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 · 78 Chinese characters · reading time 0.3 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 19 — Reports and Enclosures 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.
1The clear source of the Yan waters in the land of Mengjin
I do not know how your honored person has been these days. I bow and think of that land apart at Mengjin and the clear source of the Yan waters, where the wind clears and you tilt your pillow toward the sound of the spring, where the clouds come at dawn and you roll up the blind to the colors of the hills. Since the place already holds such beauty, your Way must surely have taken on its mild harmony. I bow and ask that you take care always in sleeping and rising, and return early to the ordering of the state, that the dream in the moon may be plainly borne out and the springtime of the world be brought to pass. The feeling of one low cannot bear his longing and his prayer, and it reaches its height. Respectfully submitted.
Interlinear notes 1
脫 is taken as "to transcend." Read as "to lose," it would mean forfeiting the harmonious breath, which contradicts the surrounding lines. — translator