Mi (Sheep)

Like the gentle, meek animal, those born in the year of the Sheep are said to be warm and mild. Koreans have a proverb for it: "Even a daughter-in-law who gives birth to a daughter in the year of the Sheep is not ill-treated." Peaceable by nature, they rarely get into disputes; like sheep they like to go about in groups, and seldom fight for rank among their peers. They can be stubborn too, always taking the same road home; and though they are not quarrelsome, they can be hot-blooded, and once angry they cannot hold back.

An old saying holds that "people born in the year of the Sheep will never get rich": like the sheep, they are too honest to cheat others and too straight to amass a fortune.

Sheep were never common in Korea, but old records show that they were there in the Three Kingdoms period. In the first year of King Beop of Baekje (599–600), a camel, a donkey, two sheep and a pheasant were sent from Baekje to Japan; in the twelfth year of King Heondeok of Silla, two black rams, four white sheep, two goats and a duck were sent from Silla. In Korea the sheep was once a measure of a household's wealth, and an auspicious animal that stood for honesty and endurance.

Strictly speaking, the museum notes, the sheep and the goat are different species — the sheep with soft, curly wool and no horns, the goat with straight, coarse hair and, most often, horns — but both have stood for this sign of the zodiac. The museum's English pages call it the Sheep, and so do we.

The character 羊, "sheep", is a pictogram tied to meanings such as beautiful, auspicious and good: a "big sheep" (大羊) gives 美, "beautiful", and the sheep over "myself" (我) gives 義, "righteous". From the animal's nature, the museum writes, Koreans saw the sheep as good, righteous and beautiful; and a sheep kneeling to graze was taken as a sign of gratitude. Because it always takes the same path home, it was seen as stubborn and upright, a symbol of honesty and justice.

In religion the sheep was always the animal of sacrifice — in the West the scapegoat, offered to gods who punished mankind; in China and Korea, an animal often used in rites. Good-natured, knowing no harm and sacrificing itself for others, the sheep was sometimes compared to the Korean people. In the last years of the Korean Empire the patriot-scholar Kim Jong-hak lamented that the ancestors, who liked to dress in white, had been like a flock of sheep that bore their fate in patience and obedience, and called on them to "sharpen our horns" and make a fence around their leader that even wolves would not dare to challenge — an example, the museum says, of how the sheep served as a metaphor for a moment of Korean history.

Before he founded the Joseon dynasty, Yi Seong-gye, living in a remote village, dreamed that he caught a sheep whose horns and tail fell off. The Buddhist master Muhak explained the dream: take the horns and the tail from the character for sheep, and what is left is 王, "king" — so he would become king. He did, and his dream of the sheep was remembered as an auspicious one.

The sheep often appears among the guardian figures that protect tombs. Under Joseon, of the twelve zodiac statues that had once surrounded royal tombs only the horse, the sheep and the tiger remained: the sheep, set to the west of the tomb, and the tiger, to the east, were its guardians.

The best-known Korean painting of the sheep is Gim Hong-do's Herding Sheep at Jinhua (金華鞭羊圖). It tells a Taoist legend: the mountain god, finding a fifteen-year-old boy, Huang Chuping (黃初平), good-hearted and virtuous, let him attain enlightenment, and he herded sheep for forty years without growing old; by the time his elder brother Huang Chuqi (黃初起) found him, he could turn rocks into sheep, and both brothers became Taoist deities.

The Sheep, the Rabbit and the Pig form one of the four harmonious triads (samhap, 삼합): the rabbit, the museum says, calmly accepts the sheep's plaintive manner and envies the pig's scent and strength, and its nose resembles those of the sheep and the pig.

The Rat is the Sheep's wonjin (원진), the animal in conflict with it: the rat shrinks from the sheep's droppings, for if even a little of them touches its body, it is said, the rat's flesh rots and it loses all its fur.