This note comes from the period when KWAIDANOTE also wrote about Korean tradition. The library now keeps to the records of Japan; this page is kept at its address because other writers have linked to it. It was revised and checked in September 2026.
In Korean the world of the living is iseung and the world of the dead is jeoseung 저승. The word is ordinary. It turns up in proverbs, in curses, in the sentence a grandmother uses about someone who died badly, and it carries no theology with it by itself. What carries the theology is who comes to collect you.
English pages tend to write “the Jeoseung Saja” as though there were one of him, a Korean grim reaper. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture defines the jeoseung saja 저승사자 as the intermediary who takes a person to the world of the dead — a role, filled by a number of holders.
In its account, three of them come for one person, though popular belief has it that seven exist altogether. In the shaman ritual of the Seoul region they are addressed as the three saints: the messenger of heaven, the messenger of earth, the messenger of humanity. Alongside them the entry lists messengers by manner of death — one for death in war, one for sudden death, one for dying away from home.
Names belong to a different layer. Gangnim, the most famous individual messenger, comes out of the shaman narratives, above all the Jeju song of the messengers, where he carries a red warrant with the dead person’s name on it and calls the name three times. Keeping that apart from the encyclopedia’s taxonomy matters, because the two are often merged into one tidy hierarchy that no source actually gives.
The domestic side of the belief is simpler and better attested than any of it: when a death occurs in the house, food is set out for the messengers — sajabap, with straw shoes and coins beside it. They have come a long way and they are to be fed before they take anyone.
The commonest underworld tale in Korea is not about hell. It is about clerical error.
A man dies and finds himself before the court of the dead, where the officials check the register and discover they have summoned the wrong person — the right name, the wrong man, the wrong village. He is sent back, and wakes in his own body, and the story is over. The pattern is old enough to be in the Samguk yusa, in the account of the monk Seon Yul, who is returned because his summons was a mistake. A later literary version in the Yongcheon damjeokgi sends a scholar on a tour of the punishments and returns him improved.
The oral tradition kept the same idea in a proverb: live in Jincheon, die in Yongin. Behind it is a story about a soul taken by mistake and put back into a body in another county — which is, in effect, a folk explanation for a person who is not quite who he used to be.
A bureaucracy that makes mistakes is a bureaucracy that can be argued with, and the tales take full advantage. Messengers are fed, flattered, bribed with wine, and talked into a few more years of life. A separate family of tales, the tales of the upright official, has a capable living magistrate recruited after death to judge the dead, on the grounds that the underworld also needs competent staff.
The ten kings who judge the dead — one at each seven-day interval after a death, then at a hundred days and at the memorial years — are the frame most Koreans picture when they picture the afterlife, and nearly every large Korean temple has a hall for them.
The encyclopedia is blunt about where they came from: the scheme is Daoist in origin, and Mahayana Buddhism contains no particular doctrine of it. It was absorbed into Korean Buddhist practice as folk belief and housed in Buddhist buildings. The modern reformer Han Yong-un attacked it on exactly those grounds, listing it with the worship of the seven stars and of mountain spirits as an accretion that was not Buddhism.
So the Korean underworld, as the rites present it, is layered: a shamanic escort at the door, a Daoist court in the middle, and a Buddhist temple to house the paintings.
There is also a myth, and it belongs to ritual rather than to storytelling. Bari gongju, the abandoned princess, is the narrative sung in the rituals that send the dead on their way — the ogu-gut of the southeast, the jinogwi-gut of Seoul, the ssitgim-gut of the southwest, each with its own name for her section. Cast out at birth for being a seventh daughter, she is the one who goes to the land of the dead and returns, and who becomes thereafter the guide of souls.
She is not a messenger. She is the answer to them: a figure who made the journey voluntarily and can therefore lead others.
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