The Korean Dead

In today’s post I want to talk about death. Well, the burial of the dead.  Within a square mile of my house there must be over a hundred grave mounds scattered around the hills, some quite elaborate but most very simple. I recently went on a walk and photographed some of the ones I passed. 

The way Koreans traditionally bury their dead is evidently very different from the Christian West.   Basically, these mounds are what historians call tumuli – from the Latin for ‘mound’ or ‘small hill’ –   an ancient and truly global burial convention. It seems the Koreans continued to inter their dead in a manner that long ago died out (excuse the pun) in other parts of the world, especially in areas dominated by Christianity. Koreans traditionally buried their dead under the mound upright in a coffin made from six planks of wood . These planks represent the four cardinal points on the compass, in addition to a plank for heaven and one for earth. Corpses either face south or toward some important spiritual part of the landscape, like a mountain.

There are more than the usual number of such burial mounds around the DMZ because  many exiles from North Korea opt to be buried as near as possible to their homeland. But actually, the whole of the Korean peninsula is a massive graveyard. Everywhere you go in the hills and mountains – as you cruise along a highway, for example – you will see these tumuli graves dotting the landscape.  

They don’t seem macabre or haunted. On the contrary, they are life-affirming. According to the Taoist-Confucian worldview, when someone dies not everything related to them disappears. Death involves a separation of hon (soul) and baek (spirit). Within this cosmology, which sees reality as the perpetual interacting of yin and yang - heaven and earth -  yin is the negative or passive force of the earth, while yang is the positive active force of the cosmos. Together, these interrelated forces are nature. In other words, the burial traditions arises from an awareness of existence as perpetual change driven by yin and yang, and it is understood that for the living to achieve a balanced life they must aim to exist in harmony with these two forces. 

Hon is regarded as yang, and upon death it leaves the material dimension and returns to the immaterial heavenly realm from which it arises. Baek is regarded as yin, and is the dimension of the human bestowed by the earth. When someone dies, with the decay of the physical body baek returns to the earth. This means that a grave is the place where someone’s baek resides, and this is why it is called a ‘yin-house’ (eum-gye).   People therefore reside in two ‘houses’ – the ‘yang-house’ (yang-gye) of the living, and the ‘yin-house,’ where rests the baek of the deceased ancestors. The bones of these deceased lying beneath the grave mound are the connecting link between the deceased and their offspring, and the burial mound or ‘yin-house’ must exert a positive influence on the living offspring, because if neglected it will exert a negative influence, transmitting bad energy. This is one important reason why the eldest son of a family is duty-bound to clean and prepare the burial mound of their most recently deceased ancestor, and family members must pay their respects before the grave. This happens at Ch'usok, the day dedicated to the ancestors, on which families gather from all over the country at their ancestral graves.

To me, these ‘yin-houses’ are obviously analogous to a woman with her legs open giving birth or a gestating woman with her arms around her pregnancy. But this makes only limited sense according to the convention described above.  Officially, what a Korean grave says is that we reside in two worlds  - one of the soul and one of the spirit, and the grave is associated with the latter.  But it seems possible that these mound-graves date much further back than the yin-yang cosmology of Taoism and Confucianism, and are linked to an essentially shamanistic or animist worldview.

Animism has been largely misunderstood, but recently a major reassessment has occurred which stresses the fact that animist societies - such as indigenous hunter-gatherers today - have a fundamentally earth-relatedness cosmology. In an animist worldview there is understood to be an intimate kinship between the human and the natural world. The realm of plants, animals, and human interpenetrate. But more than this. As Graham Harvey writes:  ‘animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others. Animism is lived out in various ways that are all about learning to act respectfully (carefully and constructively) towards and among other persons’. (Graham Harvey, ‘Animism: Respecting the Living World’, 2006, p. xi). 

When seen in this animist context, the Korean grave-mound seems to be an exemplary symbol of a belief system in which interpenetration of the human and nature is central. Humans envisage their dead as being recycled -  re-birthed – within nature, a process symbolized as a person – a pregnant or delivering female human. But the custom seems to have become overlayed with the moralism of Confucianism, which separates the heavenly world from the earthly, and stresses filial piety, the duties of the living to the dead, rather than consubstantiality between everything of heaven and earth. Flesh and earth, hair and plants, consist of the same fundamental substance, and one is continually transmuted into the other. In this sense, the Korean mound-grave speaks of kinship between humans and the rest of the natural world. Along with this went notions of care, responsiblity, soldidarity, and deep appreciation.

But it should be noted that modern-day Koreans have abandoned this tradition. They increasingly cremate their dead nowadays, and inter them in cemeteries that are modeled on the Christian convention of the centralized, enclosed cemetery. My partner’s father was cremated and is interred in a massive cemetery for former armed service personnel (he was born in North Korea and fled south and fought for the Republic of Korea in the Korean War). This cemetery looks very like rows of apartment buildings for the dead. Today’s preferred model for the ‘yang-house’ in Korea is also the preferred model for its ‘yin-house’.