Climate
Guinsa is well-placed to take full advantage of Korea's seasons, with warm temperatures in summer moderated a little by the altitude and heavy snow in winter, and is open all year round. However, the most popular time of year to visit is autumn September-November, when the mountainsides burst into dramatic fall colors. The Cheontae website (http://www.cheontae.org/0...) has picture galleries for all four seasons.
Understand
Guinsa is the headquarters of the Cheontae ì²í (http://www.cheontae.org/) school of Buddhism, the Korean version of China's Tiantai teachings. Once the largest and most powerful of Korea's 18 school, Cheontae gradually lost popularity over the years and disappeared entirely for some time, but was re-established in 1945 by Sangwol Wongak and now commands a respectable two million followers.
The temple is strikingly located, squeezed into a narrow valley surrounded on all sides by mountains. Unlikely many of Korea's temples, Guinsa is fairly new, being founded by Sangwol Wongak in 1945 as the head temple of his reborn sect. But this is partly what makes it so dazzling: unlike the musty National Treasures with fading colors and peeling edges locked away in glass cabinets at other temples, everything at Guinsa is shiny and new. The original was burned down during the Korean War, but the reconstruction of the first building was completed in 1966 and they've been expanding ever since.
Doctrine
A syncretic school that holds the Lotus Sutra as the peak of the Buddha's teachings, Cheontae posits the following mindbending truths:
All things are empty and without essential reality.
All things have a provisional reality.
All things are both absolutely unreal and provisionally real at once.
According to Cheontae, all experiences in the sensory world are in fact expressions of Buddhist law Dharma, and thus contain the key to enlightenment. This explains the ostentateous altars and the colorful details of Cheontae temples, so far from the austere aesthetic of the competing Seon Zen school.