Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) 東國李相國集 · Yi Gyubo · Compiled 1241 (Goryeo, 28th year of King Gojong); revised and enlarged 1251 · 2 passages · 89 Chinese characters · reading time 0.9 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 4 The collected writings of Yi Gyubo of Goryeo, gathered and cut in woodblock by his son Yi Ham in 1241 and revised and enlarged by his grandson Yi Ikbae in 1251. It holds poems and rhapsodies, memorials and reports sent up to the king, records written for temples and pagodas, stele and tomb inscriptions, letters and prefaces, and the state letters that passed to and from the Mongols during the invasions. The Lay of King Dongmyeong, which sings the founder of Goguryeo, stands in volume 3 of the first collection, and the daily life of a man who called himself the White Cloud Layman — with his wine, his zither and his verse — fills the later collection. The book closes with the last poem he wrote as his eyes failed and he laid down the brush, and with the dirge and tomb inscription others made for him after his death.
The Yishi says: On the bank of the Taiye Pool (大液池) there was bamboo whose shoots had never stood apart from one another, so dense that they seemed to have been planted so. The Emperor said to the princes, "Among men, even father and son, elder brother and younger, have hearts that turn away; but the roots and stems of this bamboo have never grown apart from one another. Those who look on it may well take it for a mirror and strive." The princes answered, "Yes, yes." The Emperor thereupon called it the Righteous Bamboo (義竹).
帝性怡怡篤友于。天心感應合如符。故敎義竹生蒙密。何異相承棣萼跗。
The sovereign's nature was genial and his brotherly love deep,
and the heart of Heaven answered as though matching halves of a tally.
And so it made the righteous bamboo grow thick,
and how does that differ from the linked calyxes of the cherry-plum flower?