  Masses and couplings of the negative parity excited baryons are studied in
the QCD sum rule. Separation of the negative-parity spectrum is proposed and is
applied to the flavor octet and singlet baryons. We find that the quark
condensate is responsible for the mass splitting of the ground and the
negative-parity excited states. This is expected from the chiral symmetry and
supports the idea that the negative-parity baryon forms a parity doublet with
the ground state. The meson-baryon coupling constants are also computed for the
excited states in the QCD sum rule. It is found that the \pi NN^* coupling
vanishes in the chiral limit.
