Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 12 — Dispatches

To Yang Xingmin of Luzhou — to one who sent a picture of the magic fungus廬州楊行敏

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 · 125 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 12 — Dispatches 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.

1Heaven is warning you, so be careful

報楊行敏。使至得狀。送芝草圖一軸。覽之嘉歎。喜有餘懷。且草木之祥異也。雖自天成。皆因地秀。物有所應。吾何以堪。行敏始假郡符。已彰瑞牒。天其誡爾。爾宜愼之。況鄕號千年。村名穀祿。足驗一百年之壽與二千石之資。固保前程之富貴矣。將酬美貺。更勵忠誠。非恡獎詞。慮驕銳志。悉之。夏熱切好將息。使廻附此不具云云。

A notice to Yang Xingmin. Your envoy arrived and I received your letter, and you sent with it a scroll with a picture of the magic fungus. I looked at it and sighed in praise, and gladness stayed on in my heart. Now a marvel of good omen among plants and trees, though it is brought to completion by Heaven, comes about in every case through the excellence of the ground. Things have that to which they answer. How am I equal to it? You had no sooner borrowed the tally of a prefecture than it showed forth in a register of good omens. Heaven is warning you, and you ought to be careful. Still more, your district bears the name Thousand Years and your village the name Grain Stipend. That is proof enough of a life of a hundred years and the standing of a two-thousand-bushel officer, and it truly keeps safe the wealth and honor of your road ahead. If you would repay this fair gift, put fresh strength into your loyalty. I do not grudge you words of encouragement. I fear that a keen will may grow proud. Know it all. In the heat of summer take the best of care. I send this back with your envoy and cannot set it all out, and so on.