S2E7 - Princess Bari: Medicine for Feeling Like an Outsider

In this episode of Story Medicine, we explore Princess Bari, a narrative shaman song from Korean tradition that is still sung over the dead in Korea today.

A king throws away his seventh daughter because she is not the son he longed for. Years later, when he and his queen lie dying, only that discarded daughter will make the journey to the land of the dead to fetch the water of life that could save them. 

What she finds there, and what she chooses to become on her return, turns the one who was cast out into the guide who walks beside every soul.

This story speaks to anyone who has ever felt cast aside or like an outsider, anyone carrying a part of themselves they were once told had no place, or anyone learning to author their own life after a verdict someone else handed to them.

The episode includes the story told in full, an exploration of the medicine it carries, and three practical integration practices to help you embody it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to Story Medicine. I am Joe Summerfield. For over 20 years, I've been working to better understand and support people in navigating this human experience. And I've come to believe that stories are encoded with the collective wisdom of all who have come before us. That they bring us into connection with the collective unconscious and contain treasure waiting to be decoded. This podcast explores traditional tales through that lens. Each episode offers a story told in full, an exploration of the medicine it may be offering, and three practices to help you to integrate that medicine. Today's story comes from Korean shamanic tradition, from the narrative songs that shamans sing during the rites for the dead. It's called Princess Bari, or Badi Gongju, which means the abandoned or the thrown away princess. I want to say at the outset that I come to this one as an outsider. It's not a tradition that I was raised in or trained in. And it's not an old myth from a past world. This is a living practice. To this day, when somebody dies in Korea, a shaman may sing the song of Bari over the body and the grieving family to help the one who has died find their way. So I tell this story as a respectful guest. This story has been carried by many voices over many years, so the details differ from one telling to the next, but I've tried to stay as close as I can to authentic sources. This is a story that follows a daughter who was thrown away at birth. It asks where the water of life is kept when what we need can't be found in the bright and ordered realms. And what becomes of the one who has been cast out. Let's begin. When the time came for him to marry, he went to the royal diviner to ask when the wedding should be held. The diviner studied the signs and gave him a clear warning. Wait one year, he said. Marry within the year, and you will have daughters. Wait and a son will come to you. But the king couldn't wait. His longing was too strong, and so he married that very same year. And the children came. The first was a daughter, and the king swallowed his disappointment and waited. The second was a daughter, and then the third and the fourth and the fifth and the sixth, each time a daughter, and each time the king's hope curled a little further into bitterness. When the queen grew heavy with their seventh child, the whole palace held its breath. Surely this time, surely now. The queen dreamed of dragons and of the sun coming to rest in her arms, and the wise ones said that those dreams were good omens. But when the child was born, once again it was a daughter. And something in the king broke. He looked upon his seventh daughter, and he couldn't bear the sight of her. Take her away, he said. Cast her out. The queen wept and pleaded, but the king would not be moved. So she wrapped the baby in fine cloth and gave her up. In some tellings the child was placed in a jade casket and set adrift upon the water. In others she was left out on the cold mountainside. Either way, this daughter was discarded, and she was given a name that was hardly a name at all, but more of a description of what had been done to her. Badi, the abandoned one, the one who was thrown away. But the child did not die. An old couple, poor and childless, known only as the Badigondeok grandmother and grandfather, found her and took her in. They had almost nothing, but they did have room in their hearts, and they raised her as their own child. And so the discarded princess grew up far from any palace, in poverty and in love. The years passed, and in the palace the king and queen fell ill. It was a severe and mysterious affliction. The royal physicians had no name for it, and no cure could be found. The two of them withered, and it became clear that they were both dying. Eventually word reached them through a dream or a passing monk, depending on who's telling the tale, that there was in fact one cure in all of the worlds the life giving water of the western heavens, the water that flowed in the land of the dead. So the king called his six daughters to him, and one by one he asked them to make the journey to the other world to bring back the water that would save his life. And one by one they refused. The