The Head Seat Chan Had Me Chant the Screen Painted with an Old Pine That He Keeps in His Abbot's Quarters璨首座。方丈所蓄畫老松屛風。使予賦之。
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 · 1 passages · 134 Chinese characters · reading time 1.3 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 7 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.
What man was it who built a house beside the green hills
and sat facing a lone pine grown ten thousand fathoms tall?
When he had looked day after day and admired month after month until the strength of his eyes was spent,
he drove the rough, wild spirit of it into a peck-sized winecup.
Wanting to spew out at once what had coiled a thousand times and lain hidden a hundred,
he spewed it onto six widths of white silk woven by the shark-folk (鮫人).
If it were not so, how upon an inch of brush-tip
could he have painted this knotted old tree that does not die in a thousand years?
I am afraid that in the mist where the mountain is blind and the valley dark
an iron-black snake is trying to flee and cannot, and sinks low and rises again;
and I am afraid too that the waves have dried and the sea turned to field,
and the lean bones of whales fill the pits and straddle the ravines and lie pillowed against one another.
The hollow gaping seams are like mouths and nostrils flung open,
and on an overcast day one half expects wind and thunder to rise and a dragon to roar.
All day I prop my chin and still cannot believe it was copied in ink:
how should the world hold such a hand as this?