According to Kyunghyang Shinmun, the president conveyed sympathy to the family and to the Buddhist community. Tributes followed from the Jogye Order and other bodies.

The word for a monk's death

In Buddhism, ipjeok denotes the death of a monk and carries the sense of entering a stillness in which affliction has ceased. Funerals are normally held at a temple with a cremation rite, with timing and form varying by temple and lineage.

In Korean Buddhism the death of a senior monk is treated as belonging both to an individual temple and to the order as a whole, since practice lineage and the training of successors are bound up with an order's personnel.

Temples and the ethnic Chinese community

A number of families in Korea's ethnic Chinese community have long-standing ties to temples. Among older households in Incheon and Seoul are those who attend services at Korean temples or observe ancestral rites alongside Buddhist ceremony.

Religious observance has also served as a social network for residents with migration backgrounds: even where languages differ, the forms of the calendar and of ritual are widely shared.

Hwagyo Sibo does not attempt an assessment of the deceased's life here. Funeral arrangements and memorial procedures follow the notices of the temple and the order concerned.