Korean temple cuisine is rooted in a principle that, from a chef’s perspective, doesn’t make any sense: You’re not supposed to crave it. The way you find yourself almost aching for a gooey slice of pizza? Not here. Temple cuisine is engineered to provoke a different reaction, one that goes back to the Buddhist concept of nonattachment: You may relish it as you eat it, yes, but you should have no urge to stuff your face with another heap of it when you’re done.

When Americans talk about Korean cooking, which has become tremendously popular in food-fixated circles over the past decade or so, they tend to talk primarily about barbecue — fatty strips of beef and pork sizzling on a hot surface. Temple cuisine forsakes these flavors, as well as the bloat and delirium that are usually associated with the party-down, soju-dizzy, every-dish-comes-at-once mode of Korean feasting. Instead, temple cuisine is all about delicacy. You’re left with simultaneous feelings of fullness and lightness. You consume this food as a source of mental and physical clarity — as kindling for meditation.

Paradoxically, though, chefs in recent years have begun craving more information about temple cuisine. You might hear a young chef in Seoul cite it as an influence on his or her work (as does the buzzed-about Mingoo Kang, who gives Korean classics a haute-cuisine spin at his restaurant, Mingles), and you might be surprised to find out that René Redzepi, the trailblazing chef at Noma in Copenhagen, once took a trip through Korea to learn more about this centuries-old style of cooking. In Korea there is a growing nostalgia for this old way; temple cuisine is viewed as a fading echo of an era before rampant Westernization. Meanwhile, for high-end chefs in other parts of the world, like Ripert and Redzepi, temple cuisine (not only in Korea but throughout Asia) represents a sort of gastronomic Rosetta Stone: As more chefs become obsessed with the idea of ‘‘vegetable-forward’’ menus, Buddhist cuisine provides reliable instructions for how it can be done. If, as some believe, we’re all headed for a vegan future, could this be cause for celebration?