Yetgeul › Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) › Book 20 — Poems
In reply to the poem Vice Director Kim gave to the venerable Qing of Chanshan和金員外贈巉山淸上人
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.
1Look at the spring wind shaking the flowers of the waves
海畔雲菴倚碧螺。遠離塵土稱僧家。勸君休問芭蕉喩。看取春風撼浪花。
By the sea a cloud hermitage leans on a green conch, far away from the dusty earth, and it is called a monk's house. I urge you, stop asking about the parable of the plantain. Look at the spring wind shaking the flowers of the waves.
Interlinear notes 1
Chanshan (巉山) is the estuary on the Chinese side from which Choe Chiwon set out from Huainan for Silla, so the venerable Qing is taken to be a monk of that place. — translator