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The Seated Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva of Boseok Temple in Seosan (Yonhap)

A statue of the Buddha dating back to Korea’s Goryeo dynasty that was stolen from a temple on the Japanese island of Tsushima belongs to the temple, South Korea’s highest court has ruled.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld a high court’s refusal to grant a petition by Buseok Temple in Seosan, South Chungcheong Province, to recognize its ownership of the Buddhist statue.

The statue at the center of the litigation depicts a seated Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, with a height of 50.5 centimeters and a weight of 38.6 kilograms.

In 1951, a written prayer was discovered inside the body of the statue that said the statue had been cast in February 1330 with the desire that the people of Seoju (modern-day Seosan) in the kingdom of Goryeo would be blessed by exhausting their misfortune in their current life and being reborn in paradise in the next one. That made it clear that the statue had been made by Buseok Temple in 1330, during the reign of King Chungsuk of Goryeo.

The statue’s exquisite artistry, including its beatific smile and distinct facial features, have long drawn the attention of researchers. Given accounts of five raids by Wokou pirates in the Seosan area between 1352 and 1381 that appear in the “History of Goryeo” and other historical records, academics have concluded that the statue was taken to Japan during that period.

The statue ended up at Kannon Temple, in Tsushima, in 1526, where it remained enshrined for nearly 500 years until Korean thieves stole it in October 2012 and smuggled it back into Korea. But when they tried to sell the statue in January 2013, they were caught, and the statue was seized by the authorities.

After that, Buseok Temple in Seosan petitioned the government to prevent the statue from being returned to Japan on the grounds that it was a cultural artifact that had been stolen from them. In late February 2013, the Daejeon District Court accepted their argument and delayed the statue’s return for three years, which marked the beginning of a decade-long legal battle. In 2016, as soon as the three-year delay was up, Buseok Temple petitioned the court to give it full possession of the statue, refocusing the debate on the question of the statue’s ownership.

In the initial trial, a district court sided with Buseok Temple, acknowledging that the statue had been stolen by Wokou pirates. But on appeal, a high court rejected Buseok Temple’s petition because the temple hadn’t established that it was the same as the temple in Seoju during the Goryeo dynasty. Furthermore, even granting that the statue was a stolen cultural artifact, the court said, the period of time when Buseok Temple could claim ownership of the statue had expired.

The Supreme Court acknowledged that modern-day Buseok Temple in Seosan was the same as the historical Buseok Temple in Seoju, but still found that the statue belonged to Kannon Temple in Japan. Since the statue had been in Kannon Temple’s possession for more than 20 years before it was stolen in 2012, the Japanese temple had ownership of the statue, the court said.

The court found that ownership of the Buddhist statue had legitimately passed to the Japanese temple through the principle of “adverse possession.”

The Supreme Court settled a debate about which country’s civil law was applicable by referring to conflict-of-laws principles, which indicated that it was best to apply the law of the country where the statue was located at the time that adverse possession took effect.

The Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism objected to the court’s decision in a statement released Thursday.

“We want to express our strong regret about this decision. Recognizing adverse possession of an obviously stolen cultural artifact that was plundered and taken overseas is not only patently absurd, but may also encourage others to hide and maintain possession of plundered cultural artifacts,” Korea’s largest Buddhist order said in its statement.

By Jung Hwan-bong, staff reporter; Roh Hyung-suk, culture correspondent

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