The Samguk Yusa opens its Wonders section with Joseon. The official history, the Samguk Sagi, left this story out. Iryeon chose it for the place where a book begins.
There is an old record that says this, he writes. Hwanin, who rules the sky, had a son named Hwanung, and the son kept looking down.
He was thinking about the land where people live.
The One Who Came Down
The father understood his son and looked down himself. A place called Samwi Taebaek seemed fit to do people good. Hwanin gave his son three tokens and sent him down.
Hwanung came to the top of Mount Taebaek with three thousand followers and called the ground Sinsi.
He settled under a tree there, and the spirits of wind and rain and cloud came with him. The record sets out the work he took on. Grain, life, sickness, punishment, and the difference between good and bad.
For a being who came down from the sky, the list is oddly practical. Farming and illness and penalties are what people meet every day.
Two Who Went Into the Cave
At that time a bear and a tiger were living in the same cave. The two of them kept praying to Hwanung. They wanted to become human.
Hwanung gave them mugwort and twenty cloves of garlic, and told them to stay out of the sunlight for a hundred days.
The two took it and went into the cave. This is where their paths divide. The tiger could not last that long and walked out.
The bear stayed.
The story never mentions the one who left again.
Three Sevens
Here is a line worth reading exactly as it stands. The bear did not become human on the hundredth day.
On the twenty-first day, three sevens, she took on a woman’s body.
The condition was a hundred days and the answer arrived before that. The record does not explain the gap. It just sets it down. Most readers walk straight past it.
Ungnyeo, the bear woman, had nobody to marry, and she prayed under the tree every day for a child.
Hwanung took human form for a while and married her. A son was born, and his name was Dangun Wanggeom.
A Country Called Joseon
Dangun Wanggeom made his capital at Pyeongyang and called the country Joseon. Later he moved the capital to Asadal. The record says he ruled for a very long time.
How much of this to treat as fact has been argued over for a long time. This book was not written to settle that argument.
Iryeon wrote that an old record says this, and the subject of that sentence is not him.
What remains is that he put it first. He compiled this book in years when Mongol armies had been crossing this land. It is not hard to guess what writing down a country’s beginning meant then.
Today, the Word Endure
We are taught this as a story about endurance. The bear lasted and the tiger did not.
And yet the bear never completed the condition.
Perhaps what the story says is not that you must count out every day. It is that the answer came first to the one who was still there. Staying and finishing the count are not the same thing.
The tiger’s side is worth one more look. The story does not scold the one who left. It simply never calls on them again.
That is how the part belonging to whoever did not stay disappears from a story.
In the next chapter a boy comes out of an egg. This time nothing comes down from the sky. Somebody is driven out.