In 1190 Jinul and a group of companions formed a society for the joint practice of concentration and wisdom, on a compact drawn up years earlier at an examination gathering where the participants had agreed that the monastic order had lost its way. The society was a deliberate withdrawal. Goryeo Buddhism was wealthy, closely bound to aristocratic patronage, and involved in politics to the point of maintaining armed monks; the compact proposed that a small group should simply leave and practise.
The community grew and moved to a mountain in the south, where the temple was renamed and became the centre now known as Songgwangsa. Sixteen national preceptors came from it in succession, and it is counted among the three jewel temples of Korea as the one representing the community itself.
Late in his life Jinul added a further element. He encountered the writings of the Chinese master Dahui and adopted hwadu practice, the sustained holding of the critical phrase of a case until conceptual thought is exhausted, and he set it above his own earlier method for those capable of it. Korean Seon has kept both ever since, which is why it can look from the outside like two traditions housed in one building.
The Jogye Order, formally constituted in the twentieth century, names Jinul as its progenitor, and his combination of meditation, scriptural study and communal retreat remains the pattern it claims.