Korea Designates Buddhist Temple Food as National Heritage
The Korea Heritage Service announced on 19 May 2025 that the vegetarian cooking of the country's monasteries is National Intangible Cultural Heritage. Visitors can taste it in Seoul or at the temples themselves.
South Korea has designated the food of its Buddhist temples as National Intangible Cultural Heritage. The Korea Heritage Service announced the decision on 19 May 2025. It said the cuisine reflected the Buddhist spirit and had kept its traditional methods while contributing to the diversity of Korean food.
What temple food is
Temple food is the daily diet of monks and nuns and the food offered in ritual. It follows the Buddhist precepts. There is no meat and no fish. Five pungent vegetables are also excluded, among them garlic, green onions and chives, because they are held to disturb the mind. Flavour comes instead from fermented soybean paste and soy sauce made in the temple, from wild mountain greens, mushrooms, seaweed and roots, and from vegetables that are dried or pickled for the winter. Nothing is wasted. A meal is taken in silence, and each person eats everything in the bowl.
Buddhism has been practised on the peninsula for about 1,700 years, and the cuisine developed alongside ordinary Korean cooking, each influencing the other. Written records go back to the Goryeo dynasty. A collection of writings by the scholar Yi Kyu-bo, dated 1241, mentions vegetarian dumplings and kimchi made from mountain leaf mustard.
A heritage without a named holder
Korean heritage designations usually name a master or a group as the holder of a skill. This one does not. Recipes differ from temple to temple, so the Heritage Service designated temple food as a communal practice belonging to no particular person or body. The Jogye Order’s cultural arm has said it hopes the cuisine will later be put forward for UNESCO’s list.
For travellers
The cuisine became known abroad largely through the nun Jeong Kwan of Baegyangsa, a temple in the south-west, who was the subject of a widely seen television documentary in 2017.
In Seoul the simplest introduction is in the Insadong district, near Jogyesa temple, where the Buddhist order runs a restaurant serving set menus of temple dishes and a centre that gives classes in English. The fullest experience is a night in a monastery. Under the Templestay programme guests share the monks’ meals and learn the formal way of eating from four bowls; our guide to spending the night in a Buddhist temple in Korea explains how to book.