eldest had a husband to think of. The next had her children. Each of them had a reason, and each reason was a good one, but none of them would go. The road to the land of the dead is not a road that anybody would choose to walk. And then somebody remembered there had been a seventh daughter. So the search went out, and eventually they found the seventh daughter, grown now, living her plain life with the old couple who had raised her. The royal guards brought her before the dying king and queen, and they told her the truth of who she was. That these were the very parents who had thrown her away, and that now they were dying, and she was the only one left who could help. Badi looked at the two of them, perfect strangers. She owed them nothing. They had given her away in her first moments in this world. And yet she said I will go. She dressed herself in men's clothes, for the road that she had to walk would not let a woman pass. She took up a staff, and she went out toward the setting sun, toward the west, toward the country of the dead. The journey was long beyond anything I can convey in this story. She crossed mountains that had no paths, she crossed rivers that had no far bank, and as she went she came to the places where the dead were suffering, where the lost souls were caught and crying out in their torment. And rather than hurrying past them, Buddy stopped. She sang to them, and she rang a small rattle, and wherever she passed the suffering eased and the trapped souls were freed and could move on at last. And then, finally, she came to the palace where the water was kept, and it was guarded. The keeper of that country was a great rough being named Mu Janseang, and he saw through her disguise the moment she arrived. He knew that she was a woman, and he knew what she had come for. The water is not free, he told her. If you want it you will pay for it. And the price would be years. He sent her to draw his water and to cut his wood, and to keep his fire, and she did all of it. He told her that she must become his wife, and she did that too. Seven long years passed in that grey country at the edge of everything, and in those seven years she bore him seven sons. In all of those years of service she was learning. She learned where the water of life ran. She learned of the flowers that grew in the back garden of that place, the bone flower that could knit bone, the flesh flower that could clothe bare bone in living flesh, and the breath flower that could return the breath of life. When her service was finally done, the guardian let her go, but he didn't let her go alone. He followed her, with their seven sons, and together they all set out for the land of the living, carrying the life giving water and the three flowers. But they were too late. When Bari arrived at the palace in her own country, she met a funeral procession up the road. Two coffins carried in slow ceremony. Her mother and her father had died while she was away. She ran to them and stopped the bearers and made them set the coffins down and open them up. She took the bone flour and she laid it upon the bodies, and their bones grew strong again. She took the flesh flower, and their wasted flesh was once again made whole. She took the breath flour, and the breath came back into the bodies, and then she poured the life giving water between their lips, and the king and the queen opened their eyes as though they had only been sleeping, and they sat up alive in the light of the morning. The king wept, and he offered his estranged daughter everything, half the kingdom, the throne, the palace, anything she could name, in payment for the life that she had given back to him. But Badi did not want the throne or the kingdom or the palace. She had lived her whole life outside of that palace, and she didn't ask to be let inside now. Instead, she asked for something else. She asked to become the one who would guide the dead, the one who would walk that long road west with every soul who had to walk it. The one who would meet the frightened and the abandoned at the edge of the living world and carry them safely across. And so it was granted. Badi, the daughter who had been thrown away, became a goddess. She became the guide of souls, the one who leads the dead across to the country beyond. Her seven sons became the spirits of that realm, and to this very day, when somebody dies in Korea, the shamans sing the song of Badi over the body and the grieving family, so that she herself will come and lead the one who has died safely home. And so the one who was abandoned became the one who makes certain that no soul ever has to travel alone. Part two The Medicine. Before we start, if you know somebody who might appreciate this story's medicine today, please share this episode with them. And if you're enjoying the podcast and would like to help others to find it too, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. Thank you. As I worked on this story, I felt some discomfort around the explicitness of the king's preference for a son. I wondered whether there might be a way to dial it down in the telling. But I have experienced this before, a wish to change what it is that we've been past because of discomfort with a surface reading. And as I have