military matters and another still on women’s manners. King Se-jo was the first of the descendants of the great T‘ă-jo to observe carefully the precept laid down by the founder of the dynasty—namely, to take good care of the army; this is evinced by the fact that at one time he distributed large quantities of medicine among the soldiers on the northern border and made generous gifts of land to the troops, thus fostering the military spirit among the people. As a result we see them successful on every side. The tribe of Ol-yang-hap was destroyed, the tribes of I-man-ju, Ol-jok-heup and Yan-ba-a-gan came and swore allegiance. In his fifth year he codified the laws and published them. He also extended his medical work and published a book on veterinary surgery, and he published works on astronomy, geology, music, writing, the signs of the times, agriculture, live-stock, foreign relations and arithmetic. In other words this versatile man was actively interested in military, political, social, scientific and artistic matters and caused books to be written about these subjects for the enlightenment of the people. It is said that in 1465 he caused the erection of a monastery in Seoul but he made the Buddha a standing one rather than a sitting one. Evidently he had little faith in the inanity of the sleepy sitting Buddha, who with folded hands let the years slip by unheeded. He wanted something more lifelike. So he set the Buddha on his legs. This image was carried through the streets at periodic intervals accompanied by a crowd of musicians and monks. A Japanese envoy was horrified at what he called sacrilege and foretold that it could not endure. He was right, not because the Buddha had gotten on its feet but because the people of Korea had begun to cast off the shackles of Buddhism and, following in the wake of the court, were learning to take advantage of their emancipation. This making of a standing Buddha and the occasional festivals seem to have been more by way of sport than through any serious intentions on the king and this in itself accounts for the speedy downfall of the custom. Its novelty, which was all it had to recommend it, soon wore off. In 1467 he ordered the two monks Sin Mi and Chuk Hŭn to cut wooden blocks for a book to be called the Tă-jang-gyŭng. The love of exaggeration in the Korean temperament finds play in the statement that this book contained 8,888,900 pages. The historian evidently did not have his abacus at hand, for he continues by saying that each of the fifty volumes contained 7,078 pages, while the above figure would require 167,778 pages to the volume.