Bulguksa

Bulguksa, on the wooded slopes of Mount Toham above Gyeongju, is the clearest surviving picture of how the kingdom of Silla imagined a Buddhist paradise on earth. A small temple stood here in the sixth century, but the complex that matters was begun in 751 by the chief minister Kim Daeseong and completed by the royal court in 774, after his death. Together with the Seokguram grotto higher up the same mountain, it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995.

The genius of Bulguksa is in its stone, not its timber. The wooden halls burned during the Japanese invasions of the 1590s and were rebuilt many times, most recently in a large restoration in 1969–73, but the Silla platforms, balustrades and stairways survive. The temple is raised on a massive stone terrace, and visitors once entered paradise by climbing the stone stair-bridges set into its face: Cheongungyo and Baegungyo, the Blue Cloud and White Cloud bridges, rising in two flights to the gate of the main precinct, and beside them the smaller Lotus and Seven Treasures bridges leading to the Hall of Supreme Bliss. Their symbolism is literal: the climb from the world of mortals to the Buddha land was meant to be made on foot, step by step.

In the courtyard in front of the main hall, Daeungjeon, stand the two most famous stone pagodas in Korea, deliberately unlike each other. Seokgatap, about 8 metres high, is a model of restraint, plain and perfectly proportioned. Dabotap, about 10 metres high, is its opposite, a fantasia of stone stairs, railings and stacked, openwork tiers that seems almost carved from wood; it is so emblematic that it appears on the Korean ten-won coin. The halls behind house the temple's principal Buddhas: Shakyamuni in Daeungjeon, Amitabha in the Hall of Supreme Bliss and Vairocana in Birojeon.

Getting there

Bulguksa lies about 12 km from central Gyeongju. The nearest airport is Ulsan Airport (USN), about 22 km away in a straight line. From Gyeongju train station or the city's bus terminals, buses 10 and 11 run to the temple in about 40 minutes, and bus 12 continues up the mountain to Seokguram.