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The Tidal Waves潮浪

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 · 56 Chinese characters · reading time 0.2 min

Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 20 — Poems 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 think of Zong Que's words about the long wind

驟雪翻霜千萬重。往來弦望躡前蹤。見君終日能懷信。慙我趨時盡放慵。石壁戰聲飛霹靂。雲峯倒影撼芙蓉。因思宗愨長風語。壯氣橫生憶臥龍。

Racing snow and tumbling frost, a thousand and ten thousand folds. Coming and going at the half moon and the full, they tread their old tracks. I see that you can hold to faith the whole day long, and I am ashamed that I chase the times and give myself wholly to sloth. The sound of battle on the stone cliff sends thunderbolts flying. The upturned shadow of the cloud peak shakes the lotus. So I think of Zong Que's words about the long wind, and a bold spirit rises across me, and I remember the Sleeping Dragon.