This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Korea's Joseon dynasty, founded in 1392, replaced the Buddhist-favoring Goryeo kingdom with Neo-Confucianism as state ideology and, over successive reigns, systematically dismantled Buddhist institutional power. King Taejong, who reigned from 1400 to 1418, closed monasteries, redistributed their land and seized their treasures for the state, leaving 242 temples nationwide by his reign's end; his successors continued consolidating the tradition's once-numerous schools, Goryeo's five doctrinal and two meditational orders, first to two, Seon and Gyo, and eventually to the single school of Seon.
By later points in the dynasty the number of Buddhist monasteries nationwide had fallen from several hundred to a documented low of just 36, monks and nuns were legally barred from entering city walls, Buddhist funerals and begging were outlawed, and the clergy was pushed into the lowest formal social class. This was the Joseon royal state acting through its own Neo-Confucian ideology rather than a rival religious tradition acting in its own right, a bureaucratic-decree persecution for which no perpetrator-tradition edge is written.