Encomium Inscribed on an Image of the Great Master Bodhidharma (達摩大師)達摩大師像贊
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 · 87 Chinese characters · reading time 0.8 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Former Collection, Book 19 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.
That he faced the wall at Shaolin (小林)
was only in order to hand on the mind.
The mind he had already handed on in Zhendan (震旦),
and he took body and form with him and went west.
Even while he was alive,
what could be handed on was the mind,
and what was of no use was the body.
The body is already gone,
so why must one paint a portrait of him?
To paint a portrait and seek the mind in it
is like hunting a snake's cast skin to look for a pearl.
We say body and we say portrait,
but which of them is, and which is not?
The body is a thing within a dream,
and the portrait is a dream within the dream.
Dim and dim again,
all of it returns to nothingness —
only the mind will be long together with the moon.