When you visit an old Buddhist temple in South Korea, there is a good chance that getting there involves a mountain road, a forest trail, or at least a noticeable climb. Some of Korea’s best-known historic temples sit far from dense city centers, surrounded by trees and mountains.
This sometimes leads to a simple explanation: Korean Buddhist temples were pushed into the mountains because Buddhism was suppressed during the Joseon Dynasty.
There is some truth behind that idea, but the history is more complicated. Mountain monasteries had already been part of Korean Buddhism for centuries before Joseon began in 1392. What changed under Joseon was that Buddhism lost much of its official status and many urban and lowland temples disappeared or weakened, while existing mountain monasteries continued to survive.
That long history of religious practice, political change, war, destruction, rebuilding, and survival helps explain why mountain temples have become such a familiar part of Korea’s historic landscape today.
Korean Temples Were Not Always Hidden in the Mountains
Buddhism reached the Korean Peninsula during the Three Kingdoms period and gradually became closely connected with royal courts, state ceremonies, art, education, and architecture. Temples were not simply remote retreats for monks. They were also important public and political institutions.
At the same time, the tradition of building and maintaining monasteries in the mountains developed very early. Several of the Korean mountain monasteries that survive today trace their foundations to the Silla period, centuries before the Joseon Dynasty.
In 2018, UNESCO designated seven of them — Tongdosa, Buseoksa, Bongjeongsa, Beopjusa, Magoksa, Seonamsa, and Daeheungsa — as Sansa, Buddhist Mountain Monasteries in Korea. These monasteries were established between the seventh and ninth centuries and became long-lasting centers of Buddhist worship, study, and monastic life.
As Seon Buddhism developed in Korea, mountains also became particularly important as places for meditation and religious training away from ordinary secular life. This means the Korean mountain-temple tradition cannot be explained simply as a later retreat from persecution. Historic temples also existed in and around important settlements. What we see today is partly the result of which temples survived the political and social changes that followed.
One famous Silla-era site is Bulguksa in Gyeongju. If you are interested in seeing how one of Korea’s best-known Buddhist sites fits into the landscape of Korea’s ancient capital, I also wrote about my own visit to Bulguksa in my Gyeongju travel guide.
From Goryeo Patronage to Joseon Suppression
Buddhism reached one of its periods of greatest institutional influence during the Goryeo Dynasty, which ruled from 918 to 1392. Temples received royal support and accumulated land, resources, and cultural influence. Buddhist ceremonies were also closely connected with ideas about protecting the state.
One of the most famous surviving examples from this period is the Tripitaka Koreana, or Palman Daejanggyeong. The 81,258 woodblocks preserved at Haeinsa were carved between 1237 and 1248 during the Mongol invasions. Their creation reflected both extraordinary craftsmanship and the belief that Buddhist devotion could help protect the country during a national crisis. By the late Goryeo period, however, the economic and political power of Buddhist institutions had also become a subject of criticism. When the Joseon Dynasty was founded in 1392, Neo-Confucianism became the ideological foundation of the new state.
Joseon’s policies greatly reduced Buddhist institutional power. The number of officially recognized temples and Buddhist schools was cut, temple property was reduced or confiscated, and monks faced restrictions that included limits on entering the capital. But this does not mean that Buddhism simply disappeared from Korean society. Royal women continued to support Buddhist practices at various times, ordinary people maintained their faith, and Buddhist communities continued to operate.
The most important point for understanding Korea’s mountain temples is that many monasteries were already in the mountains before these policies began. As Buddhism lost its prominent position in cities and public life, mountain monasteries increasingly became the places where Korean Buddhist traditions could continue. So rather than saying that Korean temples “fled into the mountains,” it is more accurate to say that an already old mountain-monastery tradition became increasingly important as other parts of institutional Buddhism declined.
War Repeatedly Changed Korea’s Temple Landscape
The relationship between the Joseon state and Buddhism changed significantly during the Japanese invasions of 1592–1598. Although the government had restricted Buddhist institutions for generations, monks organized military units commonly known as seungbyeong, or monk soldiers. Figures such as Seosan Daesa and Samyeong Daesa became closely associated with this wartime mobilization.
Many temples were themselves damaged or destroyed during the invasions. Some were rebuilt during the seventeenth century, which is why a temple with a much older foundation may contain buildings that date from centuries later. A Korean temple is often not a structure preserved unchanged from the year it was founded. It is a place that has repeatedly been damaged, rebuilt, expanded, and adapted.
Another major change came during Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. Under the 1911 Temple Ordinance, colonial authorities gained extensive control over matters such as temple administration, property, and the appointment of senior abbots. Buddhist institutions continued to function, but they did so within a new system of colonial regulation. For broader context on how the end of Japanese colonial rule is remembered in Korea today, I discuss it in my article about Gwangbokjeol, Korea’s National Liberation Day.
The destruction did not end with colonial rule. During the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, temples and Buddhist cultural properties suffered severe losses. A 2025 peer-reviewed study based on surveys by the Jogye Order identified 351 Buddhist temples that were destroyed or damaged during the conflict, including 240 that were completely destroyed. The researchers also note that surviving records are incomplete, so the full scale of cultural loss is difficult to calculate.
