Ssangbongsa Temple

In a quiet valley in Iyang-myeon, Hwasun, this thousand-year-old temple is known for an unusual main hall shaped like a three-storey wooden pagoda and for the stupa of Master Cheolgam, a National Treasure. The stupa, one of the finest of the Unified Silla period, is famous for carving so delicate that the stone seems to have been worked like wood. Ssangbongsa is small, but the hall and the stupa alone justify the trip.

Master Doyun and the temple's history

No one knows exactly when Ssangbongsa was founded. The stele of the monk Hyecheol at Taeansa in Gokseong records that he spent the summer at Ssangbongsa after returning from Tang China in 839, so the temple must already have existed by then. It grew under the Silla monk Doyun, who went to Tang China in 825, trained there for more than twenty years and came back in 847. He settled here and named the temple after his pen name, Ssangbong ("twin peaks"). When he died at the temple in 868, King Gyeongmun gave him the posthumous title Cheolgam and ordered a stupa and stele to be built.

In the Goryeo period the temple was powerful enough that Choe Hang, ruler of the military regime, served as its abbot. Most of its buildings, however, burned during the Japanese invasion of 1597, and the temple was badly damaged again in the Korean War. In 2014 Ssangbongsa was designated a South Jeolla Province monument.

Daeungjeon: a hall shaped like a pagoda

The Daeungjeon is a square hall, one bay wide on every side, crowned by three tiers of roofs in the form of a three-storey wooden pagoda. The first two roofs are hipped and the top one is hipped-and-gabled, and densely packed brackets carry the long eaves. Without a spire it is not strictly a pagoda, but together with Palsangjeon at Beopjusa it is one of the rare examples showing what Korean wooden pagodas looked like. A ridge-beam inscription found during repairs revealed that the building had been rebuilt for the third time in 1724. It burned down in a fire on 3 April 1984 and lost its Treasure status; the present hall was rebuilt in its old form in 1986. Inside, Shakyamuni Buddha is flanked by his disciples Ananda and Kasyapa.

The stupa and stele of Master Cheolgam

On the hillside to the west, behind the main hall, stands the stupa that holds Master Cheolgam's relics.

• Stupa of Master Cheolgam (National Treasure): an octagonal stupa 2.3 m high. Eight lions seated on clouds, each in a different pose, are carved on the lower base, and the roof stone and body reproduce the joinery of a timber building in stone. Only the finial is missing; the rest is almost intact.
• Stele of Master Cheolgam (Treasure): the inscribed stone slab is gone, leaving the turtle-shaped base and the capstone. The 1.4 m base is carved with clouds and lotus petals, and the characters on the capstone identify it as Cheolgam's stele.

Tripto tips

• Hours: 07:00–19:00, every day, free entry, with parking.
• Time needed: about an hour to look properly at the hall and the stupa. The stupa is only a few minutes up the hill path from the temple courtyard.
• Best season: October–November, when the trees around the main hall turn.
• Getting there: the address is 459 Ssangsanui-ro, Iyang-myeon, Hwasun County. By public transport you have to change at Hwasun-eup to a rural bus towards Iyang-myeon, so a car or taxi is the realistic option.
• Etiquette: monks still live and practise here. Keep quiet in the halls and avoid taking photos during services.
• Combine it with: Unjusa, also in Hwasun, to see the county's two best-known temples in one day.