The most striking feat that King Se-jong accomplished and the one that had the most far-reaching and lasting effect upon the people was the invention of a pure phonetic alphabet. This alphabet scarcely has its equal in the world for simplicity and phonetic power. He was not the first one to see the vast disadvantage under which the people labored in being obliged to master the Chinese character before being able to read. We will remember that in the days of Sil-la the scholar Sŭl-chong had invented a rough way of indicating the grammatical endings in a Chinese text by inserting certain diacritical marks, but this had of course been very cumbersome and only the _ajuns_ or “clerks” were acquainted with it. Another similar attempt had been made near the end of the Koryŭ dynasty but it too had proved a failure so far as general use by the people was concerned. King Se-jong was the first man to dare to face the difficulty and overcome it by the use not of modifications of the Chinese characters but by an entirely new and different system, a phonetic alphabet. It can scarcely be said that he had the genius of a Cadmus, for he probably knew of the existence of phonetic alphabets, but when we remember that the Chinese character is considered in a sense sacred and that it had been in use in the peninsula exclusively for more than two thousand years we can place him but little lower than the great Phoenician. Korean histories are almost a unit in affirming that the alphabet is drawn from the Sanscrit and from the ancient seal character of China. Where then did King Se-jong have access to the Sanscrit? Some have argued that his envoys came in contact with it at the court of the Emperor at Nanking. This is possible but it is extremely unlikely that they gained such a knowledge of it in this way to make it of use in evolving their own alphabet. On the other hand it is well known that the monasteries of Korea were filled with books written in the Sanscrit or the Thibetan (which is an offshoot of the Sanscrit) character. It is believed by some that Buddhism was entirely crushed in the very first years of the dynasty, but this is a great blunder. Buddhism had begun to wane, but long after the end of King Se-jong’s reign it was still the predominant religion in Korea. Most of the officials, following the lead of royalty, had given it up, but the masses were as good Buddhists as ever. The probabilities are therefore overwhelming that when the histories refer to the Sanscrit they mean the Sanscrit contained in these Buddhist books and which had been a common feature of Korean religious life for centuries.