Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Reports to the Throne

Letter of thanks for leave to go home and see my parents謝許歸覲啓

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 · 203 Chinese characters · reading time 0.8 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 20 — 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.

1I left home at twelve, and now it is eighteen years

某啓。早來員外郎君奉傳尊旨。伏蒙恩慈念以某久別庭闈。許令歸覲者。仰銜金諾。虔佩玉音。雖尋海島以榮歸。古今無比。且望煙波而感泣。去住難安。伏緣某自年十二離家。今已二九載矣。百生天幸。獲托德門。驟忝官榮。仍叨命服。一身遭遇。萬里光輝。是以遠親稍慰於倚門。遊子倍榮於得路。唯仰趙衰之冬日。深暖旅懷。豈吟張翰之秋風。遽牽歸思。且緣辭鄕歲久。泛海程遙。住傷烏鳥之情。去懷犬馬之戀。唯願暫謀東返。迎待西來。仰託仁封。永安卑迹。今卽將期理□。但切戀軒。下情無任感戴兢灼涕泣之至。謹奉啓陳謝云云。

I submit this. This morning the Vice Director conveyed your honored will. In your kindness you considered that I have long been parted from my parents' courtyard, and you have allowed me to go home and see them. I take up your golden promise with reverence and wear your jade words with awe. To seek the sea islands and return in glory has no match in old times or new, yet I also look out on the misty waves and weep with feeling, so that going and staying are alike hard to rest in. I left home at twelve, and now it is already eighteen years. By the heaven-sent fortune of a hundred lives I found shelter at your gate of virtue, was suddenly and unworthily given the honor of office, and then unworthily given the robe of appointment. What one body has met with shines for ten thousand li. Therefore my distant parents are somewhat comforted as they lean at the gate, and the wanderer is doubly honored at having found his road. I look up only to the winter sun of Zhao Cui, which deeply warms a traveler's heart. How should I chant the autumn wind of Zhang Han and be dragged all at once by thoughts of going home? Moreover the years since I left my home village are many and the sea road is long. To stay wounds the feeling of the crow; to go carries the longing of dog and horse. I wish only to plan a brief return to the east and then to meet the west again, to lean on your benevolent domain and to set my low traces at rest forever. Now the time is near when I am to put □ in order, but my longing for your gate is keen. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its gratitude and awe, its burning and its tears. Respectfully I send up this letter of thanks, and so on.

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