in the past, I decided that to do so would be to distort the message and perhaps miss the opportunity to discover what it is that the story is offering. By the time I had carved out my final draft of this episode, I was glad that I left it as it was, because to change it would be to miss the central theme. This whole story seems to turn on two forces. Those forces are the masculine principle and the feminine principle. By that I don't mean men and women, although of course there is a relationship. I mean order and possibility, structure and spirit, form and life, masculine and feminine. The principle that defines and holds and builds, and the part of us that nurtures and moves and brings things to life within that boundary. Both are necessary, and neither is whole without the other. And what this story watches from its first moment to its last is what happens when one of these is exalted and the other is thrown away. So it's no accident that the story begins with a king who wishes forcefully for a son, for the attainment of his desired outcome, an heir, and a seer who reads the natural order and tells him to wait. There is a right time for things, the seer is saying, a ripening that can't be hurried. And that sense of timing, of letting life arrive when it's ready belongs to the feminine principle, to the wisdom of the body and the seasons, and the slow work of gestation. But the king overrides it. He is decided on the outcome, an heir who will carry the structure forward, and he wants it now. What he receives in return is an abundance of the medicine that he refused, of the feminine. Six daughters, and then a seventh. So the king in this story is someone who chose and set fate in motion, not somebody who things merely happened to. And this detail sets a frame around the whole tale. The story opens with a seer being ignored, and it will end, as we see, with the birth of arguably the greatest guide that this tradition knows. The wisdom that the king throws away at the start is the very thing that saves him. By the time the seventh daughter arrives, the king's longing has hardened into a blinkered cruelty and he casts the newborn out. Her given name, Bari, is derived from the verb meaning to throw away, so she's branded, in some way defined, by that which she was born into. Her name is the mark left by the realm that couldn't hold her. I think that we have a tendency toward this kind of approach also. There is a king in each of us who has decided what counts. And when something turns up that doesn't seem to serve that plan, a feeling or a circumstance that we didn't order, or a softness in life that we wanted hard, or a part of us that seems surplus to the project, we are quite capable of throwing it out before it's had a chance to work on us. Yet that part that we exile is rarely without meaning or importance. It's more often the part that we might not want that draws us toward what we need. The newborn Bari does not die. An old couple, poor and childless, take her in and raise her. Their name carries the word Gongdiok, which in the Buddhist language of this story means merit, the spiritual worth earned through acts of compassion. So the child that the palace was unable to value is recognized by people with nothing to gain from her. And so she grows up outside her family's structure, in poverty, surrounded by care, and she learns there what she could never have learned in the palace, what it's like to be accepted out of grace and love. Far from being destroyed by being cast out, the exiled feminine is gestated. Years later, the king and the queen fall ill, with a sickness that can only be cured by the water of life kept in the land of the dead, and there is medicine for us in that. What renews life is held in the place that we won't go, down in the dark, nowhere near the lit and ordered palace where the king sits and decides what counts. So the water that would bring us back to life is rarely in the rooms that we've kept bright and well managed. It's down in what we have buried, in the grief that we've walked around, or in the places that we fear to venture. The king turns first to his six daughters, the ones that he chose to keep, and every one of them refuses. I didn't read this as selfishness. Each of them has husbands or children, they belong to the living order. And after all, the move into marriage and into motherhood is itself a kind of descent, a giving over of the self. Each of them is already on their path, and this descent is not a part of it. Badi, on the other hand, was raised between worlds. She was neither princess nor peasant, so she has never truly been a part of any order. Perhaps her father's decision at her birth still held power over her. A verdict that was passed on the moment of her birth had stayed in force and defined her place until she could make a choice of her own that would redefine it. There is beautiful medicine in this for anyone who has always felt outside of things, never at home in the ordinary arrangements of life. That's a hard place to live. But it can also be the very place from which a person becomes able to go where the comfortably settled cannot, and to stand at the edge with others when their time comes. Back to the story, they find her, they