Temple story · Traditional attribution
Two Temples for Two Lives' Parents
Iryeon, Samguk yusa
Samguk yusa, fascicle 5, 'Filial Piety and Goodness': 'Daeseong Honors the Parents of Two Lives'
To honor the parents of two lives with a single body is something rarely heard of, even in ancient times.
In the Silla village of Moryang, it is said, a poor boy named Daeseong urged his mother to give the field she had earned by hired labor to a Buddhist assembly, and not long after, he died. That night a voice from the sky called out at the house of the minister Kim Mun-ryang, 'Daeseong of Moryang now entrusts himself to your house,' and the child later born there kept his left fist closed for seven days, then opened it to show a gold tablet carved with the characters 大城, 'Daeseong.' His new family also took in the mother of his former life, and when the grown Daeseong, who loved hunting, killed a bear on Tohamsan and it appeared in a dream asking him to build a temple, he gave up hunting. Iryeon wrote in the Samguk yusa that Daeseong then built Bulguksa for his parents in this life and Seokbulsa, today's Seokguram, for his parents in the previous one. Iryeon added that the temple's own record said Daeseong began building Bulguksa in 751 and the state completed it after his death, which differs from the old tale, and that he could not tell which was right. After Bulguksa, visit Seokguram, the other temple of the same story.