The smell of fresh herbs hits first as Chef Ji Hye Kim moves through her Ann Arbor kitchen. She rinses each leaf individually under cool water, turning them gently in her hands—stems aligned with stems, leaves with leaves. This isn’t multitasking. This is meditation. In May, when temple bells ring across South Korea to mark the birth of Buddha, Kim channels an ancient philosophy that stretches back over seventeen centuries: the idea that how you prepare food shapes who you become.
On the 15th of May this year, millions of people across South Korea—where one in six citizens follows Buddhism—will gather at temples draped in paper lanterns and coloured strings to honour Siddhartha Gautama, the spiritual teacher whose teachings laid the foundation for Buddhism in the 6th or 5th centuries before the common era. Many will sit down to simple, free meals that carry the weight of centuries. Few will realise they’re tasting an entire philosophy distilled into rice and vegetables.
When Memory Became Method
Kim grew up in Seoul surrounded by the rhythms of tradition. She remembers pinching the edges of dumplings around her family table, the steam rising from warm bowls of red bean porridge during winter solstice celebrations. When she immigrated to the United States as a teenager, these memories travelled with her—packed away like ingredients waiting to be used.
Years later, after opening Miss Kim restaurant in 2016, she found herself standing in her Michigan kitchen feeling something was missing. The cookbooks in Korean whispered their secrets, but the ingredients around her seemed foreign. She could follow recipes, but the stories behind them remained locked away.
That’s when she discovered something that would reshape her cooking entirely: Buddhist nuns and priests had spent centuries perfecting ways to honour vegetables, grains, and legumes—transforming them into meals that nourished both body and spirit. They had learned to deepen flavour not through fermented seafood or meat-based broths, but through patience, seasonality, and an almost scientific understanding of how ingredients interact with the human body.
The Mountain Monasteries and Their Gardens
Buddhist monasteries in Korea weren’t built in convenient locations. Over seventeen hundred years, these communities established themselves in the mountainous regions of the Korean peninsula’s southern provinces, deliberately removed from power centres. During the Joseon Dynasty—that long stretch from 1392 to 1910 when Confucian philosophy dominated the kingdom—Buddhist priests found themselves barred from the capital. The mountains became both sanctuary and classroom.
In those remote valleys, a different kind of kitchen evolved. Wild vegetables grew abundantly. Winters stretched long and harsh. Buddhist monks and nuns learned to ferment soybean paste using only salt and time, creating a condiment that could soften the bitterness of mountain greens whilst preserving them through seasons of scarcity. Every technique served a purpose beyond flavour.
According to scholars studying Korean religious history, these temple kitchens operated under strict principles rooted in Buddhist philosophy. The meals excluded five pungent ingredients—onions, garlic, chives, green onions, and leeks—substances believed to overstimulate the body and cloud the mind during meditation. Every dish became an extension of spiritual practice. Food was medicine, and those who prepared it were pharmacists armed with knowledge of which vegetables cooled the body, which warmed it, and which brought clarity to a wandering mind.
The Art of Attention
During a temple cooking class at a monastery about an hour’s journey south of Seoul, Buddhist teacher Seonjae Sunim explained that cooking begins the moment water touches greens. The temperature of that water matters. The gentleness of your touch matters. When blanching vegetables, you hold them upright so the stems enter the heat first, and you resist the urge to squeeze out every drop of moisture—because that perilla oil, pressed cold from plant seeds, needs somewhere to cling and flavour the leaves from within.
“Food shapes the spirit we embody,” Sunim explained to those gathered to learn. When eating meals seasoned with fiery spices or heavy salt, the body and mind respond differently than when consuming gentler preparations. The idea that ingredients carry qualities that transfer to those who consume them isn’t metaphorical in temple cooking—it’s foundational.
This philosophy of intentionality extends to seasonality. Across the lunar calendar, Korean farmers traditionally divided the year into twenty-four solar terms, each lasting roughly two weeks. These jeolgi, as they’re called, mark when barley begins ripening, when farmers rush to transplant rice seedlings, when wild mushrooms fruit. Buddha’s birthday in 2024 falls between two of these terms, ipha and soman—the threshold between spring and the most demanding season of the agricultural year.
Honouring What Grows Here
Kim’s favourite moment each year arrives between late August and early September, when the farmer’s market one block from her restaurant explodes with colour. There’s a farmer obsessed with tomatoes—striped zebra varieties alongside beefsteak and deep burgundy heirlooms. Another grower focuses exclusively on traditional Korean varieties, nurturing second-generation seeds. Kim knows which stall sells microgreens, which vendor has the rarest herbs.
When she designs her monthly menus, Kim doesn’t approach Buddhist temple principles dogmatically. She can’t replicate the traditional earthenware pots used for fermentation, so she sources the simplest commercially available soy sauce within her budget and simmers it with black pepper and kelp to build depth. She sources local mushrooms—maitake, oyster, shiitake—and pairs them with sweet potato noodles dressed in plum syrup for sweetness and tartness. Local asparagus bundles sit alongside savoury rice cakes. Michigan cherries, when they arrive in summer, become either fresh additions to cold noodles or roasted companions to rice cakes.
This adaptation isn’t compromise—it’s the essence of temple cooking translated across geography. A chef working at Seoul’s Michelin-recognised Buddhist restaurant explained that what matters isn’t whether you use exact traditional ingredients, but whether your cooking aligns with the soil beneath your feet. True temple cuisine asks: what grows here? What’s in season now? How can we honour both the ingredient and the person eating it?
The Springtime Ritual Returns
Throughout May, Miss Kim’s menu transforms into a celebration of this philosophy. A delicate shiitake broth arrives bowled with silken tofu, finished with drops of perilla seed oil and lotus roots crowned with toasted cashews. Fresh Michigan microgreens are dressed with fermented soybean paste sauce carrying its own heat and depth.
Each dish carries a lineage stretching back through temples and mountains, through centuries of nuns and priests who discovered that paying attention to a single leaf of greens—how you wash it, how you blanch it, how you season it—could be an act of devotion. What began as survival in remote mountains has become, in Kim’s hands, a way of honouring both heritage and home.
When millions gather at temples across South Korea in May, few will think about the seventeen centuries of knowledge in their bowls. They’ll simply taste something gentle, something nourishing, something that whispers of mountains and monks and the quiet revolution that happens when someone decides to cook with intention.
