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 · 161 Chinese characters · reading time 1.6 min
Dongguk Isangguk Jip (Collected Works of Minister Yi of the Eastern Country) Latter Collection, Book 10 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.
Among the people of the world, few indeed turn and look upon their own person as though it were another's and so examine its faults. This meaning is only that one should examine one's own faults as one looks upon another's faults; it does not reach so far as the meaning that the many bodhisattvas take upon their own persons the suffering of living beings in their stead.
Yet if one practices this without ceasing, shall one not in the end reach even the realm of buddhas and bodhisattvas? I mean only to awaken others, and also to examine my own person myself.
Hard it is to turn and look back, hard it is to turn and look back;
who knows this, if he be not a sage or a worthy?
One must turn one's own person about and make of it another's person,
and look upon its moving and stopping, its going and halting, as upon that man's.
Only by not holding one's own person alone as private
can one begin to practice the sense of the two words "turn and look back."
It is as though, when my face is reflected in a mirror,
it becomes at once the same as another's face.
Who, looking upon another's face,
would in the end fail to know its ugliness or beauty?
And yet one's own one does not know,
so wherein does one differ from a blind man?
All you gentlemen, engrave this upon your hearts:
hold it precious to know how to turn and look back and examine your own person.