Images of Monasticism: The Temple Stay Program and The Re-Branding of Korean Buddhist Temples.” Korean Studies Vol. 34: 127-146.

Summary 5

Images of Monasticism: The Temple Stay Program and the Re-branding of Korean Buddhist Temples

The national government and the Buddhist establishment are involved in branding the temple stay within the history of the Korean History. This summary will discuss cultural contents that were introduced into the monasteries via the temple stay program, which began in 2002.

Introduction

The temple stay program brought various changes in functions and images of Korean Buddhist temples. An example of such a change is the remote mountain temples which have begun hosting branded tourist camps, which offer so called authentic experiences specifically designed for tourists, such as cooking and martial arts class. This is why this article discusses that temples are transforming from simply being sacred sites of a religion into inclusive hybrid displays of national heritages.

The Korean heritage industry

The heritage industry began with a colonizer, who strive to eliminate Korean national discourse and imaginary. However, under Japanese colonization the Koreans began to preserve and restore Korea’s cultural assets, which includes systemizing Korean archeology, the ‘heritage project’. Furthermore, two laws were introduced in 1962, namely the Cultural Assets Preservation law (formalized reorganization of heritage industry) and the Control of Buddhist Property (gave government the right to interfere in the economics of temples, draft monks for military purpose and maintain police agents in temples). During this time, Korea was aiming at uniting people around a common heritage and in this way, solidify their power. However, to achieve this, people had to be going to these places, and thus tourism was promoted for the sake of nationalism.

The tourism idea was a success, as entrance fees were collected and these could be used to preserve the heritage site and make it more easily accessible to tourists. In this way, the temples have become living museums, as the temples were still being used by monks.

However, some people criticize using sacred sited for the sake of tourism. Such as ‘diminishing quality of the spirit of the place due to retailing of religious places’. Also, some scholars of Korean Buddhism argue that tourists bring too much noise with them, which disturbs meditation in temples. But temples have responded to tourism in two different ways. The first being that they tried to limit tourists by restricting them from various parts of the temples, not wanting to become a public amusement park following government plans. The second being that temples realized the economic possibilities of joining tourism trade.

The Temple Stay

It all started with the world cup in 2002, when the government sought out more places for tourists to stay over. They discusses the opportunity with temple leaders (the Chogye order), consequently a package of both accommodation and cultural/spiritual experience was offered by temples. In this way, the temple stay stimulated both the Buddhist universalistic intention and the touristic nationalistic intention. This initial collaboration resulted in positive replies from tourist attendants and so this package continued even after the world cup. Although there were some initial disagreements, in the end the temple stay program still resumed.