In 1568 Yi Hwang, then in his late sixties and repeatedly resigning from court, presented the sixteen-year-old king Seonjo with the ten diagrams on sage learning. It is a short work and an unusual one: ten charts, each with a text and a commentary, moving from the diagram of the supreme ultimate through the western inscription, the rules of the White Deer Hollow academy, the study of the mind and the practice of reverence, to the daily conduct of a person who intends to become a sage.
The argument of the arrangement is that sagehood is a curriculum rather than a gift. Reverence, gyeong, holds the whole together: a settled inward attentiveness maintained through ordinary activity, not a technique of withdrawal. He asked that the diagrams be made into a folding screen so that the king would have them in view.
The second half of his life was given to the private academy. The seowon combined a shrine to an exemplary scholar with a school, and Yi Hwang was the movement's leading advocate, securing royal recognition for the first of them and founding the Dosan academy himself. Hundreds followed within a century. The academies educated the Joseon elite, transmitted the factional identities that came with their lineages, and made a scholar's home district a centre of intellectual authority independent of the capital. Dosan Seowon was included in the UNESCO World Heritage listing of Korean neo-Confucian academies in 2019.