The causes were not all the same. Temples could be caught in fighting, shelled or bombed, damaged by fire, occupied by military forces, looted, or deliberately destroyed when they were believed to be useful to enemy troops. The history is therefore more complicated than saying that mountain temples were simply safe refuges from war. The research is available in the 2025 study Surveying Buddhist Cultural Heritage Lost During the Korean War.
Korea’s Mountain Temples Are Still Living Religious Spaces
One thing that can be easy to overlook as a visitor is that many historic Korean temples are not archaeological ruins. Monks still live, study, pray, eat, and work there. Buddhist ceremonies continue. People visit to pray for family members, take part in religious events, or simply spend quiet time at a temple they have visited for years.
This continuity is one reason UNESCO’s designation of Korea’s seven Sansa is important. The value of these sites is not limited to old wooden buildings or Buddhist artworks. They represent religious communities and practices that have continued for many centuries despite political suppression and repeated wars.
That also changes the feeling of visiting a Korean temple. A building may be hundreds of years old, but someone may be praying inside it. A courtyard may appear to be a historic attraction to a traveler, while for another visitor it is simply part of their religious life.
Temple food is another example. What visitors now sometimes experience as a cultural program developed from the ordinary dietary practices of Buddhist communities. The same is true of meditation, chanting, and other activities that have become more visible to travelers through modern Templestay programs.
My 2002 Visit to Bomunsa Temple on Seokmodo
One Korean temple that I remember personally is Bomunsa on Seokmodo, an island off Ganghwa in Incheon.
I visited Bomunsa in 2002. Today you can drive to Seokmodo across Seokmo Bridge, which opened in 2017, but there was no bridge when I went there. We had to take a ferry. What I remember is not only the temple. I remember the seagulls.
On the ferry, many passengers would hold a piece of snack food out toward the sea. The seagulls flew alongside the boat, came surprisingly close, and snatched the food directly from people’s hands. People did it on the way to the island and again on the way back. We were not the only ones doing it. It seemed like one of those small things that almost everyone on the ferry tried.
It was nothing grand or historically important, but it is one of the details I still associate with that trip. Travel memories often work that way. Years later, I may forget part of the itinerary, but I can still picture people standing near the side of the ferry with snacks in their hands and seagulls following the boat.
The old ferry route itself has now disappeared from ordinary travel to Seokmodo. The bridge changed what had once been an unavoidable part of visiting the island.
Bomunsa has an old foundation tradition, although the exact date cannot be confirmed. According to VISITKOREA’s information on Bomunsa Temple, it is traditionally believed to have been founded in 635 during the reign of Queen Seondeok of Silla.
One of the best-known sights there is the large rock-carved seated Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva above the main temple area. Visitors who want to reach it have to climb a steep staircase of 419 steps. Interestingly, the carving is much younger than the temple’s foundation tradition. It was created in 1928 during the Japanese colonial period and measures about 9.2 meters high. I think that difference is worth noticing.
When people visit an “ancient temple,” it is easy to imagine that everything around them belongs to the same distant period. In reality, Korean temples often contain many different layers of time. One part may be connected with a Silla-era foundation story, another building may have been reconstructed after a war, and another religious object may have been created in the twentieth century.
My own photographs from 2002 are now another small layer in that history. They are not professional photographs. They were taken with the kind of digital camera I was using more than twenty years ago, so the image quality is obviously different from what we expect today. But that is also why I want to keep them in this article. They show the place as I personally saw it at that time.
Why So Many Historic Korean Temples Remain in the Mountains
There is no single explanation for why so many of Korea’s famous historic temples are found in the mountains. Mountain monasteries were already an important part of Korean Buddhism many centuries before the Joseon Dynasty. Joseon’s suppression of Buddhism then weakened or eliminated many temples elsewhere, while mountain monasteries became increasingly important for maintaining Buddhist religious life.
Those monasteries later survived — sometimes barely — Japanese invasions, rebuilding, colonial regulation, the Korean War, and Korea’s rapid modernization. That is why I now think the familiar image of a Korean temple surrounded by mountains tells a more complicated story than it first appears to.
The temple is not simply there because monks once wanted to hide from society. In many cases, the mountains were already part of Buddhist practice. History then determined which religious communities disappeared, which were rebuilt, and which continued long enough for us to visit them today.
When I think about Bomunsa, I remember an old Buddhist temple, a 1928 rock carving, hundreds of steps, a ferry that no longer carries visitors to the island, and passengers feeding snacks to seagulls in 2002. All of those things belong to different moments in time. Together, they are closer to the way I experience Korean temples: not as frozen remains of one ancient period, but as places where many layers of Korean history are still visible.
About the Author 🇰🇷
I live in South Korea and write about the small details of Korean life and culture that I experience and observe firsthand.
English is my second language, so I sometimes use tools such as Gemini and Google Translate to help with translation and editing. The experiences, observations, opinions, and cultural perspectives in my articles are my own, and I personally review and edit every article before publishing it.
My goal with Korea Core Info is simple: to share everyday Korea from a local perspective and help international readers discover things they might not always find in a typical travel guide.
I hope my stories and guides help you understand Korea a little better — not just as a place to visit, but as a place where people live their everyday lives.