Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Tripitaka Koreana is a collection of Buddhist scriptures carved onto 81,352 wooden printing blocks in 13th-century Korea. It is housed in four buildings at Haeinsa temple in South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, where it has been stored since 1398.
The Tripitaka Koreana contains 52,330,152 Hanja characters across 81,258 pages, divided into 1,496 titles and 6,568 books. Each wooden block holds 644 characters, carved in 23 lines of 14 characters per line on both sides.
The first set of woodblocks, begun in 1011 during the Goryeo-Khitan War, was destroyed by fire during the Mongol invasions in 1232. King Gojong ordered a second carving, which ran from 1237 to 1249, again as a religious appeal for divine protection against the Mongol threat.
Sugi was the National Preceptor and Buddhist monk placed in charge of the second carving of the Tripitaka Koreana. He compared Northern Song Chinese, Khitan, and Goryeo source texts, and after completion published 30 volumes of Additional Records documenting errors, redundancies, and omissions he found across the versions.
Each block was made from birch wood sourced from the southern islands of Korea, soaked in sea water for three years, boiled in salt water, then dried in shade and wind for another three years. After carving, blocks were coated in a poisonous lacquer to repel insects and framed with metal to prevent warping.
Japan never produced its own woodblock Tripitaka and made repeated requests to acquire the Korean collection from 1388 onward. A total of 45 complete printings were gifted to Japan since the Muromachi period, and the modern Japanese Taisho Tripitaka was based on the Korean edition.