Requesting to Be Relieved of the Joint Charge of Military Affairs辭免兼察軍務狀

In the seventh month of last year your servant received a command and came out on the business of mustering the army grain of one road. Thereafter, about the ninth month, he received orders, and there was an instruction that he should look to military affairs jointly and set them in order. In the main there was a reason at that time and no more, and now there is no business besides that calls to be looked to.

What your servant said before — that the office of Supreme Commander cannot be held by two, and that when commands and orders issue mixed together there is loss and no profit — is what the court ought to look into closely once again. From of old, matters of arms must be entrusted wholly to one man and the fruit of them laid to his charge. If a man be already charged with the business and another at his side be thrust in and mixed with him, there is no reason for him not to fail; and this is why the Book of Changes has the warning that "the cart carries corpses."

Still more, your servant's nature and discernment are dull and mean, and from before now his stealing of a place and his ruining of the state have been grievous indeed. If now, at an hour of peril on which the survival or ruin of the state hangs, he should again transgress what the men of old warned against and hasten the defeat, his guilt would be greater still.

Moreover, since the outbreak of the troubles your servant's pain in things public and private has been keen, and his cares and indignation have turned to sickness. At times he cries out as if maddened until his breath fails, and his thought and spirit are the more overturned by the day, and the day of his death is not far off; the shape of things is already such that he cannot take part in and manage military affairs. He dares to beg that by your sacred grace the command to look to military affairs jointly be taken back, so that he may spend his strength wholly upon the one business of grain with which he is charged.