Bulhwa — Buddhist painting — represents the oldest continuous painting tradition on the Korean peninsula, stretching back to the Three Kingdoms period of the fourth and fifth centuries when Buddhism first arrived in Korea from China and immediately generated a demand for devotional images of extraordinary beauty and spiritual power, and encompassing across its long history a range of subjects, formats, and stylistic approaches unified above all by the purpose they served — not the aesthetic pleasure of a scholarly collector or the decorative enrichment of an aristocratic interior, but the focusing of devotional attention, the visualization of sacred realms and divine beings, and the generation of the spiritual merit that Buddhist teaching associated with the creation and veneration of sacred images. Korean Bulhwa reached its first great flowering during the Goryeo dynasty of the tenth through fourteenth centuries, when the Korean Buddhist establishment enjoyed extraordinary royal patronage and produced devotional paintings of a refinement and technical accomplishment that have never been surpassed in the Korean tradition — images of Amitabha Buddha, Avalokitesvara, and the Bodhisattvas rendered on silk in mineral pigments of jewel-like brilliance, their figures outlined in gold and their compositions organized according to a hierarchical spatial logic that communicates the structure of the Buddhist cosmos as clearly as any theological text, the physical beauty of the image understood not as mere decoration but as a reflection of the transcendent reality the painting sought to make visible and accessible to the devotee. The tradition continued through the Joseon dynasty despite the new government's official promotion of Confucianism and relative suppression of Buddhism, with temple paintings — large hanging works depicting the Buddha preaching to assembled Bodhisattvas, guardian figures, and narrative scenes from Buddhist scripture — continuing to be produced for the mountain temples where Korean Buddhism maintained its practice, preserving across centuries of official disfavor a living tradition of sacred image-making of considerable artistic power and spiritual depth.