Text for the Cold Food sacrifice to the officers and men who fell in battle寒食祭陣亡將士文
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 · 128 Chinese characters · reading time 0.5 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 16 — Funerary 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.
1What I think of is their old service, and what grieves me is the fair season
Alas. Life has its bound, and this is what old and new alike sigh over. For a name that does not rot, loyalty and righteousness come first. You drew the crossbow and wore out your bodies; you took the chariot wheel for a shield and gave full play to your strength. You roused your spirit in the ranks of the valiant and forgot your bodies before the goose and stork array. You could let your courage overflow among shield and spear, and so you were surely spared the shame of dying on a mat. Now the wild grass is green and the oriole in the wood sings well, but the stream goes far and dim on its way, carrying regret to no end and to no purpose, and mound upon mound the graves lie waste. Who can prove that the souls have knowledge? What I think of is their old service, and what grieves me is the fair season. Let this thin libation be set out, to comfort their wandering in the dark. Plot together to hold off the bandits as against Du Hui, and do not follow Wen Xu in longing to go home. If you can bring your bold will to completion, this is called merit in the unseen world.