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Protestant Reformation. Very few people outside of Korea know that moveable metal type was actually invented two centuries earlier, around 1230, by Buddhist monks in a temple in south-central Korea. In fact the earliest extant book printed with moveable metal type, a Korean work of Buddhist scripture, dates to the 1370s, and is held in the French National Library in Paris. (How France managed to gain possession of this book is a matter of dispute.) In Korea, however, this breakthrough did not lead to significant social or religious change, even after the crafting of
    Around the same time as this invention, the storied
Tripitika Koreana
—wooden blocks on which were carved nearly the entirety of the East Asian Buddhist canon—was being destroyed by the Mongol invasions that began in the 1230s. Originally produced as a testament to Buddhist devotion amidst the Khitan invasions of the eleventh century, the
Tripitika’s
destruction by the Mongols prompted the Koreans to reproduce it, again as a way of appealing to the Buddha for salvation amidst thecarnage. The result was a project that took nearly two decades in the mid-thirteenth century to carve over 80,000 wooden blocks, which are now preserved in Haeinsa Temple near the southern city of Taegu. This extraordinary feat bespoke not only the cultural centrality of Buddhism at the time, but also the authority of the Korystate and the Buddhist establishment in mobilizing the enormous human and material resources necessary for the project. It also testified to the high level of literacy and technology associated with KoryBuddhism.

    Image 5    Wooden blocks of the
Tripitika Koreana
, in Haeinsa Temple, near Taegu, South Korea. (Author’s photo.)
    nationwide Buddhist examination system. The state also sponsored the erection of massive temple complexes throughout the country, which enjoyed tax and other benefits that allowed them to accumulate, and often abuse, extraordinary wealth. The monarch, furthermore, appointed national and royal preceptors, who served as religious advisors to the king and maybe more importantly provided the stamp of Buddhist blessings on the monarchy. Perhaps the most eminent monk to be named national receptor, albeit posthumously, was Chinul, a figure of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Chinul developed a unified system of thought and practice for Korean Buddhism, which had long been divided, sometimes bitterly, into the meditation (
sn
) and textual (
kyo
) schools. The largest Buddhist order in South Korea today counts him as its founder.
    What proved most distinctive about KoryBuddhism, however, was the incorporation of shamanistic and geomantic elements. As the Ten Injunctions strongly suggested, Korean Buddhism by this time drew from a great mixture of Buddhist orthodoxy, underlying folk beliefs in local gods and spirits, and geomancy, or the systematic combination of nature worship with geography. The great state-sponsored Buddhist celebrations, the Lotus Lantern Festival and the Eight Gates Festival, incorporated these various elements. Through this mixture of religious influences, together with the development of Buddhist scholarship, a distinctively hybrid form of Buddhist practice emerged. Indeed, Korean geomancy was itself systematized by a Buddhist monk in the Unified Silla era,Tosn, who integrated the geographical features of Korea into an organic vision of the peninsula as a living entity fed by the spiritual energy of Buddhist temples and practices. Tosn’s followers, including Myoch’ng, cultivated and popularized this perspective, to the extent that geomancy, including the notion of a geomantic unity for Korea, held an influential standing among the aristocracy and monarchy well into the twentieth century. The location of the capital of the next dynasty, Chosn—still the capital of (South) Korea today—was determined according to geomantic principles, for example. Well before then, however, geomancy played a central