Beomeosa Temple

I started yesterday morning at a seaside temple, Haedong Yonggungsa. But recognizing that variety is, as they say, the spice of life, I switched things up this morning and began with a mountainside temple, Beomeosa Temple.

Beomeosa Temple is another of those Busan sights that takes a while to get to, at least from my hotel, as so many of them do, likely due to a mountain or two getting in the way.

I looked at my mapping app for ways to get there. It told me that the fastest public transit route would take almost an hour and a quarter and involve a metro, a bus, and some walking.

I switched to the driving route tab as a surrogate measure for how long it would take for an Uber to get me there. That requires a 50-minute drive. Faster, but still much longer than what I’d classify as fast.

I decided to take transit, and I set out for Beomeosa Temple. That considered, no matter which of the options I chose, I wasn’t at all convinced that it would be about the journey, not the destination, but what are you going to do? The exploration continues.

In truth, it took a little more than an hour and a quarter to get there because when I walked from the metro to the bus stop, I saw my bus pull away just before I got there. I had to wait ten minutes for the next one.

At Beomeosa Temple

In the opening paragraph, I called Beomeosa Temple a mountainside temple, but that’s not exactly true. However, neither is it a mountaintop temple.

Beomeosa Temple* sits high up on a broad plateau between some mountains. The plateau is elevated enough that if the surrounding mountains magically disappeared, I’d readily call it a mountain in its own right.

(Autocorrect insisted that I meant “Romeo’s” when I typed Beomeosa. After typing it a few times, it learned, though. Eventually, it even started offering Beomosa as an autocomplete option.)

Before you ask, no, I did not have to climb all the way up to Beomeosa Temple. The bus covered most of the elevation on a twisting mountain road.

I read in Wikipedia that Beomeosa is the transliteration of the Korean word for “Temple of the Nirvana Fish.” So you know it’s going to be a great place.

Beomeosa Temple is in a beautiful setting, surrounded by lush forests covering tall, but gentle, adjacent mountains.

Just inside the temple compound, before the ceremonial gates, so perhaps not technically in the compound, there is a plot of flat ground on which sits an array of sculptures. I call them sculptures out of ignorance. Monuments or memorials are probably more accurate.

All but a few are of the same general style. The top is a carved, attractive, sculpted grey stone shape, a different shape for each monument. Below that is a shiny black polished stone monolith made of some sort of polished stone. The monoliths each rest on the back of its own giant stone turtle. So there was that.

Beomeosa Temple Gates

The Beomeosa Temple compound has a few, independent, gracefully decorated gate structures with roofs of traditional Korean style.

One has a beautifully crafted and adorned heavy roof resting on four cylindrical pillars.

The bottom of each of the four pillars, which makes up the majority of their height, is constructed of stone.

Atop each of the four stone cylinders are stubby wood pillars. The roof rests on those four stubby wood pillars.

There is a sign near this four-pillar gate. (I forgot, did I mention it has four pillars?) The bilingual sign gives the English name of the four-pillar gate as “The One Pillar Gate, or Mountain Gate.”

The sign then explains that it’s called the One Pillar Gate because, if you look at it from the side, it looks like only a single pillar is holding up the roof. I looked at it from the side. It does.

Another of the gates, for which I didn’t see a name, has a more substantial base. Two small rooms face each other. Both have one open side. The open side of each room faces the other. The walkway through the gate is between the rooms.

Inside the rooms are four larger-than-life guardian statues, two per room, attempting, but failing to look fierce.

Other Beomeosa Elements

Inside the compound, there are several halls attractively, not glaringly, decorated in the traditional Korean temple style.

There’s also a tall, slender stone pagoda.

As I said, the temple is in a wooded area. There are trails through the woods and trails to elsewhere, deeper into the forest, to a couple of hermitages, and into the national park. I kept to the Beomeosa Temple grounds.

In a forest clearing not far from the buildings, there are more of what are probably funereal monuments, but they look very different from the ones I mentioned above.

They are all made of stone, with a tastefully decorative doodad on top. The middle section, which makes up the bulk of the monument, is usually a somewhat bulbous cylinder, often with patterned carvings on it. The bases are mostly squat, upturned bowl shapes with decorative carvings, often sitting on a plain, low, square pedestal. The collection of them was solemnly evocative. Evocative of what, I’m not sure. But whatever it evoked in me was solemn.

I spent the whole morning, or what was left of it after the journey to the temple, wandering the grounds of Beomeosa Temple and its immediately surrounding nature. Then, I caught the bus down to a different metro station and called it a morning. Because what else would you call the day part up to roughly noonish? Fred?

Far From Madding Crowds

By the way, my guidebook said that Haedong Yonggungsa, which I visited yesterday, tends to be crowded on weekends. I have no idea if it was right in that, but it was wrong in implying it wouldn’t be packed on weekdays. Yesterday was Tuesday. It was crowded.

It said the same thing about Beomeosa Temple. Today is Wednesday. It’s surprising how often that happens when yesterday was Tuesday. It’s like it’s a rule or something.

The point is that Beomeosa Temple was kind of uncrowded. “Kind of” is an ambiguous phrase. You probably think I mean that it was almost uncrowded, but not quite. That’s not it at all.

There’s a large courtyard in front of the main hall. When I was there, the courtyard was full of plastic chairs. Probably at least a couple hundred of them, maybe more.

The vast majority of seats had bums in them. I probably don’t need to tell you that by “bums,” I don’t mean vagrants. I mean backsides, butts, tushes, buttocks, derrières, or behinds, if you will.

I probably don’t need to tell you that, but I will. By “bums,” I don’t mean vagrants. I mean backsides, butts, tushes, buttocks, derrières, or behinds, if you will.

Someone was speaking to the crowd with the aid of a high-fidelity speaker system. I think he was giving a sermon, but how would I know? It was in Korean. I don’t speak Korean. More importantly, because I wasn’t called on to speak, I also don’t understand Korean when I hear it spoken.

Attendants ushered me around the side of the courtyard so I could see the rest of the temple compound without impinging on the assembled crowd.

I wandered around and, after a while, got within earshot of the courtyard again. The guy was no longer speaking. He or someone else was chanting instead.

I wandered some more. Before I left, I went to the courtyard. The assembled crowd was gone. Completely. A couple of men were starting to take down some paraphernalia and remove the chairs. Apart from them, there were just a very few other tourists and me there.

Where did those people go? I didn’t go all that far from the courtyard in front of the main hall. Nor was I away from it for all that long. At no time did I see people streaming to cars or buses. Nor were there any people milling about, schmoozing after the event or service or whatever it was. They just disappeared. I hope they didn’t fill up Nirvana.

Wait. That wasn’t where I was going with that at all. The point that I was going to make was that, other than those people at the event, there weren’t a lot of people at Beomeosa Temple today.

And those event people remained confined to one place. They weren’t wandering about en masse, invading my perambulating personal space as was the case at Haedong Yonggungsa Temple. So, that was good.