서울에 있는 동천(洞天) 바위글씨의 분포와 성격

Abstract

In an age without written characters, humankind painted or carved pictures of significant events on rocks. When pictures were replaced by written characters, their content diversified, with many more of them expressing ideals of future utopias or individual life values rather than events in the past. As primarily three or four characters were carved into rock as it difficult to carve more, one frequently written set of characters was dongch’ŏn (洞天), literally “grotto-heaven,” or also “scenic view.” One’s courtesy name, the place name of the location, or two characters describing the nearby landscape were also frequently written in front of dongch’ŏn. The author has surveyed over one hundred carved rock writings in Seoul, and forty such writings claiming to be dongch’ŏn were found in fourteen locations, close to half of all the writings. Among these, Chaha dongch’ŏn is carved on Kwan’aksan Mountain, P’yŏkun dongch’ŏn on Suraksan Mountain, and Cheil dongch’ŏn on Topongsan Mountain, and although these may be interpreted as grotto-heavens as written, it is difficult to read the other carved rock writings as such because they are written outside the four gates of Seoul. Despite this however, noblemen who owned villas carved the characters dongch’ŏn onto the nearby rocks. For such noblemen who could not return home for various reasons, the dongch’ŏn rock carvings represented their unfulfilled dreams. If Seoul’s carved rock writings are surveyed intensively, there is a possibility of finding more dongch’ŏn. There is a need to compile these writings, analyze the wishes of their noblemen writers, and introduce them to citizens in the form of a map with carved rock writing trails.