Baedamsa Temple, Inje, South Korea

Baedamsa Temple, Inje, South Korea

746, Baekdam-ro, Buk-myeon, Inje-gun, Gangwon-do, Republic of Korea

Baedamsa Temple, nestled at the heart of the inner Seorak range, is a place connected to two figures who left profoundly significant marks on Korea's modern and contemporary history. It is also, for me personally, a place threaded through with memories from childhood. Heading out from Inje in Gangwon Province toward the junction for Hangyeryeong Pass and turning in the direction of Jinburyeong, one soon reaches the entrance to Baedamsa at Yongdae-ri; from there, an unpaved road winds upward for some eight kilometers before the temple comes into view. In years past, visitors would walk this path for two hours, or make the journey by taxi or private car. But returning after twenty years, I found that everything had changed: all private vehicles are now stopped at the national park entrance, and the only way to reach the temple parking area is by a shuttle bus run for a fare of two thousand won each way. The shuttle, I was told, is operated by residents of the surrounding village — a welcome sight of the kind one more often associates with famous tourist destinations or national parks abroad.

Baedamsa, revisited after nearly twenty years, has changed a great deal. What was once a small and modest hermitage has expanded considerably; multiple new halls now stand within the precinct, and the temple runs templestay programs alongside various other revenue-generating activities, much like well-known temples elsewhere in the country. The atmosphere of remote solitude that I remembered from before — the sense of a place deep in the mountains, quietly keeping to itself — has largely disappeared, and I felt a faint pang of regret at finding it gone. Yet the valley stream of the inner Seorak flowing before the temple was as beautiful as ever, and for a long while I found myself lost in memories of my university years, when I had climbed the trail from this very spot up through Bongjeongam Hermitage all the way to Daecheongbong Peak — a route I completed three times in those days.

According to the temple chronicle written by the monk Manhae Han Yong-un, Baedamsa was founded in 647 — the first year of Queen Jindeok, the twenty-eighth ruler of Silla — by the monk Jajang, under the name Hangyesa, and was renamed Baedamsa in 1783. This brings me to Manhae Han Yong-un himself, the author of that chronicle, who cannot go unmentioned here. The name Manhae Han Yong-un may call to mind first and foremost his poetry collection The Silence of Love, but Manhae was far more than a poet: he was the preeminent Buddhist intellectual of the Japanese colonial period, a leading figure in the resistance against Japanese rule, one of the thirty-three representatives of the Korean people who signed the Declaration of Independence during the March First Movement of 1919, and the founder and driving force behind the Korean Buddhist Youth Association — one of the most prominent independence activists of his era.

Perhaps because of this, once one understands that background and looks at Baedamsa with fresh eyes, the entire atmosphere of the place seems suffused with Manhae's presence. The experience of passing through Baedamsa in youth as little more than a waystation on the way to climb Seoraksan, and the experience of returning with a true understanding of the temple's history, are entirely different things. Baedamsa was never a large temple to begin with, and it holds no particularly notable cultural artifacts. Yet the spirit of Manhae Han Yong-un that permeates this place, and the traces he left here, are alone enough to give the whole temple an overwhelming weight.

There is, however, a second figure associated with Baedamsa — former President Chun Doo-hwan. Having seized power through the military coup of May 1980 and subsequently convicted of massive corruption following his time in office, Chun served part of his sentence before receiving a presidential pardon, after which he retreated to Baedamsa for several years of self-imposed seclusion, eventually returning to his home in Seoul once public attention had subsided. Baedamsa stands at the center of that chapter of his life. Standing within the temple grounds and holding both men in mind, the contrast could not be starker: one figure's legacy grows only brighter, the other's only more squalid. Had Chun known how history would judge him, one imagines he might have thought twice before choosing to take refuge in a place so imbued with Manhae's moral and spiritual legacy.

There is an irony in all of this. Baedamsa was once little more than a small hermitage — precisely the quality that gave it such warmth and intimacy. But in the wake of the former president's stay and the notoriety it brought, the temple appears to have grown several times over in scale, expanding into something rivaling the more established temples of the country. For someone who travels in search of Korea's finest and most unspoiled temples, it registers as something of a blemish on an otherwise fine picture. I arrived at Baedamsa at four in the afternoon, and after an hour of wandering through every corner of the grounds, it was five o'clock; the sun was beginning to settle against the mountainside, and the temple, caught in the backlight, took on a quality of quiet mystery. It was just at that moment that I had to hurry away to make the return journey, and riding the shuttle bus back down to Yongdae-ri, I let my thoughts drift once more to those precious memories of younger days.

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