Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 9 — Enclosures

To Minister of Works Zhou Bao of Zhexi — the second浙西周寶司空 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 · 115 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 9 — 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.

1A reply to his praise for the cutting down of Lu Wen

錄溫者包藏異謀。玷汚玄化。螻蟈暫成聚窟。鴟梟貴欲同巢。誠謂天高可欺。不知日遠能照。果彰罪跡。遂擧刑書。旣絶慮於竊鈇。俾成規於用鉞。言堪自賀。事必相傳。豈料司空染五色毫。飛一函紙。徵美詞於魯史。辱虛譽於劉牋。列土除兇。不負國章。在手臨風拜賜。其如戎律拘身。未啓素誠。但銘殊貺。

Lu Wen harbored a treacherous design and stained the mysterious teaching. The mole cricket and the frog gathered their burrow for a while, and the owl wished to share the same nest. Truly he thought heaven was high and could be deceived, and he did not know that the sun, though far off, can shine upon all. In the end the traces of his crime came out, and at last the book of punishments was raised. It cut off the suspicion of the stolen axe and let the rule for the use of the battle-axe be carried through. The words may well be a matter for self-congratulation, and the deed will surely be handed on. How could I have reckoned that the Minister of Works would wet his five-colored brush and send flying a case of paper, gathering fine words out of the history of Lu and lavishing empty praise upon a letter in Liu's manner, saying, "He was given land and did away with the wicked, and did not fail the statutes of the state"? I hold it in my hand and bow to his gift in the face of the wind. But the discipline of the army binds me, and I cannot open my plain sincerity to him. I only engrave his rare bounty.

Interlinear notes 1

The source text has 貴; it is read here as 冀, "to hope," the former being taken as an error. — translator