Written Tibetan བོད་ཡིག་ is derived from Devanāgarī writing (more specifically from the Gupta variant of this, once used in northern India), and bears some similarities to written Burmese and other alphabets of Southeast Asia, which also derive from Devanāgarī. It was created in the seventh century, during the first diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet. According to Tibetan tradition, King Songtsen Gampo, an emanation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, dispatched to India his minister Tönmi Sambhota, himself an emanation of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, with the aim of establishing a permanent alphabet, which would allow the translation of Buddhist texts in particular. This story does not rule out the possibility that a writing system could have existed in Tibet before the seventh century, but it is from this date that written Tibetan began to flourish on the high plateau.