Surveys of Buddhism tend to move from China straight to Japan and Tibet. Korea and Vietnam get a sentence each, usually as conduits. This is a distortion: both developed substantial traditions with distinctive positions, and both went through twentieth-century histories — colonisation, war, partition, state atheism — that reshaped them severely.

They also make a useful pair. Korea received Buddhism from northern China and kept a strongly monastic, meditation-and-scripture tradition. Vietnam received it from both China and, on the southern coast, from Indian maritime contact, and ended up the only country where Theravada and Mahayana coexist as established traditions within one national sangha.

Korea #

Transmission and the Three Kingdoms #

Buddhism entered the northern kingdom of Goguryeo in 372, when a monk named Sundo arrived from Former Qin with images and texts. Baekje, in the south-west, received it in 384 from a Central Asian monk, Malananda, travelling via eastern China. Silla, the most isolated, resisted longest, adopting it officially only in 527 — and then, according to the chronicles, because of the martyrdom of a court official named Ichadon, whose execution was followed by his blood running white.

As elsewhere, adoption was a state decision. Buddhism offered rulers a universal ideology transcending clan religion, a literate clergy, and continental prestige. Baekje then transmitted Buddhism onward to Japan in the sixth century, along with the craftsmen who built its first temples — Korean influence on early Japanese Buddhist architecture and sculpture is direct and visible.

Unified Silla and Wonhyo #

Silla unified the peninsula in 668, and the following centuries were Korean Buddhism’s intellectual high point.

Wonhyo (617–686) is the outstanding figure. Having abandoned a journey to China after an experience that became one of East Asia’s best-known Buddhist stories — drinking refreshing water from a gourd in a cave at night, then discovering by daylight that it was a skull, and concluding that everything depends on the mind — he stayed in Korea and wrote prolifically.

His characteristic project was hwajaeng, “harmonising disputes”: the argument that the competing doctrinal systems of Chinese Buddhism were partial and reconcilable rather than contradictory. This ecumenical impulse became a persistent Korean trait. Wonhyo also broke with monastic convention — he fathered a son with a princess, returned to lay life, and propagated Pure Land practice among ordinary people through song and dance.

Uisang (625–702), his friend, did travel to China, studied Huayan, and established the Korean Hwaeom school.

The period’s material remains include Seokguram, a granite grotto above Gyeongju housing a seated Buddha of extraordinary quality, and the Bulguksa temple complex.

Goryeo: the Tripitaka Koreana and Jinul #

Under the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), Buddhism was the state religion and enormously wealthy.

Its greatest achievement is the Tripitaka Koreana: the complete Chinese Buddhist canon carved onto wooden printing blocks. The first set, begun in 1011 as a merit-making appeal for protection against Khitan invasion, was destroyed by the Mongols in 1232. The second, carved between 1237 and 1248 during the Mongol occupation, survives complete at Haeinsa — 81,258 blocks, some 52 million characters, with an error rate so low that it is the standard reference edition used by scholars and the basis of the modern Taisho canon. The storage halls, built in the fifteenth century with calculated ventilation, have preserved the blocks for nearly 600 years without artificial climate control.

Jinul (1158–1210) defined Korean Seon (Chan/Zen). His formula — sudden awakening followed by gradual cultivation — held that one first recognises the mind’s nature directly, and then continues practice to dissolve long-established habits. He also insisted on the unity of Seon and scriptural study, against the Chan tendency to dismiss texts. Both positions remain characteristic of Korean practice.

Joseon suppression and the modern period #

The Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) adopted Neo-Confucianism and suppressed Buddhism systematically: temples were closed, land confiscated, the schools forcibly amalgamated, and monks barred from entering the capital — a prohibition that lasted until 1895. Buddhism survived in the mountains, which is why Korean temples are overwhelmingly rural and remote to this day.

Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) brought a different pressure: the colonial administration promoted Japanese Buddhist institutions and encouraged clerical marriage. After liberation this produced a bitter conflict between celibate and married clergy, resolved by a split. The Jogye Order, celibate and by far the largest, is the mainstream; the Taego Order permits married clergy.

Korean Buddhism today is vigorous, with a strong meditation tradition centred on hwadu (koan) practice, an active monastic training system, the well-known temple-stay programme, and a substantial nuns’ order with full ordination — one of the few places where the bhikkhuni lineage has been continuously maintained. It also exists in sharp competition with a large and energetic Protestant Christian population, which is unusual in Asia.

Vietnam #

Two routes in #

Vietnam is the only East Asian country to have received Buddhism by two independent routes.

The northern route brought Chinese Buddhism overland during the long period of Chinese rule (111 BCE–938 CE), with the Chinese canon, Chan, Pure Land, and the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya.

