The famous cultural hero, King Sejo (1455–1468), at first he put in place, on the advice of his officials, very punitive and strict regulations around Buddhism. But as time went on, to put it bluntly, he got sick of the [Confucian State Council] he was dealing with. He started to think that his officials were nuts, I mean actually crazy. You can see it in his documents, he himself was being driven crazy having to deal with these people. And the whole issue was Buddhism. They want the recurring thing: to convince a King to go the whole way and kill off Buddhism once and for all.

[By the 16th century], they kind of succeed in [stripping Buddhism of legal recognition] but there’s an unhappy conclusion: it didn’t atrophy and die. In fact, something worse happened: because they removed the government oversight of Buddhism, it started to flourish!