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

A separate letter sent up to the Grand Commandant: the second上太尉別紙

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 · 77 Chinese characters · reading time 0.3 min

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

1"Let all the party take good care and come safe through wind and waves"

某啓。伏奉手筆。批誨一行人竝善將息穩風濤者。俯顧微流。仰窺尊念。望淮海則陟遐自邇。指風波則視險如夷。遍洒温言。盡叨恩於挾纊。潜敷至懇。願無愧於賣綃。下情無任感激攀戀兢灼之至云云。

I submit this. I have respectfully received the letter in your own hand, in which you instructed that all the party should take good care of themselves and come safe through the wind and the waves. You bent down to look on this slight stream, and I look up and glimpse your honored concern. Looking toward Huaihai, I climb what is far by starting near; pointing at the wind and waves, I see the dangerous as level ground. You have sprinkled warm words all around, so that I unworthily receive in full the kindness of being wrapped in wadding. I quietly unfold my utmost earnestness and wish not to be shamed before the one who sold his gauze. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its gratitude, its clinging longing and its burning awe. And so on.