Monk Soldiers and a Partial Recovery From the Joseon Suppression

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Buddhism survived as a marginalized, legally degraded tradition practiced chiefly in remote mountain temples rather than being extinguished outright. Partial institutional relief came under the Buddhist regent Queen Munjeong, who governed from 1545 to 1567 and repealed many of the anti-Buddhist measures her predecessors had imposed, and fuller social standing followed the Buddhist monk-soldiers' prominent role repelling Japan's Imjin War invasions of 1592 to 1598, most famously under the monks Hyujeong and Yujeong.

No international body has made a genocide or crimes-against-humanity determination on the suppression; it unfolded as sustained state policy across five centuries rather than a single documented atrocity, and its recognition is historiographical, treated in Korean religious history as the defining reversal of Buddhism's earlier Goryeo-era status as state religion. Confucian social restrictions on the clergy nonetheless persisted in substantial part until the dynasty's end in 1910, so the monk-soldiers' wartime service earned standing rather than a formal reversal of the legal order that had degraded them.