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 · 176 Chinese characters · reading time 0.7 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 17 — Reports to the Throne 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.
So-and-so states this. Yesterday I humbly received his kindness again in a further grant of a living allowance. The favor came down beyond my hopes, and joy gathered in the midst of my sorrow. I am at ease in poverty, yet my morning cooking is already ample. I am moved by his virtue, and I know only that I go to sleep full. So the pot and the steamer of the Fan family are spared their long regret of idleness, and the bamboo bowl and gourd dipper in Yan Hui's lane have their joy doubled. I humbly consider that though I pierce the leaf as Yang Youji and Zengzi did, I am a tumbleweed with its root cut. In vain I hold a sharp awl and hope to meet the eye of a great worthy. How should I take up a long sword and be the first to raise the song of the lowest guest? The other day I suddenly offered up my rough notes and again soiled his honored hearing. Peeping at the house of his virtue, the swallows may well congratulate one another. Looking at his awesome wind, the heron fears it will fly backward. How could I have reckoned that his lordship the Minister of Works would look down and think of a man of the sea who has long been a dusty clerk, that he would send down a record of me and follow it with a wetting of his bounty? For the rest of my life there is no fear of the ditch. Hunger and cold are relieved, yet the hill and mountain on my head grow heavier, and I can hardly bear to carry them. In coming to lean on him I am already like a cornered monkey. In showing my thanks I wish to be like the sick sparrow. My humble heart cannot bear it, and so on.