There is probably much more diversity of thought in South Korea itself. Proportionately it actually has a shitload of atheists as well as a huge number of cultural Buddhists who also participate in pretty frequent Confucian / shamanistic cultural rites. The regular Buddhists are pretty "normal" but I spent a lot of time around the monks and found them to be pretty bizarre. They made excellent conversational partners but their ideas were, uh, let's say, hmmm...I once spent an entire semester arguing about the importance of astronomy with a monk who said that it was unimportant because the Buddha had never really mentioned it. I said it was important if we want to, like, not get wiped out by an asteroid, but she didn't care. Still, we were friends.