Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 15 — Prayer Texts

Rite-text for the late Vice Director of Zhaoyi — the second爲故昭義僕射齋詞

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 · 197 Chinese characters · reading time 0.8 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 15 — Prayer Texts 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 feast for three hundred monks, and the copying of sutras

中和二年七月二十七日。某官某乙奉太尉處分。爲故昭義僕射。於法雲寺設三百僧齋。並寫金光明經五部。法華經一部。永充供養。蓋聆佛修慧力。普濟群迷。人發信心。終成善願。苟得影從至敎。必能響答虔誠。伏以昭義僕射夙振雄圖。繼分重寄。將軍投袂。練兵而方切專征。天子翦衣。飛詔而唯憑妙略。佇建彀中之勳業。忽罹意外之災殃。不弔昊天奪我良胤。今則敬投蓮宇。虔設桑門。仍尋貝葉之眞蹤。仰奉法華之妙義。伏願乘玆功德。解彼冤讎。災星昔照於預州。已推定分。慧日分懸於覺路。永絶良緣。謹疏。

On the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month of the second year of Zhonghe, so-and-so of such-and-such office, carrying out the disposition of the Grand Commandant, sets at Fayun Monastery a feast for three hundred monks for the late Vice Director of Zhaoyi, and with it has five copies of the Golden Light Sutra and one copy of the Lotus Sutra written out, to serve as an offering forever. For it is heard that the Buddha cultivated the power of wisdom and saves the crowd of the deluded everywhere, and that when a man raises a believing heart he brings a good vow to completion in the end. If one can follow the utmost teaching as a shadow follows, it will surely answer sincere reverence as an echo answers. I humbly consider that the Vice Director of Zhaoyi early shook out his great designs and in turn took up a heavy charge. The general threw back his sleeve, drilled his troops, and was just then keen to hold sole command of the campaign. The Son of Heaven cut the cloth for him, sped down an edict, and leaned on nothing but his fine strategy. While men waited for him to raise merit within bowshot, he suddenly met a disaster beyond all thought. Unpitying August Heaven took away our good heir. Now we reverently cast ourselves before the lotus hall and devoutly set out the gate of the Sangha, going on to seek the true traces on the palm leaves and to look up and receive the wondrous meaning of the Lotus. We humbly pray that, riding on this merit, the enmity there may be loosed, that the star of disaster which once shone on Yuzhou be set down to a lot already fixed, and that the sun of wisdom hang apart on the road of awakening and forever cut off the bond of enmity. Respectfully submitted.

Interlinear notes 1

The base text has 良緣, "a good bond," but the preceding plea to loose the enmity, and 永絶怨讎之本 in the same book, support reading it as an error for 怨緣, "the bond of enmity." — translator

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