To Prince Li Keju of Youzhou — the second幽州李可擧大王 第二
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 · 142 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 8 — 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.
The cloud and the dragon are in my thoughts, but like horses loosed to the wind we lie in different regions. There is no way to fulfill the sincerity of tilted carriage covers, and the wish to take up the whip is keen for nothing. Though word goes by scale and wing, it cannot write out the heart and the liver. Still more, when I look back upon my own house, I am unworthily of the same village lane. Whenever I chant the verses of the mulberry of home, I hold at once the kindness of the tall trees. Happily the Palace Attendant and Prince does not hold the hill of my home country a low thing, and knows deeply what my country brings forth. He has bent thick encouragement upon me and has often honored me with good word. If the heart can truly be known, then what need is there to borrow a meeting of faces? Holding his grace in my heart, he may see what I lean upon and hold to. Now the trouble of the state is not yet removed and the enmity of the neighbor is not gathered in. I would gladly be careful of speech and bind up my tongue, but what am I to do when angry breath fills my breast? I borrow paper and brush in brief and set out the facts in full. I trust that Huizi knows me, and I hope that an enlightened prince will discern the worthy. I humbly ask that in kindness he look from afar upon this plain sincerity, and so on.