The “Ten Injuctions” 訓要十條 (Hunyo Sipcho, 942?): annotated translation

Abstract

The article focuses on the “Ten Injunctions” (Hunyo sipcho, 942?), a famous Korean document that dates back to the early Koryŏ period (918–1392) and most likely belongs to Wang Kŏn (T’aejo, 877–943), the founder of Koryŏ kingdom. This article, for the first time in Russian Korean studies, introduces a reader to a commented translation of the “Ten Injunctions”. The “Ten Injunctions” is mentioned in Korean historical chronicles, namely the “History of Koryŏ” (Koryŏsa, 1451) and the “Essentials of Koryŏ History” (Koryŏsa chŏryo, 1452). It was written in Hanmun – a Korean form of classical Chinese, and as our research shows, it was in form of traditional Chinese imperial writings. The “Ten Injunctions” document consists of two parts. The first one is an Introduction that explains the reasons stood behind the completion of the document, and the second one is the main text with the prescribed ten injunctions. The origin of the “Ten Injunctions” is still under discussion because most of the Koryŏ historical documents were destroyed in Khitan invasion in 1011: although most of the scholars are sure that the text belongs to Wang Kŏn, recently there have been a number of suggestions that the text belongs to Wang Kŏn’s grandson or even to a palace scholar of the 11th century. The “Ten Injunctions” document has never yet been translated into Russian, nor have ever been a study on its contents, so this paper seeks to fill this gap and to introduce the document to the Russian Korean studies.