Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 8 — Enclosures

To the three ministers三相公

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 · 230 Chinese characters · reading time 0.9 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.

1Thanks for release from the burden of the price-leveling office and for the added real fief

某蒙恩忝官。不任感懼。伏以風后古官。是聖代弼諧所重。國僑美賞。非賢才負荷固難。必也挺秀儒林。鉤深學海。方可奪席占五十重之譽。享秩稱二千石之榮。如某任重咽喉。功微毫髮。早提兵柄。不能靜剗寇戎。久握利權。無以廣資經費。雖進退每從於帝命。而否臧實愧於軍謀。以玆責躬。無所逃罪。但願罷歸林藪。絶望雲霄。豈料宸襟。猶傷墜履。自上安下方。慙畫鹿之幡。居高飮淸。忽戴附蟬之冕。解煩難於平准。增寵祿於實封。此皆相公啓導睿慈。庇安戎律。使貞金鍊火。免銷耗於毒煙。直材摧霜。更敷榮於聖日。唯當親驅銳旅。遍討群兇。冀成破竹之功。少贖伐檀之刺。末曲陳謝。悚惕增深云云。

I have received favor and unworthily hold office, and I cannot bear my thanks and my fear. I humbly consider that Fenghou is an office of old, weighty in the eyes of those who aid and harmonize in a sagely age, and that the fair reward of Guoqiao is truly hard to shoulder for one who is not a worthy talent. Only he who stands out in the forest of scholars and hooks the depths from the sea of learning may take another's mat and win the fame of fifty mats, and enjoy a rank that fits the honor of two thousand piculs. As for me, my charge is heavy as a throat and my merit slight as a hair's tip. Early I held the handle of arms, and I could not quietly scrape the bandits away. Long I gripped the control of the state revenues, and I could not supply the costs broadly. Though in advance and retreat I always followed the emperor's command, in doing well or ill I am truly ashamed before the plans of the army. Blaming myself for this, I have nowhere to flee my fault, and I wished only to be let go to wood and marsh and to cut off all hope of the clouds and the sky. How could I have reckoned that the heart of the throne would still grieve over a dropped shoe and would make the lower parts easy from above, so that I am ashamed before the banner with the painted deer, and, dwelling high and drinking what is clear, I suddenly wear the cap with the cicada fastened upon it, and the burden of the price-leveling office is loosed and the favor and emolument of a real fief are added? All this is because the ministers opened and led the way for the sagely kindness and sheltered and calmed the rule of arms, so that true gold tried in the fire escapes being melted away by poisonous smoke, and straight timber broken by frost spreads its glory again in the sagely sun. I look only to drive picked troops myself and to strike the whole crowd of the wicked, hoping to gain the merit of splitting bamboo and to redeem a little the barb about the felling of the sandalwood. I have no way to set out my thanks in full; my dread grows the deeper, and so on.

‹ To Academician Hou Zeng of the Hanlin Academy Contents To Chief Minister Xiao Gou of the Historiography Office ›Listen to this piece