To Chief Minister Li Du of the Salt and Iron Office鹽鐵李都相公
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 · 173 Chinese characters · reading time 0.7 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.
I have received favor and unworthily hold office, and I cannot bear my thanks and my fear. I humbly consider that the steep rank of the Palace Attendant and the rare honor of a real fief belong to one who has the merit of holding up the altars of the state and the art of blending the light and the dark. Only then does he dwell in the right place and truly meet the feeling of the many. As for me, my virtue is too little to enrich my own person, and my wit is shamed before the round of things. Still more, meeting a time of many affairs, I have not spread out a stout plan. In motion I have had no effect in opening the road; in stillness I have only the skill of governing while lying down. Besides, I have long had charge of goods and coin and am truly short of counsel. Since I have fallen away from enriching the state and supplying the army, I am deeply ashamed before the wooden ox and the flowing horse. I could only take demotion gladly and follow ease forever. How could I have reckoned that the sagely bounty would lean to no side, and that a border command would fall unworthily to me? The painted deer flying upon the shaft — in years past I saw no fair omen. The rich sable rising upon the cap — today I am the more ashamed of a place not mine. And still a fief in the ranks is added; with what shall I repay the sage court? All this is because the Vice Director always granted me his keeping and holding, so that I could hand over the post in honor. I look only to strive in my duty, and I wish with him to set the age straight. I have no way to set out my thanks; my leaning and holding grow the keener, and so on.