foot.

A storm was threatening, so the air was dense as we walked along the wide dirt road, lined with fruit stands and one-room kitchens that served the pilgrims and tourists. Through a massive, unpainted wooden gate the road lead into the forest and to steep steps cut from stone. Here or there a drop of rain would fall, and across valleys in the distance, thunder would break and race up the stairs as if running low to the ground.
At the top of the wooded stair is Gyasimsa (The Temple of an Uplifted Heart). First built in 654, the temple remains one of the few in Korea never to have been razed or burned to the ground. A stilted bell house stands outside the main gates and overlooks both the path to the temple and the valleys of the smaller mountains that run beside. Monks still live at Gyasimsa, sweep the path daily free of pine needles and shake the great silent bell from the stillness that seen first-hand seems to radiate brooding strength. Sunchaul says the bell is rung twice a day, with the goal of waking the world.
The temple itself was open, and though a stray monk or layperson would slide a door open and step back into the shoes they’d left on the stone walkways that connected the buildings, only the main hall had its doors open invitingly. Sunchaul told me that Korean shamanism had based much of its beliefs on the spirits of mountains, that communities had seen their local mountains as lords and patron gods, and that this belief had crept its way into the Buddhist temples in the door guards and painted motifs that surrounded the gilt Buddha and Chinese sutras. Wandering into the back houses and vegetable gardens of the monks, I heard in a grief-stricken woman weeping loudly, here seeking comfort and council from the resident monks. I didn’t linger.

The rain that had broiled and threatened the edges of the mountain never broke, and we left Sanghangsan even as great drops seemed poised to fall. The threat of a downpour charged the atmosphere, so I felt as though we walked a boundary, tiptoeing along some verge. Mountains have a special power over all of us. Seated in both grandeur and reservation, they swallow all the prickling notes of life’s minor moments, calming each and making from them a single, drumming cord. The resonate part inside all of us hears this, and knowing its sister tone, slows our trembling meter to harmonize.

This road, through pine groves and down a stone path that had no litter or the trashcans to collect litter, must have been the way to Inwangsan once, too. The small stalls and kitchens were the forbearers of the convoluted city neighborhoods, the walled homes and shuttered driveways. Our cities hums along so literally we forget the faces of towers and the walls at our sides ring with their own definite timber. What is the music of our landscape that flows into the hollow parts inside us which gather feelings like sound? In Asia, a great grey and spreading sea of mega-housing is growing across the ground like a mold, leaving mountains like islands in the quick.