Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 7 — Enclosures

To Chief Minister Xiao Gou of the Historiography Office史館蕭遘相公

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) 桂苑筆耕集 · Choe Chiwon · 886 (Tang, 6th year of the Zhonghe era · Silla, 12th year of King Heongang) · 1 passages · 199 Chinese characters · reading time 0.8 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 7 — Enclosures A collection Choe Chiwon made by choosing out of the writings of his four years in the headquarters of Gao Pian, military commissioner of Huainan under the Tang, binding them into twenty volumes and presenting them to King Heongang of Silla in 886. It holds 366 pieces — memorials and reports sent up to the emperor, the proclamation denouncing Huang Chao, letters to the several military commissioners, orders and dispatches issued to those under him, Daoist and Buddhist texts for services, funeral offerings, records written for the outer wall of Chengdu and for a painting of Annam, and the reports and poems he sent up to Gao Pian. Here is the first report, which begins "I am a man of Silla," and the proclamation against Huang Chao with its line, "Not only do all the men of the world think to kill you openly; the ghosts under the earth have already discussed cutting you down in secret." The last volume holds the poems he made on the voyage home to the country he had left at twelve. It is the oldest collection by a Korean that survives, and when Hong Seokju and Seo Yugu printed it with movable type in 1834 they called it "the root and the beginning of the writing of our Eastern Country." Their two prefaces are translated with it.

1On his rising to the Central Terrace and holding the Historiography Office as well

昨睹制書。恭承高辭大計。正陟中台。兼升史館之榮。實副儒門之望。竊以冊書所重。筆削爲難。別成一代之楷模。夐掩百王之規矩。是得宸衷妙選。朝列具瞻。而況相公。眞君子儒。老成人德。允釐百揆。顯贊萬機。今者邦計旣豐。國經斯整。東西臺之極位。揚歷無遺。左右史之直言。裁成有類。莫不勛華表德。游夏緘詞。能施補衮之功。備載垂衣之化。必使褒眞貶僞。彰發傳之體有三。激濁揚淸。勵事君之心無二。古今盛美。遐邇欽依。某遠守藩維。忝資陶冶。每愼六條之理。敢希一字之褒。抃躍所多。啓陳無及。伏惟俯賜念察。

The other day I saw the imperial writ. I respectfully learn that with a lofty refusal and a great plan he has risen straight to the Central Terrace and has climbed besides to the honor of the Historiography Office, and that he truly answers the hopes of the Confucian school. I humbly consider that what the records hold weighty is the difficulty of the brush that adds and cuts. It forms apart the model of an age and covers far the measures of a hundred kings. So the imperial heart chose him with rare skill, and the ranks of the court look up to him together. Still more so since the Chief Minister is truly a gentleman among scholars, with the virtue of one ripe in years, who rightly orders the hundred offices and plainly aids the ten thousand affairs of state. Now the plans of the realm are already rich and the ordering of the state is set straight. He has passed through the highest seats of the Eastern and Western Terraces and left nothing untried, and he shapes the straight words of the Left and Right Historians, and there is a pattern in what he makes. There is nothing in which he does not set forth the virtue of Yao and Shun, nothing in which he does not seal his words as You and Xia did. He can offer the merit of mending the dragon robe, and he can set down in full the rule of one who transforms by letting his robe hang. He will surely praise the true and cut down the false, and make it clear that the manner of writing a record has three kinds. He will stir the muddy and raise the clear, and urge that the heart which serves the ruler is not divided. This is the full beauty of all times, and far and near look up and lean upon it. I guard the border ties far away and unworthily draw upon his molding. I am always careful in the rule of the six articles. How should I dare to hope for the praise of a single word? My clapping and leaping are many, but my words fall short of them. I humbly beg that he bend down and grant me his thought and his regard.

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