Pilwon Japgi (Miscellaneous Jottings from the Garden of the Brush)筆苑雜記
Seo Geojeong · 1487 (Joseon, 18th year of King Seongjong) · Korea · 5 volumes · 26,015 Chinese characters
Jottings that Seo Geojeong set down at leisure as his brush ran, cut on blocks at Uiseong in 1487. It holds 177 passages of court and country over the hundred years from the founding of Joseon to the reign of King Seongjong. Men are left just as they were — Yu Gwan, who held up an umbrella against a leaking roof; Hwang Hui, who did not grow angry even when a servant child made water on his papers; Choe Yundeok, who shot a tiger and did not know what beast it was; Seong Gan, who read out the whole of a library in one night. Beside them stand passages where the author sets out his own thought: the one in which he told King Sejo that the four pillars of a fate run out at five hundred and eighteen thousand four hundred and so the books of destiny cannot be trusted, and the ones arguing over the doctrine of geomancy and the rules for posthumous titles. He grades the character of the Chinese envoys one by one, and here too is the place where he says of the Samguk Sagi that "it is not a book that hands down what can be trusted." The three prefaces by Paeng So, Pyo Yeon-mal and Jo Wi, and the colophon by Yi Se-jwa, are translated with it.
Three prefaces, volumes 1 and 2, and the postface — 5 entries, 181 paragraphs and 26,015 graphs — have all been translated. The whole text is carried on one Wikisource page, so only the templates and categories were cleared away and the graphs left as they are. On the preface page the preface by Peng Shao and the preface by Pyo Yeonmal are joined into one block, so they were parted by putting in a blank line and nothing more. At two places in volume 1 (「太宗敎延편臣曰」, 「常有편二」) one Korean letter 「편」 is mixed in, but it cannot be made out which graph it stands for, so the material is left as it is and the place is stated in the translation. The graph counts of the original against the source text, and of the source text against the translation, are all the same.