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 · 154 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 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.
He has received the summoning writ in honor and will go to the palace court, and my thanks and my gladness are both at their height. Now the baleful mist is dying down and the sage fortune rises again. The use of troops such as Zhuge Liang's is no longer the urgent task, and the making of rites such as Shusun Tong's leans upon men of worth. The Minister has piled up the repute of Gao and Kui, and his government was brought to its full in Wan and Ju. For three years he watched the customs and put humaneness and right first. The four borders held his kindness close, so that raiders and soldiers drew themselves in of their own accord. So a dream was tied at Fuyan and a letter flew to the Xuan Hall. The black-haired people lean their hearts toward him and cannot fulfill their wish to hold his carriage shaft, and the ruler pricks his ears and waits to hear the sound of his dragging shoes. Still more since he himself attends the easy carriage of his parent and goes in honor to the imperial carriage. We wait to hear that he seasons the cauldron and makes the bow cases be put up for good. How should it be only that the land within the passes is at peace? It is truly the great good fortune of all under heaven. I have long been neighbor to his humane borders and am deeply filled with the wind of his virtue. I clap and take comfort, and I gaze and cling, and I cannot bear my sincere and earnest feeling, and so on.