Seokbulsa

This guide to Seokbulsa in Busan opens with a question posed by twenty-nine faces carved into a cliff above a mountain hermitage: who spends a lifetime chiseling saints into stone, alone, on a slope nobody else wanted? In 1930 a monk named Jo Ilhyeon settled into a fold of rock between two peaks, at a spot shaped like a folding screen, and instead of building a hall first, he picked up a chisel. The guide follows the pantheon he carved figure by figure, from guardian kings to a healing Buddha and a standing bodhisattva watching the valley. Stand back from the rock face and look up at how much of the mountain he turned into sculpture.