Chanting on the Snow Blossoms and Showing It to the Reverend Gonggong雪花吟示空空上人。
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 0.9 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 9 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.
All other flowers come out with five petals, and the snow blossom with six.
The handiwork of Heaven, in its cutting and carving, has its more and its less.
Where there is more, the labour spent must have been deep;
where there is less, the work must have been done in a moment.
How is it, then, that the true flower and the snow flower
are not alike in their being born and being gone, as Heaven's making of them is alike?
The flower endures long and the snow is easily gone,
and this principle is too remote to be argued out in the end.
If one were to say that the snow is not a flower,
how should that not be something false?
And what is false does not come up to what is true,
yet Heaven cannot be stingy with the true and generous with the false.
The hidden workings are not to be reckoned up,
and if I try to reckon them, they will laugh at me instead.