A mountain at the end of a ridge, and three temples in Yeongnam

Beomeosa, in these notes, sits inside Geumjeongsan, the mountain the writer calls Busan’s representative peak. It was founded, they say, to make a quiet, sheltered place for practice, in harmony with the land, and to carry out the Avatamsaka adornment that a temple is meant to hold. It specializes in Seon, and stands with Haeinsa and Tongdosa as one of the three great temples of Yeongnam. The Beomeo lineage, they add, sits with the Deoksung lineage as one of two great houses of the Jogye order, and Beomeosa is the house’s central temple.

At the far tip of the Baekdudaegan, the notes place a site full of force, and they set the Geumeo Seon hall at the vital point where that force gathers, as a mark of a leading Seon temple. Buddhist Three Jewels thought and Confucian three-way harmony, they say, meet here with unusual ease. The notes also point to written founding records: Gajeok, the Beomeosa Founding History, and an account of the first building and later rebuilding on Geumjeongsan, as well as the “Uisang Transmits the Teaching” chapter of Ilyeon’s Samguk Yusa, where the temple appears again among the ten Avatamsaka temples.

Records that disagree, and a year that the notes say cannot exist

The founding dates, the notes insist, are not the same from record to record. The Beomeosa Founding History places the building in the reign of Silla’s King Heungdeok. Gajeok writes the nineteenth year of Tang Emperor Wenzong’s Taihe era, still in Heungdeok’s reign. But Taihe, the notes say, was used only from 827 to 835, so a nineteenth year of that era does not exist.

Chae Sang-sik, in this telling, reads a year called Eulmyo as the ninth year of Taihe, which would be Heungdeok’s tenth year, and treats “nineteenth” as a slip for “ninth.” Choi Wan-su, the notes say, reads the nineteenth year of King Munmyo, a year marked Gimyo, as having been written down by mistake as the nineteenth year of Taihe. Another line in the notes mentions the nineteenth year of King Munmu (679), three years after Uisang built Buseoksa in 676. The writer does not choose a winner among these. A founding legend also appears, they add, in the geography monograph of the Veritable Records of King Sejong and in a Founding History by the monk Donggye. In the fifth year of Gwanghae (1613), monks together fitted out halls, images, and utensils; the details, the notes say, are in a 1714 repair record of a Maitreya image written by Bongsang in the fortieth year of King Sukjong.

A school in 1908, and a closing in 1919

Beomeosa, the notes say, also ran a modern course of education. The Myungjeong school was established there in 1908 as the first modern educational institution of its kind at the temple. In 1916, with a reorganization of the secondary course, a local academy was set up and split away. That academy, they write, trained people with modern ideas and an anti-Japanese consciousness, and served as an important bridge, but in 1919, only three years after it opened, it was forced to close because of Beomeosa’s involvement in the March First Movement. Those years stay in the notes’ window. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Temple records named in the notes: Gajeok, the Beomeosa Founding History, and the Geumjeongsan first-building and rebuilding account
2. Ilyeon’s Samguk Yusa, the chapter “Uisang Transmits the Teaching,” as the notes cite it

Last updated: 14 November 2026