This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Uisang built Buseoksa Temple after returning to Korea from his Huayan study in China, a documented central seat of the Hwaeom school he established there, distinct from a school defined by teaching alone with no institutional home. He went on to found ten further Hwaeom temples across the Korean peninsula beyond Buseoksa, a documented expansion that carried the school's teaching on the mutual interpenetration of all phenomena into eleven separate institutional centers rather than concentrating it in one location.
That institutional reach is documented alongside a scale of direct teaching: ethnographic and historical tradition credits Uisang with more than three thousand students gathering to hear his lectures, a documented figure distinct from the temple count itself, since a large teaching following and a network of eleven temples are two separate measures of the same school's reach rather than one restated as the other. Alongside Wonhyo, whose own approach to Buddhism remained more eclectic and popularizing rather than institutional in this way, Uisang is remembered specifically for the doctrinal and institutional focus that built Hwaeom into a peninsula wide school.
That one monk's return from Tang China produced not only a central temple but ten further teaching seats across Korea, together drawing a following numbered in the thousands, marks Uisang's Hwaeom founding as a documented case where doctrinal study abroad was converted, on return, into an institutional network rather than remaining personal teaching alone.