Hwangnyongsa Temple Site, Gyeongju

Hwangnyongsa Temple was originally being built as a palace to the east of Wolseong Palace Site in Gyeongju, in the fourteenth year of King Jinheung of Silla (553), but when word came that a yellow dragon (hwangnyong) had appeared on the site, construction was changed to a temple instead, completed after seventeen years. Later, in 574, King Ashoka of India, having failed in his attempt to cast a Sakyamuni Triad using 57,000 geun of iron and 30,000 bun of gold — traditional Korean units of weight — sent the metal and a model of the triad by ship; when these reached Silla territory, they were used as the material to cast the triad. To house this Buddha image, more than 5 metres tall, the Golden Hall (geumdang) was built in the sixth year of King Jinpyeong (584). In the twelfth year of Queen Seondeok (643), at the urging of the monk Jajang, newly returned from study in Tang China, a nine-storey wooden pagoda was built in the hope of warding off foreign invasion, each storey said to represent a hostile country; it was completed in 645 by the Baekje craftsman Abiji. Hwangnyongsa was thus a great temple built as a state project over ninety-three years, and its importance can be judged from the fact that, of Silla's three treasures other than the Heaven-Bestowed Jade Belt, the remaining two were the nine-storey wooden pagoda and the great Buddha image (jangyuk jonsang) of Hwangnyongsa. The temple also expresses well the Silla people's Buddhist belief that the land of Silla was itself the land where the Buddha dwelt. Hwangnyongsa was entirely burned down, however, in the Mongol invasion of the twenty-fifth year of King Gojong of Goryeo (1238), and only traces of it now remain. Built on reclaimed marshland, the temple originally had a single-pagoda layout, with the middle gate, wooden pagoda, Golden Hall and lecture hall arranged in a line running north to south. After the great Buddha image and the pagoda were built, however, this changed to a one-pagoda, three-Golden-Hall layout, with small Golden Halls added on either side of the main one, and a bell tower and sutra tower (gyeongnu) placed symmetrically on either side of the pagoda. The whole precinct was enclosed by corridor-like cloisters (hoerang), giving the temple a distinctive layout. According to the Samguk yusa, the bell tower held an enormous bell, which appears to have been lost at the time of the Mongol invasion. Excavations begun in 1976 have unearthed some 40,000 relics, including a standing gilt-bronze Buddha, wind chimes, gilt-bronze earrings and various glass objects, and a great chimi (an owl-tail-shaped roof ornament) 182 cm tall, which gives a sense of the building's massive scale. The Golden Hall is said to have held a mural painted by Solgeo, and a white porcelain jar from Tang China, found at the site of the wooden pagoda, gives a clear picture of the exchange of material culture at the time.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Gyeongju, Gyeongbuk

Designation

Historic Site · 사적