• Korean Journal of Plant Resources
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.576-587
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• 2014

The purpose of this research is to classify various plants written in the Korean Buddhist scriptures and assign scientific name to them in accordance with the Hangul Tripitaca as standard scriptures, thereby establishing the foundation of the plants in Buddhist scriptures. As a natural resource, we also assessed the value of the plants written in the Buddhist scriptures that distributed from other countries. To this end, we inferred the route of introduction to Korea of the plants and investigated their function and usage. Taxonomic classification of the plants written in Buddhist scriptures identified a total of 331 taxa belonging to 107 families, 244 genera, 313 species, 1 subspecies, 16 varieties, 1 forms. Species composition of the 331 taxa of plants consisted of two taxa of pteridophyte, 15 taxa of gymnosperm, 261 taxa of dicotyledon, and 53 taxa of monocotyledon. Among them, 183 and 148 were woody and herbaceous plants, respectively. Analysis of the distribution of 331 kinds of plants that India's portion of origin of place is 8.9% which holds a low rank compared with those of Korea (10.5%), China (10.9%), and Japan (10.0%). This explains why many taxa of plants distributed from the three countries appeared in the Hangul Tripitaca. Accordingly, we hypothesized that the majority of the plants were added and replaced at some point in past while Buddhist scriptures were propagated from India to China and from China to Korea. Our analysis indicated that 119 out of the 331 taxa (36 %) were distributed from Korea.