Seokbulsa
Cliffside hermitage where twenty-nine Buddhist figures are carved directly into a sandstone rock face.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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