David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
In search of sansin
Mountains of Gangwon Province / Courtesy of David Tizzard
By David A. Tizzard
Cities tell you what a country builds. Mountains tell you what it believes. And so I learn more about Korea when I walk alongside it. When I lose myself in the mountains. Venturing further and further outside of Seoul. Here the mountains sensitize you. They are intense. They are spaces and places where the light feels brighter. The snow sharper. The air travels through your nose like a wire down to your lungs. It’s transformative.
In the mountains, everything crackles and tingles. And, perhaps most of all, mountains are dangerous. There is rock and ice and water. Snow and sun. Bugs. Bites. Bits of things that have no name. Paths without handles. A life without a safety vest.
There’s not much intrepid about a coffee shop in Namdaemun. The Yongsan department stores offer little in the way of thrill. Hongdae is alive with neons and electronica, but it lacks that very visceral, vertiginous scale of mountain life. And because mountains are alive, you have to be alive. There is a constant risk assessment taking place. Are those rocks safe? Is the heat okay? That’s not a snake, is it? Yes, actually it is. But it’s small. Don’t worry. But watch out for the next few steps.
Doing this makes you alive to the world. To the country of Korea and its history and people. You are open so that the atoms of the universe can interact with you. Mountains wear away the usual boundaries and shells we put up in our neoliberal selves in the city. It’s hard to wear a tie or make-up on the mountain. There’s just you and the sky. A person dwarfed by heaven.
The mountains offer us Asian sensibility in the form of mono no aware — the pathos of things. The understanding that everything you see is bespoke. It is just for you. At this moment, and this moment only. So wake up. And look at it. Phones don’t work. They can never capture the sanguinous slaughter of a blood red sky just before dusk. Phones can never grasp the way the air smells as you gaze at the trees. We will never ‘capture’ the moment with language or technology. Nor should we try. We cannot enslave that which is born to be free. What it feels to walk the Korean paths that have been stepped along by countless others, is just that. A feeling. A feeling that must be felt.
To run in the Korean mountains is to feel time differently. Time, like nature, is lived rather than measured. Down below, the city ticks and counts. Here, it breathes.
And so, I like to lace up at dawn in the half-light of a village that is still groggy from its noraebong dreams and soju hangovers. As I travel away from civilization, the granite shoulders of the mountains rise in the distance, like monks cloaked for morning meditation. Each apex a different shape. A different monk. Different personality. Different teaching to impart. These mountains are not mute. They are storytellers. These are Korea’s old texts, older than Hangul, etched in stone, wind, and rain.
I leave behind traffic. Asphalt gives way to pine needles. Feet find earth. The breath deepens.
Not quite a God
I pass a group of fit looking ajumma: older women clad in electric coloured hiking gear, eyes laughing, voices carrying down the trail. The women you meet out here are different from the softer, rounder, variant you find on the buses. The mountain ajumma is slender. Lean. Quieter. Faster. Their hair straight rather than curly. They offer me some peeled apple. Their eyes glisten. I bow. “Samneeda.” The first few syllables of my Korean thank you lost in both the air and the descending bow as my eyes travel down.
Mountains have long been sacred in Korea. They are the Land, with an intentional capital letter. And that’s where you meet the Sanshin (the mountain spirit). Housed in painted pavilions. Normally tucked behind Buddhist temples. Always watching and always smiling beneath his white beard. He is part myth, part ancestor. He gave people ginseng to keep them alive. Climb just high enough that the air thins and you might feel him before you see him.
Sansin is not quite a god. But not a ghost either. He (I suddenly wonder whether the pronoun is correct?) is something in between. More a principle than a person. He belongs to no official pantheon. He simply is. His existence accepted the way one acknowledges the coming of rain. Some say he is Dangun’s father, birthed at the origin of the Korean people: part tiger, part myth. Fully ancestral! My father-in-law still grimaces when I accidentally refer to him as a myth. My kids sing his song at the local school. Others say Sansin is the spirit of the mountain itself: a soul made of roots and wind and ancient knowing. What strikes me most is that Sanshin survives. In a country of 5G towers and KTX trains, of skyscrapers and social media, this old spirit still holds ground. He is not jealous. He does not demand worship or tithes. But he knows the mountain.
Korea’s mountains teach impermanence in their own tongue. In spring, cherry blossoms write poems on the path. In autumn, danpung paints the slopes in red, gold, and rust. Each leaf a firework of death. And in winter, snow weighs the trees until they creak in resignation. The Korean word sunhwan lives here. Nothing is lost, only transformed. Cycle and return. Spring, summer, autumn, winter…and spring again.
And maybe that’s what the mountains really teach us: rhythm. A rhythm forgotten in the hypermodernity of the capital. In the endless loops of franchise coffee and scrolling screens. Because in the mountain, everything slows, then sharpens.
Because on a narrow pass above the tree line, with nothing but wind and your heartbeat for company, the world is reduced and made whole at once. The body feels its edges again. The self is clarified. You have no name up here. Only spirit.
You begin to see the world not as something to be owned or consumed, but something that lives through you. The mountain does not belong to Korea. Korea belongs to the mountain. And for a few hours, should you choose to venture out, so do you.