JINKWANSA
of Korean History
Remembered and Renewed.
A Window into Korea
Nestled within Bukhansan National Park, just outside downtown Seoul and not far from the border with North Korea, Jinkwansa offers a remarkable window into Korea's history, spirituality, and cultural identity.
Although it served the royal court, it is strikingly modest in scale — offering quiet, intimacy, and a deeply human sense of place rather than grandeur.
Buddhism in Korea
Buddhism began in India and travelled east through Central Asia and China before reaching the Korean Peninsula in the fourth century — officially introduced to Goguryeo in 372 and to Baekje in 384.
Korea did not merely receive Buddhism; it developed its own distinctive Mahayana traditions, influencing the wider Buddhist world. In the sixth century, Baekje transmitted Buddhist texts, artisans, and temple architecture to the Japanese court.
Goryeo and Joseon
Under Goryeo — the dynasty from which the modern name “Korea” derives — Buddhism became a central institution of the state, shaping art, scholarship, ritual, and technology.
When Joseon replaced Goryeo in 1392, it grounded a new political order in Neo-Confucian principles of ethical government, education, hierarchy, social harmony, and filial duty. Buddhism lost its official primacy, but remained deeply embedded in the spiritual life of both the royal family and the wider population.
A Royal Temple
During the early Joseon dynasty, Jinkwansa served as a royal temple where Buddhist rites were performed for the royal Yi family — the house of King Taejo, founder of the Joseon dynasty and grandfather of King Sejong, the creator of the Hangul alphabet.1
Tradition also holds that, under King Sejong, scholars continued research on the newly created Hangul alphabet here, away from political opposition at court.
Roots Beyond the Border
The royal family's early power base lay in Hamhung, in what is now North Korea, like many Korean families whose roots lie north of today's border — a reminder that Korean history long predates the peninsula's modern division.
Gukhaeng Suryukjae
First commissioned by King Taejo in 1397, shortly after the founding of Joseon, this rite has continued for more than six centuries and is now recognized as a National Intangible Cultural Heritage of Korea.
Suryukjae (수륙재) comes from su (水, water) and ryuk (陸, land), together symbolizing the entire realm of existence and all beings within it.
Unlike Confucian ancestral rites devoted primarily to one's own family lineage, it extends far beyond kinship and rank.
Prayers are offered for those who died in war or disaster, those with no descendants to remember them, the unnamed and forgotten, wandering spirits of land and water, hungry souls, the living, the dead — ultimately all sentient beings.
Today, the annual rite brings together religious leaders, government officials, the military, police and fire services, veterans, diplomats, and the public — a national act of remembrance, reconciliation, and peace.
Confucianism provided the principles by which the kingdom was governed; Buddhism offered the rituals through which it remembered, mourned, and sought peace.
A Refuge for Independence
During the Japanese occupation (1910–1945), Jinkwansa quietly provided refuge for those involved in the independence movement. The discovery of hidden documents beneath the temple grounds in 2009 revealed another chapter in its history as a guardian of Korea's cultural and national memory.
Only a few years after liberation, the Korean War (1950–1953) separated around ten million people from their families — making questions of memory, home, and reconciliation deeply personal for generations of Koreans.
The Spirit in a Meal
Temple cuisine is not simply food without meat; it is an invitation to consider the many lives, hands, seasons, and acts of care that made the meal — and our own presence here — possible.
Together, the rite and the meal offer a moment to reflect on all that has carried us to this point, and on the gratitude we owe beyond ourselves.
A Moral Tradition, Still at Work
Long before the language of human rights or civil society entered Korea, Suryukjae embodied a remarkably expansive vision of compassion — one that extended beyond family, status, or even the boundary between the living and the dead.
While modern democracy emerged through complex political, economic, and social forces, Korea's culture of empathy and shared responsibility also draws from much older moral traditions such as this one — traditions that continue to shape the country's moral imagination today.
Jinkwansa, in Glimpses
