It seems that Gim Jeong-hui was accustomed to frequenting Buddhist temples from his childhood onward. There are indications that the sudden death in or around 1805 of several of those he had been close to drove him to deepen his Buddhist practice. Among his calligraphic work, a number of copies of Buddhist Sūtras and other texts survive and he wrote name boards for halls in Daeheung-sa, Bongeun-sa and other temples. The reformists of the Practical Learning tradition often showed an interest in either Catholicism or Buddhism, as part of their reaction against the rigidly secular Neo-Confucianist philosophy.