Daeungjeon Hall of Songnimsa Temple, Chilgok

The Daeungjeon Hall of Songnimsa Temple, Chilgok is a single-storey building, five bays across the front and three bays deep; a five-bay front is an uncommon scale among surviving late-Joseon Buddhist halls. Records show that before the Imjin War, main halls typically had a two-storey structure or a front of three bays or more, but after the destruction wrought by the Imjin War, halls rebuilt from the seventeenth century onward mostly failed to recover their former scale. This tendency toward the continual shrinking of temple halls became more pronounced through the experience of the war, and in this climate a front of three bays and a depth of three bays became the standard type able to retain a hall's status and fulfil its visual and spatial role. Against this trend, the Daeungjeon Hall of Songnimsa, rebuilt as a five-bay main hall, is recognised as distinctive in scale alone among temples where three-bay halls predominate. Five-bay halls built in the late Joseon period are few in number, and it should also be considered that most of the surviving examples are now protected as State-designated heritage. When the Daeungjeon Hall was rebuilt in 1649, its floor plan retained older, archaic features in the placement of the altar and the wall behind the Buddha images and in the bay arrangement, in contrast to halls rebuilt in the same period. The altar stands at the centre of the hall and is large in scale, measuring 13 m across, 2.44 m deep and 1.03 m high, its front carved with elaborate relief decoration. Because the altar occupies the central three bays, the interior worship space of the Daeungjeon Hall, although nominally a five-bay hall, ends up no more spacious than that of an ordinary hall. As the practice developed of holding rites indoors, there arose a need to expand the interior space, and the common solution of the period was to set back the row of tall interior columns (the "iju" technique) to enlarge the worship space in front of the Buddha images. The Daeungjeon Hall of Songnimsa, however, placed the wall behind the Buddha images against the rear row of tall columns and set the altar to span the full width of the central three bays, giving it a floor plan in which the altar occupies the centre of the interior. This bay arrangement is interpreted as reflecting the archaic technique also seen in buildings such as the West Geumdang Hall of the Manboksa Temple Site and the Geungnakjeon Hall of Muryangsa Temple. The bracket sets of the Daeungjeon Hall of Songnimsa are of a type without ox-tongue-shaped tips on the bracket arms, classified as the "bridge-head" style. This style of bracket set is comparatively archaic and was not widely used in the late Joseon period. It is a notable feature that buildings adopting the bridge-head bracket style in this period are concentrated in the area around Palgongsan Mountain, where Songnimsa stands; behind this lies the monk-carpenter Gakwon, and the finding that carpenter-monks who inherited his skills and techniques built the structures of this region deserves close attention. Beyond the bracket sets, an influence can also be traced in the structure of the buildings these carpenters built, a subject that calls for further in-depth research. In the repair of 1850, old timber members continued to be used; the contents of the ridge-beam record and the reused members suggest that this repair may have brought about architectural changes in several respects compared with the earlier Daeungjeon Hall. Faced with an inability to obtain new timber, the repair was completed using the existing members of the Daeungjeon Hall — that is, the old timber — and it is thought possible that in the course of this repair the roof form was altered from a hipped-and-gabled roof to a gable roof. The 1850 repair thus began from the practical difficulty of obtaining new materials and resulted, through the extensive reuse of old members, in a transformation of the building's architectural form. In fact, this situation can readily be observed in other late-Joseon main halls as well, but the Daeungjeon Hall of Songnimsa is distinguished by the fact that the evidence of its architectural members and the record in its ridge-beam inscription corroborate each other — a value that sets it apart from other halls whose history can only be inferred from their members alone, without documentary record.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Chilgok, Gyeongbuk

Designation

Treasure · 보물