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

A memorial thanking him for money for the journey謝行裝錢狀

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 · 212 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.

1Two hundred strings of cash and the gear for the road

伏蒙仁恩特賜錢二百貫。又令辦行裝者。謹依處分捧領訖。伏以某學虧力行。事過心期。燕觜銜泥。點汙常慙於廣廈。鼇頭抃嶽。低佪暗避於連鉤。每愼行藏。深規躁靜。豈謂謙而受益。或希屈以求伸。今者果逢尊慈令將遠命。榮歸相國。免挈空囊。比陸生南說之橐裝。倍多輝煥。異孔氏東還之輜重。豈慮焚燒。且彼虞卿白璧。郭隗黃金。徒欲耀名。終非濟事。是若念其就養。愍以食貧。減二十曰之堂封。濟數千里之家信。累載莫申其勞苦。一朝頓贍於旨甘。寧親而旣佩銀章。倍榮衣錦。戀德而但垂珠淚。願效賣綃。下情無任感恩榮抃涕戀兢惕之至云云。

I have humbly received your benevolent kindness. You bestowed on me two hundred strings of cash and further ordered that gear for the road be made ready, and following your disposal I have respectfully received them. I humbly consider that my learning falls short of vigorous practice and that my affairs have gone beyond what my heart looked for. Like a swallow's beak holding mud, my staining has always shamed the great hall. Like the turtle's head bearing up a peak, I have lingered and quietly shunned the linked hooks. I have always been careful about coming forward and drawing back, and have taken haste and stillness for my deep rule. How then could I have hoped to be humble and so receive increase, or to bend in order to seek stretching? Now I have indeed met your honored kindness, which sends me far with a command and lets me return in glory to the chief minister's land, sparing me from carrying an empty bag. Set beside the bag and gear of Master Lu when he went to persuade the south, this is doubly bright. It is not like the baggage carts of Master Kong returning to the east, so what fear have I of burning? Moreover the white jade of Yu Qing and the yellow gold of Guo Wei were meant only to make a name shine, and in the end they rescued no affair. This, then, is because you thought of my going to support my parents and pitied my poverty in food, and so cut away twenty days of the hall's emolument to carry word to a house several thousand li away. For many years I could not repay their toil; in one morning there is suddenly plenty of sweet food. In setting my parents at ease I already wear the silver seal, and the glory of brocade robes is doubled. In longing for your virtue I only let fall pearl tears, and I wish to follow the one who sold his gauze. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its gratitude for kindness, its clapping at glory, its tears of longing and its awe. And so on.

‹ A memorial thanking him for sending the monthly salary money againContentsLetter of thanks for leave to go home and see my parents ›Listen to this piece