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 third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 · 92 Chinese characters · reading time 0.4 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.

1Hang the medicine bag at the bow and do not open it

伏奉尊誨。藥帒子懸於船頭。不畏風浪。愼勿開之者。仰掛靑囊。遠踰碧海。必使天吳息浪。水伯迎風。旣無他慮於葭津。可訪仙遊於蓬島。唯願往來無滯。忠孝克全。萬里安流。永荷濟川之力。百年苦節。不欺臨谷之心。下情無任感戴兢灼之至。

I have respectfully received your honored instruction: "Hang the medicine bag at the bow of the ship and you will not fear wind and waves. Be careful not to open it." I hang up the blue bag with reverence and cross the far blue sea. It will surely make Tianwu still the waves and Shuibo meet the wind, so that there is no other care at the reed ford and I may seek the wandering of immortals on the isle of Penglai. I wish only that going and coming be unhindered and that loyalty and filial duty be made whole, that on ten thousand li of quiet current I may long bear your strength in crossing the river, and that in a hundred years of hard constancy I may not betray the heart that stands at the edge of the valley. My humble heart cannot bear the fullness of its gratitude and its burning awe.