Since the remotest of times Koreans have believed that the sun, moon, and stars, the trees and rocks were the abodes of spirits. The roots of this ancient animistic folk religion still survive today in the respect and love that Koreans hold for nature. In addition to animism, the culture of each age has also reflected Koreans' beliefs in the principle of the dual forces of yin and yang; Heaven (the spiritual realm), Earth (the physical realm), and Man as a being that somehow straddles and embodies the two; geomancy; Confucianism; and Buddhism. Naturally, Koreans incorporated elements of all of these in their living environment, situating and designing their houses, courtyards, walls, and so on in such a way as to ensure that they blended with nature and complemented it.

Korean gardens were, of course, no exception. A Korean garden took nature "as is" as its main ingredient with manmade elements such as pavilions playing a dependent role. A garden generally had an inner part, with a lotus pond, pavilions, stonework, and the like often surrounded at least partially by a wall, and an outer part that eased the transition from the inner, manmade portions to the surrounding area. Even in the inner garden, buildings were positioned to fit into the surrounding landscape, and the height of the roof, the curve of the eaves, and other aspects of the manmade structures were planned and built so as to appear subordinate to the natural surroundings. Such structures had an openness about them that purposely blurred the boundary between the inside and the outside. In fact, such a garden owed most of its esthetic to the fact that it was laid out in such a way as to simply "borrow" the beauty that was already present in the woods and hills surrounding it. The garden was an ideal place for peaceful contemplation in communion with nature.

The simplicity of Korean traditional gardens and their blurred distinction between the manmade and the natural contrasts with the grander gardens of China, with their complexly artificial elements, and the scaled- down, abstract gardens of the Japanese.