JINKWANSA
of Korean History
A Guardian of Seoul
Nestled within Bukhansan National Park, just outside downtown Seoul, Jinkwansa offers a remarkable window into Korea's history, spirituality, and cultural identity.
Although it served the royal court, the temple is strikingly modest in scale — offering quiet, intimacy, and a deeply human sense of place rather than grandeur.
Step into a Thousand-Year Tradition
of Leadership, Balance and Reflection
For nearly a thousand years, Jinkwansa has offered a place to slow down, reflect, and return to what matters. This is not about Buddhism alone — it is an invitation into a living tradition of balance, presence, clarity, and purposeful leadership.
One of Seoul's oldest royal temples
Nestled within Bukhansan National Park
Home to Korea's renowned temple cuisine
A place where leaders, scholars and practitioners have sought clarity for centuries
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.
Over centuries, Korean monks, scholars and practitioners shaped Buddhism into something distinctly their own — an enduring Mahayana tradition of philosophy, art and spiritual practice that would influence the wider region.
Goryeo and Joseon
Under Goryeo (918–1392) — 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 succeeded Goryeo in 1392, it grounded a new political order in Neo-Confucian principles of ethical government, education, hierarchy, social harmony, and filial duty. Rather than replacing Buddhism, Joseon layered Confucian governance upon an enduring Buddhist spiritual tradition — one that lost its official primacy but remained deeply embedded in the lives of the royal family and the wider population.
A Royal Temple
Jinkwansa began with an act of refuge. Before he became King Hyeonjong, the young prince was hidden here and saved from assassination by the monk Jingwan. After ascending the throne, he built the temple in gratitude—an early chapter in the life of a king who would later lose his capital to invasion, reclaim his kingdom, and rebuild the foundations of Goryeo.
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 Great, the creator of the Hangul alphabetic system.1
Tradition also holds that, under King Sejong the Great, scholars continued research on the newly created Hangul alphabetic system here, away from political opposition at court.
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.
Perhaps this was no coincidence: the Joseon dynasty itself was born amid war, dynastic transition, political conflict, and considerable bloodshed — making rituals of remembrance and reconciliation all the more meaningful.
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 here, and on the gratitude we owe beyond ourselves.
Jinkwansa once served as a jopo-sa (조포사, 造泡寺) for the royal court — a temple officially charged with preparing tofu for royal ancestral rites. Today, vegetables are grown on the temple grounds, traditional sauces and soybean pastes are made and aged in-house, and seasonal produce is preserved through fermentation, which Venerable Kyeho calls “the art of waiting.” That quiet discipline has drawn culinary figures from around the world, including Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin and Sam Kass, former Obama White House chef.
A Quiet Forum for Cultural Diplomacy
Jinkwansa’s relationship with public life did not end with the kings of Joseon. In recent years, its visitors have included Queen Mathilde of the Belgians, Jill Biden, Yuko Kishida, actor and humanitarian Richard Gere, a Bhutanese princess, and successive Korean presidents.
Here, diplomacy takes a quieter form: temple food, tea, meditation, and conversation. Protocol gives way to reflection, and public roles briefly fall away.
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