tell her the truth, and they make their request, and she says I will go. When I first read this story with a view to working with it, I felt some uncertainty about the meaning of this. Was this about forgiveness or duty or self-sacrifice to the parents who had discarded her? I think the medicine is much deeper than that. I think her decision to go, far from being about service to the parents, is the turning point of her whole existence. Until this moment, Badi has only ever been something done to, thrown away, named for the throwing, raised on the charity of others, defined from beginning to end by a rejection that she had no say in. By choosing to walk this path, she stops being the one that things happen to, and she becomes the one who acts. She lifts her life out of the hands of others, and she takes it into her own. So I don't believe that this is a daughter sacrificing herself for cruel parents. I believe it's a person stepping out from the shadow that she was cast into and beginning for the first time to author her own life. And in doing so, she discovers her destiny. She dresses as a man for the road because the passage won't let her through as she is. She takes on the forward driving form in order to be allowed across. But what she does once she's on the road is not the same as the form that she's adopted. She comes to the places where the dead are suffering, and she doesn't hurry past them on her urgent errand. She stops, she sings, she rings her rattle, and the trapped souls are eased and set free. Far from the hero seizing the prize, she's bringing something unique and needed to this path. She is attending, she's staying, she's accompanying. She's not yet a goddess, but already she's doing the work that one day she will be known for. And perhaps there is medicine for us in this stopping. She has every reason to hurry, her errand is urgent, her parents are dying. And the suffering that she meets on the road is not her task, but she stops for it anyway. How often, fixed on where we're going, do we hurry past what comes to us, treating it as somehow an obstacle to the real thing? She lets what she's being called to on the way matter as much as the destination that she's racing toward. Her stopping is the work itself already beginning. The vocation was never waiting only at the end of the road. It began in how she travelled it. We tend to become what we are through the doing of it, long before we even recognize it or give it a name. Perhaps this story invites us to notice the features of our journey as much as our intended destinations. When Buddy comes to the water, She meets its keeper, who holds the boundary of that realm and names the price. The guardian fixes the law of that place, and the law is that Body must pay with time and learning. So she draws his water, she cuts his wood, she keeps his fire, and she becomes his wife, and over seven long years she bears him seven sons. I was curious here about the recurrence of the number seven, seven daughters, seven sons, seven years. And seven is a meaningful number. In old Korean belief, it represents the Big Dipper, which in cosmology is understood to govern life and death, fate and long life. In a related story, those seven children become those stars. So the daughter who was thrown away for not being a son becomes, in the land of the dead, the mother of seven sons who belong to the constellation that rules over the living and the dying. There is medicine for us in how body comes by the water of life. That power can't be given, it must be earned across years of experience in that realm. The capacity to truly be of service to another, to carry someone back from the dead, is not simple or quick to acquire. We must live there long enough to soak in the knowledge by drawing the water, keeping the fire, and raising the children. To be able to give others the water of life, we first have to dedicate our lives to it. And that's how she comes to know the secret of the flowers, the bone flower, the flesh flower, the breath flower, by dwelling in that place year on year until the knowing is hers. So when the time comes she carries all of that home, only to find that it's too late. The coffins are already on the road. And here the story shows us the order of restoration. First the bone flower, and the bones grow strong, creating the structure. And then the flesh flower, and the flesh is made whole, providing substance. And then the breath flower, and the breath returns, the animation. And finally the water of life she carried back from the land of the dead, poured between the lips. Bone, then flesh, then breath, then water. Structure first, then substance, then animation, and then the spirit that fills it. The form has to be laid before the life can move through it. This isn't only how the dead are raised, it's how anything is made or made again, a practice, a relationship, a self. And I think this speaks to the starting point of the story. The king rejected spirit in pursuit of only structure. And look who does the raising and who is raised. The king who only wanted sons, who couldn't see a place for the feminine offspring, is brought back to life by the daughter that he discarded. The order that exiled the feminine is saved in the end