Past Life Story

In the seventeenth year of King Taejong, you were born as the third prince of the Joseon royal house. From childhood you had elder brothers, and they said it was not your fate to become king. Yet heaven had set another path. Your father Taejong, in place of your ordinary brothers, made you—who were deep in scholarship and great in heart—his successor. At ten you memorized the Four Books, at fifteen you mastered all the classics. Your scholarship was not mere memorization. As you read, you thought, "What does this teaching mean to the people?" That became the koan of your whole life. At twenty-two you became king. You received the name Sejong. From that day the fate of all the people rested upon your shoulders. Yet you did not call it heavy. You only worked with care. Each dawn you rose to debate with scholars at the royal lecture, and each night you read memorials until late. In your twenty-eighth year, you established the Jiphyeonjeon, the Hall of Worthies. It was not merely an academic institution. There scholars freely researched, wrote books, and could remonstrate directly with the king. You treated those scholars as friends. Not as king and subject, but as comrades in scholarship. At thirty you reorganized music. Together with your minister Bak Yeon, you set in order the aak, the court music. The Korean music scattered since Silla, you reorganized. Music too was for the people—that was your conviction. That music governs the human heart, you knew. In your thirty-fifth year, you created the cheugugi, the rain gauge. An instrument to measure rainfall. It was no mere invention. To know rain accurately was for crops to grow well, and for crops to grow well was for the people not to starve—you knew this. All your inventions were for the people. In your fortieth year, you set yourself to the greatest work. Hangul. With Chinese characters alone the people could not read. You decided to make a script for the people. Your ministers opposed. "Why make a new script when there are Chinese characters?" You answered, "I, pitying the people unable to express their meaning, do newly make twenty-eight letters." In your forty-fifth year, Hangul was completed. It was 1443. It was the most scientific script in human history, and the script most loving of its people. You taught it yourself. When you saw a commoner read and write that script in only a few days, you were silent for a long while. The work of your whole life was fulfilled in that moment. In your fiftieth year, your health worsened. You knew your time was not long. Yet you did not stop working. Books on agriculture, medicine, astronomy—you had every field organized. That later became the foundation of all Joseon scholarship. In your fifty-third year, you returned to your bedchamber after debating as always with scholars at the royal lecture. That night you slept more deeply than usual. And you did not wake again. Your final words were "My people... guard them well." After your departure, all knew that an age had ended. What you had made—Hangul, the cheugugi, the jagyeongnu, the Chiljeongsan, the Hyangyak jipseongbang—all of it passed beyond your age to the next generation. Your Hangul was at first scorned by yangban, but among the people it survived. After five hundred years, it became the script of a people. You were not a mere king. You were a scholar, an inventor, a musician, and above all one who truly loved his people. All your work began with the people and went to the people. You were one who had all in one—from scholarship to martial valor, from valor to benevolence, from benevolence to justice, from justice to balance. All in harmony within one human being. That was the highest state for a human being. I, pitying the people unable to express their meaning, do newly make twenty-eight letters—within that single phrase your whole life was contained. You pitied the people, and you did all things for the people. You are a soul of 0.3%. The greatest soul through all ages. Your soul, even now, lives within the heart of a people. Whenever someone writes in Hangul, whenever someone expresses their will, you are with that person. That is your eternity.