Mountain Spirit Painting of Cheongnyeonam Hermitage, Suwon

A Mountain Spirit Painting (sansindo) is a Buddhist painting depicting the mountain spirit as the personification of the tiger, worshipped as king of the mountain. The tiger has long been believed to be the spirit of the mountain, and gradually came to be deified as an object of worship; Buddhism, too, adopted it as an object of devotion. In Korea there appears to have been no cult of the mountain spirit up to the Goryeo period. It was only in the Joseon period, as Buddhism merged with folk belief and became indigenised, that worship of the mountain spirit grew popular, and temples of the Joseon period generally built a Sansingak (Mountain Spirit Shrine) to house its statues and paintings. Mountain spirit paintings are typically set against a backdrop of deep mountains and valleys, showing the mountain spirit as a white-haired old man seated among strangely shaped rocks, accompanied by a boy attendant, with a tiger crouching beside him. The Cheongnyeonam Mountain Spirit Painting shows these same pictorial elements, and is displayed together with a Seven Stars Painting inside the Chilseonggak (Seven Stars Shrine). Unlike typical Buddhist paintings, its free and unconstrained expression suggests a connection with the folk paintings (minhwa) of the late Joseon period.

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Where it is

Region

Suwon, Gyeonggi

Designation

Cultural Heritage Material · 문화유산자료