A Programme That Began as a Room Shortage

The wake-up is at four. A monk walks the courtyard striking a wooden fish, then the great bell is rung twenty-eight times, and by half past four you are in the main hall with your forehead on the floor. This happens whether or not you are a Buddhist, whether or not you slept, and whether or not you understood any of it — which for most visitors is the point.

Korea's templestay programme began in 2002, and it began for a reason that has nothing to do with spirituality: the country was co-hosting the football World Cup and did not have enough hotel rooms.

An accommodation shortage

The Jogye Order opened thirty-three temples to visitors for the tournament as overflow lodging. It was meant to be temporary. Roughly two million people have done it since, and about 140 temples now run programmes, many with English-speaking guides.

What began as a room-shortage fix turned into the most effective cultural programme the country runs, and into a lifeline for mountain temples with ageing congregations and expensive wooden buildings to maintain.

It exists because Korea needed beds in 2002. Twenty years later it is how a foreigner is most likely to spend a night inside Korean Buddhism, and how many Koreans reconnect with it.

What you actually do

Arrive in the afternoon, change into loose grey clothes, learn how to bow and how to eat. Barugongyang — the formal monastic meal — is served in nested bowls and finished by rinsing them with water and drinking it, so that nothing is wasted and nothing is left. Doing it correctly takes concentration and doing it incorrectly is quietly embarrassing, which is a good teacher.

Then the evening bell, early sleep on a heated floor, the four o'clock service, and often 108 prostrations — one for each of the afflictions — which is a physical exercise long before it is a religious one. Some temples add tea with a monk, walking meditation, or making a lotus lantern.

Choosing one

The official programme lists temples by whether they offer English support and by whether the schedule is "relaxation" or "experience". Relaxation means you may sleep through the 4am service; experience means you may not.

Mountain temples are the ones worth travelling for — Bongjeongsa near Andong, Golgulsa with its Sunmudo martial-art practice, Haeinsa where the Tripitaka Koreana has been stored on 80,000 woodblocks since the thirteenth century. City temples are convenient and it is not the same night.