Kim Dae-seong builds Bulguksa and the Seokguram grotto

The Samguk yusa, compiled in the 13th century, tells that Kim Dae-seong, the son of a poor woman, gave the family’s small plot of land to a temple, died, and was reborn in the house of the chief minister Kim Mullyang; as a grown man he built Bulguksa for his parents in this life and Seokbulsa, the ‘Stone Buddha Temple’ — today’s Seokguram — for his parents in his former life. The same book quotes a record kept at the temple: Dae-seong, a great minister under King Gyeongdeok, began Bulguksa in the tenth year of Tianbao (751) and died on the 2nd day of the 12th month of the ninth year of Dali — 8 January 775 — after which the state completed it; the compiler notes that this differs from the old tradition. A small temple is said to have stood on the site since 528.

Bulguksa stands on stone terraces reached by two pairs of stone stairway-bridges, Cheongungyo and Baegungyo and Yeonhwagyo and Chilbogyo; in front of its main hall rise two stone pagodas of the same period, Dabotap and Seokgatap. When Seokgatap was opened for repair on 13 October 1966, after robbers had tried to break into it, a copy of the Great Dharani Sutra of Immaculate and Pure Light was found inside; printed between 704 and 751, it is one of the earliest surviving woodblock prints in the world. Higher up the mountain, some 750 m above sea level and overlooking the East Sea, stands Seokguram, begun, like Bulguksa, in 751 according to most accounts (in 742 according to others): a domed rotunda of granite blocks laid without mortar, in which a seated Buddha 3.5 m high is surrounded by fifteen relief panels of bodhisattvas, arhats and ancient Indian gods and by ten figures in niches, with the Four Heavenly Kings guarding the corridor.

The wooden buildings of Bulguksa burned during the Japanese invasions of 1592–1598, and the temple was extensively restored in 1969–1973; its stone bridges and pagodas are original. Seokguram, restored by the Japanese colonial authorities in 1913–1915 with concrete that trapped moisture, can now be seen only through a glass wall. In 1995 Bulguksa and Seokguram were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List.