Seoul's Buddhist Temples, and the Templestay Worth Booking

Jogyesa sits in a compound off a busy street five minutes west of Insadong, and it is the administrative head of the Jogye Order, the largest Buddhist order in Korea. That means it is busy in a working sense: monks crossing the yard, services running, offices behind the halls.

The main hall holds three large gilded Buddhas and is open to visitors, who may enter quietly, remove shoes and sit at the back. In the courtyard stands an old white pine and a lacebark pine, both protected, and a seven-storey pagoda holding relics.

What makes it worth planning around is the lantern season. In the weeks before Buddha's birthday, which falls in May, the entire courtyard is hung with thousands of paper lotus lanterns, and the streets around it carry the lantern parade. It is the best free spectacle in central Seoul, and it lasts several weeks rather than a single day.

The temple runs templestay and short 'temple life' programmes in English, and the information centre opposite the main gate handles bookings.

Bongeunsa was founded in 794 and has stood on the slope above what is now Gangnam through every version of the city that has existed since. Today it faces the COEX convention centre across eight lanes of traffic, and that juxtaposition is the single most photographed thing about it.

The compound climbs the hill in terraces: main hall, halls of the disciples, and at the top a twenty-three-metre standing stone Buddha, the largest in the country, with the Gangnam skyline behind it.

It is free and open daily. The temple runs a well-established templestay, including an English-language programme, and holds a regular Sunday service in English — one of the few in the city.

The practical case for going is the pairing. Starfield Library is five minutes away inside the mall, Lotte World Tower is twenty minutes east, and the three together make the only afternoon south of the river that a first-time visitor genuinely needs.

Templestay is a national programme, launched around the 2002 World Cup, in which working temples host guests overnight. It is not a hotel arrangement and it is not a retreat in the wellness sense.

The standard shape: you arrive in the afternoon, change into loose temple clothes, take part in a tea ceremony with a monk, attend the evening chanting, sleep on a mat on a heated floor in a shared or simple room, and get up for the dawn service — which is usually around 03:30 or 04:00. Meals are vegetarian, taken in silence in some temples, and served in the formal barugongyang style at others, where you eat everything and clean the bowls with water and a piece of radish.

English-language programmes exist at both central temples and at several outside the city, and the fee is modest — this is not a commercial product and the temples are not trying to make money on it.

What it suits: anyone curious about the discipline rather than the aesthetics, and anyone who wants one night of a Korea that has nothing to do with cities. What it does not suit: a lie-in. Vegetarian visitors will also find the food page useful, since temple cuisine is the most reliable vegetarian eating in Korea.