The Tripitaka Koreana began as an act of spiritual warfare. In 1011, during the Goryeo-Khitan War, artisans started carving the first version of the Buddhist scriptures onto wooden blocks, believing that invoking the Buddha's teachings in this physical form would protect the kingdom. That first set was completed in 1087. When the Mongol invasions of the 13th century destroyed it, Korea did not abandon the idea. Instead, the military government of the Choi clan, which had relocated the capital to the fortified Ganghwa Island, established a special bureau called the Daejang Dogam and commissioned the entire project again. This second carving, completed around 1251, is the version that survives today. Scholar Robert Buswell Jr. has compared the undertaking to the American Apollo program in its national commitment of resources and labor.

Each of the 81,352 blocks was carved with 23 lines of text, 14 characters per line, for a total of 644 characters per block when both sides are counted. The finished work contains 1,496 titles divided into 6,568 volumes across 81,258 pages, totaling 52,330,152 Hanja characters. The consistency of the carving is so uniform that early scholars believed a single person must have cut every character. Modern analysis attributes the work to a team of approximately 30 carvers, but their discipline was extraordinary, producing text that looks machine-made across tens of thousands of blocks. The content goes beyond the Buddhist Tripitaka itself: it includes travelogues, Sanskrit and Chinese dictionaries, and biographies of monks and nuns, leading scholars like Buswell to argue that it should be called the Korean Buddhist Canon, a name that better reflects its scope.

In 1398, the woodblocks were moved to Haeinsa temple in the mountains of South Gyeongsang Province, where they have remained housed in four medieval storage halls ever since. Those halls, the Janggyeong Panjeon, are an engineering achievement in their own right, using natural ventilation, moisture-regulating clay floors, and precise orientation to maintain conditions the blocks require. The woodblocks survived the Japanese invasions of 1592-98, seven major fires at the temple, and a near-bombing during the Korean War, when a South Korean Air Force pilot disobeyed orders to destroy the site. In the early 1970s, the government built a modern storage facility and transferred test blocks to it. The blocks immediately began to deteriorate. They were returned to the medieval halls, and the experiment was not repeated.

The Tripitaka Koreana was designated a National Treasure of South Korea in 1962 and inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2007. UNESCO's committee described it as "one of the most important and most complete corpus of Buddhist doctrinal texts in the world." Its significance extends beyond Korea: the compilers incorporated older Northern Song Chinese and Khitan versions of the scriptures alongside content by respected Korean monks, making the collection a unique reference point for scholars studying how Buddhist texts evolved across East Asia. Forty-five complete printings were gifted to Japan during the Muromachi period. Today, the blocks remain at Haeinsa, occasionally visible to the public, a physical archive of faith that has outlasted every technology designed to replace it.