by the feminine it exiled. That is the law that this whole story serves. What we exalt cannot stand alone, and what we throw away may turn out to be the very thing that carries the water of life. The king weeps and offers her everything, the throne, half the kingdom, and her place in the family that was denied her at birth. Everything the cast off child might have imagined to have longed for is laid in front of her at last, and she turns it down. She doesn't take the reward of being let back in because she was never trying to get back in. She's found her own path, and she won't be called off it into something that was never hers. What she asks for instead is to become the one that guides the dead, the one who walks that long road with every soul who has to walk it. The one who meets the frightened and the abandoned at the threshold, so that none of them has to cross alone. And it makes sense that it's she who takes this office, not the guardian of that realm. The feminine brings us into life through the gate of birth, and here the feminine guides us out of it again through the gate of death. The same principle presides over both thresholds a midwife at the one and a guide of souls at the other, and at the heart they are the same calling. The realm of the dead has its keeper and its law, the masculine structure that holds that space. But the one who carries a soul across is the feminine, and her song is still sung over the dead today. The thrown away one becomes the one who makes certain that no soul ever travels alone. Part three Integration The medicine in this story doesn't come from understanding it intellectually. For insight to change anything, we have to invite it into the body and into how we actually live. Here are three practices to help you to integrate this story's medicine. First practice reclaiming what you cast aside. Bring to mind a part of yourself that you have set aside because it didn't serve the plan that you or somebody else had for your life. A softness in life that you wanted hard, a curiosity that you deemed unworthy or frivolous, a longing that you judged impractical, a talent that seemed aimless, a gift, a need, a part of your nature that you decided was somehow surplus to requirements. We have all set something aside before it could really live. Take twenty minutes with your journal or in a listening partnership, and turn toward that part with curiosity. Let it speak. What was it? How did it feel? Is it still alive for you today? Or is there now some other equivalent part that isn't being welcomed? Then choose one small place in your life this week where you contend to this part. And as you explore what it would be like to welcome it, notice what stirs in your body. The part that we set aside is rarely the worst of us. That part may even be carrying something that we need, a piece of the water of life. Second practice stopping on the road. For the next few days, watch for the moments that you would normally hurry past on the way to wherever you're going. An interruption, a bid for connection, somebody's need, the song of a bird, an instinct for play, a feeling rising in you. Something small on the roadside of your day that you would usually see past as an obstacle to the real thing. Each day, choose to stop and offer your presence. Give it real attention rather than pressing on. At the end of the day, note down what you stopped for and what happened in you and around you when you did. Our vocation doesn't wait for us at the end of the road, it's in how we travel. See who you become in the stopping. Third practice so no one crosses alone. Buddy's calling in the end is to accompany others on their passage to what comes after life. Bring someone to mind in your life who's in a hard place right now, grieving or afraid, or in the middle of a change, or standing at some threshold of their own. Sometimes it's a person we quietly avoid because we don't know what to say or because we fear we may not be able to fix it. This week, offer them your accompaniment, just your presence. There's no need for solutions or advice. Sit with them, walk with them, send the message, make the visit, notice the pull to fix it or to slip away and stay anyway. Let it be enough simply to be there, the way that Bari stops for the suffering on the road. To this day, Bari, the daughter who was thrown away, the stranger who walked to the land of the dead, serves as the guide who waits at the threshold so that no soul has to cross alone. She went down into the dark the others refused and came back carrying the water of life. The one who had to forge her own place became the one who makes a place for all of us in our moment of need. We don't come into this world alone. We're carried through a passage and caught by waiting hands and held before we are able to hold ourselves. And perhaps the sweetness of Badi's story is its promise that we will not leave the world alone either. That the welcoming feminine is there to meet us at the far threshold too, to carry us through that passage and see us gently across. The wisdom in these old stories waits patiently. I hope that this one's medicine found you where you need it. Thank you for listening to Story Medicine. I am Joe Summerfield. Until next time.