Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Poems
The Perilous Rock on the Mountaintop山頂危石
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.
1The whole world, scheming for itself, laughs at Bian He
萬古天成勝琢磨。高高頂上立靑螺。永無飛溜侵凌得。唯有閒雲撥觸多。峻影每先迎海日。危形長恐墜潮波。縱饒蘊玉誰回顧。擧世謀身笑卞和。
Through all the ages what heaven made is better than what is cut and polished. High on the highest summit stands a blue conch. Never can the flying drops encroach upon it; only the idle clouds brush and touch it often. Its steep shadow is always first to meet the sea sun. Its perilous form long fears that it will fall into the tidal waves. Even though it holds jade within, who turns to look at it? The whole world, scheming for itself, laughs at Bian He.