Goryeo court commissions the Tripitaka

1109

The Korean Goryeo dynasty launched its first great project to carve the entire Buddhist canon onto wooden printing blocks - an act of pious devotion intended to invoke the Buddha's protection against the Khitan raids ravaging the northern frontier. The tens of thousands of blocks, each meticulously carved in mirror-reverse, would take decades of monastic labor to complete and represented a monumental feat of medieval printing technology.