Janggyeon Panjeon of Haeinsa
Interesting facts
- In September 1951 the air force colonel Kim Young-hwan refused an order to bomb the temple during an anti-guerrilla campaign, and his memorial tablet is now kept inside the halls.
- The storage halls have come through seven serious fires over the centuries without losing the printing blocks.
- Front windows are larger below and back windows larger above, so air enters low, circulates through the racks and leaves high.
- The racks are open on all sides, kept clear of the walls out of direct sunlight, and raised about 30 cm above the earthen floor.
- Stacked, the blocks would rise about 2.7 kilometres, close to the height of Mount Paektu; laid end to end they would stretch some 60 kilometres.
- Each block carries 23 lines of 14 characters on each face, weighs about three to four kilograms, and the whole set weighs roughly 280 tonnes.
- The monk Sugi, who checked the texts against older Chinese and Khitan editions, recorded the errors and omissions he found in 30 volumes of notes.
- Japan never carved its own woodblock canon and sought this one from 1388 onwards; about 45 complete printings were sent to Japan over the following centuries.
- The scholar Robert Buswell has compared the carving project's scale of national effort to the Apollo Moon programme.
- The South Korean internet company Naver named its data centres Gak after the scripture hall of Haeinsa.
Why it is worth it
High on the slopes of Mount Gaya, at the top of the Haeinsa temple compound, four plain wooden halls guard one of the great treasures of East Asian Buddhism: the Tripitaka Koreana, more than 81,000 carved wooden printing blocks bearing the Buddhist canon in Classical Chinese. The halls of the Janggyeong Panjeon are deliberately unadorned. Their marvel lies in how they work: for more than five centuries they have kept the blocks free of rot, warping and insects with nothing but careful siting, moving air and earth.
The blocks were carved in the 13th century under the Goryeo dynasty. An earlier set, begun in 1011 as a plea for divine protection during wars with the Khitan, was burnt during the Mongol invasions in 1232. King Gojong ordered a new one, and from 1237, with the royal court withdrawn to Ganghwa Island, monks and craftsmen spent twelve years carving it again. Each block, about 24 by 70 centimetres, was made from wood soaked in sea water, boiled in salt water and dried for years before carving; text was cut on both sides, and the finished blocks were lacquered against insects and framed with metal against warping. The result, more than 52 million characters, is the oldest complete surviving version of the Chinese Buddhist canon and served as the basis of the modern Japanese Taishō edition. It was brought to Haeinsa in 1398.
The storage halls are thought to date from the 15th century, with a recorded renovation in 1457. The two long main halls, each about 60 metres in length, face south-west to avoid damp winds rising from the valley and are sheltered from the north wind by the mountain. Windows of different sizes in the front and back walls keep air moving through the racks, and the earthen floors, packed with charcoal, lime, salt and sand, absorb moisture in the wet season and release it in the dry. The halls survived the Japanese invasions of the 1590s and the early 19th-century fire that destroyed most of the temple. When a modern storehouse was tried in the early 1970s, test blocks moved there quickly suffered damage, and the plan was abandoned. UNESCO inscribed the halls as a World Heritage Site in 1995, and the blocks are on the Memory of the World register.
Haeinsa, founded in 802, is one of Korea's Three Jewel Temples, representing the Dharma, and a head temple of the Jogye Order.
Getting there
Haeinsa lies in Gayasan National Park in Hapcheon County, South Gyeongsang Province, about 36 km from the city of Gimcheon. The nearest airport is Daegu International Airport (TAE), about 52 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Janggyeong Panjeon of Haeinsa is a building complex that houses the printing woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana and other Buddhist scriptures. It is located on Gayasan mountain in Hapcheon County, South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea. Built in the 15th century, the complex was designated as a National Treasure of South Korea in 1962 and a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage in 1995. Its scientific design has contributed to the preservation of the woodblocks for more than 600 years.
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