Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 17 — Reports to the Throne

Poem recording his virtue — the way of the brush七言紀德詩 筆法

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 · 46 Chinese characters · reading time 0.2 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.

1Writing that even men of outer countries strive to learn

見說書窓暫臥龍。神傳妙訣助奇鋒。也知外國人爭學。惟恨無因乞手蹤。

They say that in the study a dragon lay down for a while, and a spirit handed him a subtle secret that helped his strange brush point. I know as well that men of outer countries strive to learn it. My one regret is that there is no way to beg a trace of his hand.

Interlinear notes 1

南朝蕭子雲善書。百濟使人求手蹤。以爲國寶。

Xiao Ziyun of the Southern Dynasties wrote well, and an envoy of Baekje asked for a trace of his hand and made it a treasure of the country.