The southern route brought Indian Buddhism by sea to the Mekong delta and the central coast, where the Indianised kingdoms of Funan and Champa flourished. Luy Lau, in the north, was a Buddhist centre by the second century CE and appears to have received Indian monks directly by sea.

The consequence, reinforced when Vietnam absorbed Khmer territory in the south, is that Vietnam has both a Mahayana majority and a genuine Theravada minority, chiefly among the Khmer Krom, and that both are represented in the unified national sangha.

Thien #

Vietnamese Chan is Thien. Traditional accounts trace it to Vinitaruci, an Indian monk said to have arrived in 580 having studied with the third Chinese Chan patriarch, and later to the Vo Ngon Thong and Thao Duong lineages.

Under the Ly (1009–1225) and Tran (1225–1400) dynasties, Buddhism was the state religion and closely bound to national independence — monks served as advisers and the tradition was part of the ideological apparatus of resistance to Chinese reconquest. King Tran Nhan Tong, who twice defeated Mongol invasions, abdicated to become a monk and founded the Truc Lam (“Bamboo Grove”) school, the first distinctively Vietnamese lineage. Truc Lam emphasised engagement with the world over withdrawal, a theme with a long Vietnamese afterlife.

As in Korea, a later dynasty — the Le, from the fifteenth century — turned to Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism lost official favour, surviving strongly at village level.

The twentieth century #

Vietnamese Buddhism’s modern history is dominated by war and politics.

A revival movement from the 1920s and 1930s modernised education and organisation. Under the Republic of Vietnam in the south, the Catholic president Ngo Dinh Diem’s discriminatory policies produced the Buddhist crisis of 1963, in which the monk Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death at a Saigon intersection. The photograph is among the most widely reproduced images of the twentieth century, and the crisis contributed directly to Diem’s overthrow.

Out of this period came Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022), who coined “engaged Buddhism” for a practice inseparable from social action, organised relief work during the war, was exiled for nearly four decades, and became one of the most widely read Buddhist authors in any language.

Thich Thanh Tu (b. 1924) led a revival of the Truc Lam lineage within Vietnam, establishing a network of monasteries with a strong meditation curriculum.

After 1975 religious institutions were brought under state control, with the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha established in 1981 as the sole recognised body. The Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, which declined to join, has been suppressed and its leaders detained or confined for decades. Practice has expanded considerably since the doi moi reforms of the late 1980s, within continuing state regulation.

What they share, and what they don’t #

Both are Mahayana traditions using the Chinese canon and the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya. Both combine Chan/Seon/Thien meditation with Pure Land recitation, in the East Asian dual-practice pattern. Both spent centuries under Neo-Confucian suppression and became village religions in consequence. Both have strong traditions of ancestral and funerary ritual.

The differences are as marked. Korean Buddhism is more thoroughly monastic, with a rigorous training system and a strong scholastic component; Vietnamese Buddhism is more diffuse, more devotional, and — through the Truc Lam and engaged strands — more explicitly worldly. Korea has a continuous full ordination lineage for women; Vietnam’s is also strong, with a large nuns’ population. And Vietnam’s coexistence of Theravada and Mahayana within a single national structure has no parallel.

Common questions #

Is Korean Buddhism just Chinese Buddhism? It derives from Chinese Buddhism and shares its canon, but Wonhyo’s harmonising method and Jinul’s sudden-awakening-gradual-cultivation formula are Korean positions, and the institutional trajectory — mountain monasteries, Joseon suppression, the celibate/married split — has no Chinese parallel.

What is a temple stay? A programme run by the Jogye Order since 2002 allowing visitors to stay at working monasteries, join the daily schedule, and receive meditation instruction. It is available to foreigners in English and is the easiest way to encounter Korean practice directly.

Was Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation a Buddhist act? It has been defended by reference to the Lotus Sutra’s Medicine King chapter, in which a bodhisattva burns his body as an offering, and there is a long East Asian history of such acts. It has also been criticised within Buddhism as a violation of the first precept. Thich Nhat Hanh’s own account described it as an act of compassion rather than suicide or protest, intended to move the hearts of oppressors.

Is Buddhism the majority religion in Vietnam? Census figures put formal Buddhist affiliation surprisingly low, but these measure registered membership rather than practice. Surveys of actual observance — temple visits, ancestor rites, festival participation — give far higher numbers. Vietnamese religious identity, like Chinese, is not exclusive.

Sources & further reading #

Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience: Buddhist Practice in Contemporary Korea (Princeton, 1992) — an ethnography by a scholar who trained as a Korean monk. Robert E. Buswell Jr. (trans.), Chinul: Selected Works (Jogye Order, 2012) — the founding texts of Korean Seon. Cuong Tu Nguyen, Zen in Medieval Vietnam (University of Hawai’i Press, 1997) — a critical study of the Thien lineage claims. Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (Hill & Wang, 1967) — the contemporary account of the war years. Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 2013), pp. 213–222.