Fetching
One moment.
Fetching
One moment.
Romanised transliteration as printed by the translator, not the original script. This is what we hold.
1According to the account given in the next note this man was Khung $ze-hui; and in the Books of Sui that is given as the name of the individual of the Khung family, who had hidden the tablets on the appearance of the Khin edict for the destruction of all the old books. 1 The Catalogue Raisonné of the Imperial Libraries commences its account of the copies of the Hsiéo with a description of ‘the Old Text of the Hsiao with the Commentary of Khung An-kwo,’ obtained from Japan ; but the editors give good reasons for doubting its genuineness. There is a copy of this work in the Chinese portion of the British Museum, an edition printed in Japan in 1732, which I have carefully examined, with the help of Professor R. K. Douglas and Mr. A. Wylie. It contains not only the commentary of Khung An-kwo, but what purports to be the original preface of that scholar. There it is said that the bamboo tablets of the copy in ‘ tadpole characters,’ found in the wall of Confucius’ old ‘ lecture hall, in a stone case,’ were presented to the emperor by Khung 3ze-hui, ‘a very old man of LQ” The emperor, it is added, caused two copies to be made in the current characters of the time by ‘the great scholars,’ one of which was given to 3ze-hui, and the other to General Ho Kwang, a minister of war and faveurite, who greatly valued it, and placed it among the archives of the empire, where it was jealously guarded. This account makes the meaning of the phrase ‘the San ldo of Li’ quite clear; but there are difficulties in the way of our believing that it proceeded from Khung An-kwo. No mention is made of him in it, whereas, according to the current narrations, the tablets with the tadpole characters were first deciphered by him; nor is the name of the emperor to whom Khung 3ze-hui presented the tablets given. No doubt, however, this emperor was KAo, with whom Ho Kwang wasa favourite. “If the preface were genuine, of course Ankwo was alive after 3ze-hui went to court with the tablets. Now, the tablets were discovered in the period Thien-han, 8, c. 100-97, and Kao reigned from B.c. 86 to 74. An-kwo died at the age of sixty, but in what year we are not told. He had studied the Shih under Shin Kung, whose death can hardly be placed later than in s.c. 135. If An-kwo were bom in B.c. 150, he would have been more than sixty years old—the age assigned to him at his death— at the accession of Kao. I cannot believe, therefore, that the preface in the Japanese Hsiao was written by him; and if we reject the preface, we must also reject the commentary before which it stands.
2150, he would have been more than sixty years old—the age assigned to him at his death— at the accession of Kao. I cannot believe, therefore, that the preface in the Japanese Hsiao was written by him; and if we reject the preface, we must also reject the commentary before which it stands. The text of the Hsiao in the work is nearly identical with that of Sze-m& Kwang, mentioned below on p. 458; but to the chapters there are prefixed the headings (which Kwang did not adopt), that cannot be traced farther back than the Thang dynasty. This might be got over, but the commentary throws no new light on the text. ‘It is shallow and poor,’ say the editors of the Catalogue Raisonné, ‘and not in the style of the Han scholars.’ I must think with them that Khung An-Kwo’s commentary, purporting to have been preserved in Japan is a forgery. INTRODUCTION. 455 is possible that the difficulty would disappear, if the details of the discovery and the subsequent dealing with the tablets had come down to us complete. Certainly, in the first century B.C. there were two copies of the Hsiao King in the Imperial Library of Han. If those copies, catalogued by Lid Hin, were the actual text, presented by Yen X4n, and a faithful transcript in the current Han characters of the ancient text discovered in the wall of Confucius’ old lecture hall, we should be able to say that Can we rely the evidence for the recovery of the Hsiao, as fully on the it had existed during the KAu dynasty, was copies cata- : : logued by Lia aS Satisfactory as we could desire; but there Hin? are some considerations that are in the way of our doing so. According to the records of Sui, after the old text came into the possession of the court, and the differences between it and the text earlier recovered were observed, Lid Hsiang (B.C, 80-9), the father of Hin, was charged by the emperor (Khang, B.C. 32-7) to compare the two. The result of his examination of them was that ‘he removed from the modern text what was excessive and erroneous, and fixed the number of the chapters at eighteen.’ It does not appear that previously there was any division of Kn’s copy into chapters. What Hsiang did in the case of the old text we are not told. A note by Yen Sze-k0 of the Thang dynasty, appended to Hin’s Catalogue, quotes from him that ‘ one chapter of the modern text was divided into two in the old, another into three, and that the old had one chapter which did not appear in the other.’ This missing chapter, it is understood, was the one beginning, ‘Inside the smaller doors leading to the inner apartments,’ which I have appended, from the current old text, to my translation of the classic as published by Hsiian 3ung ; and yet the Sui account says that that chapter was in the Hsiao of Kang-sun, one of the four early commentators on the modern text.
3The copies catalogued by Hin were made after the examination and revision of the two texts by his father. There are suspicious resemblances between the style and method of the present classic and those of the original works of 456 | THE HSIAO KING. Hsiang that have come down to us. It is impossible to say, from the want of information, what liberties he took with the documents put into his charge. The differences between the two texts as we now have them are trivial. I believe that the changes made ‘in them by Hsiang were not important; but having them as they came from his revision, we have them at second hand, and this has afforded ground for the dealing with them by Kd Hsi and others in the manner which will be described in the next chapter. 2. I have said above (p. 450) that for the text of the classic.—the modern text, that is,—as we now have it, we are indebted to the labours of the emperor Hsiian 3ung of the Thang dynasty. Kd f-tsun, of the K/ien-lung period (1736-1795), in his work on the classics and the writings From Khung on them, has adduced the titles of eighty-six An-kwoto different works on our classic, that appeared Ae sn Bune. between Khung An-kwo and Hsiian 3ung. Not a single one of all these now survives ; but the enumeration of them shows that the most distinguished scholars during the intervening centuries exercised their powers on the treatise, and would keep a watch on one another in the preservation of the text. Moreover, several of the works continued through the Thang dynasty, and on into that of Sung. The Catalogue of the Sui Library contains the titles of nineteen in its list. The emperor Hsiian says, in his preface, that in the Hsiian 3ung’s Making of his commentary he had freely used work. the commentaries of six earlier writers, whom he names. They were, Wei K4o, Wang Sd, Yii Fan, and Lid Shao, all of our second and third centuries; Lid Hsiian, of our sixth century, who laboured on the commentary of Khung An-kwo, which, as I have already stated, is said to have been discovered in his time and presented to him; and La Khang, rather earlier than Lid, who dealt critically with the commentary attributed to Kang Khang-éAang. ‘ But,’ says the imperial author, ‘if a comment be right in reason, why need we enquire from whom it came? We have therefore taken those six writers, considered wherein INTRODUCTION. 457 they agreed and differed, and decided between their interpretations by reference to the general scope of the five (great) King. In compendious style, but with extensive examination of the subject, we have made the meaning of the classic clear.’
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
Romanised transliteration as printed by the translator, not the original script. This is what we hold.
1According to the account given in the next note this man was Khung $ze-hui; and in the Books of Sui that is given as the name of the individual of the Khung family, who had hidden the tablets on the appearance of the Khin edict for the destruction of all the old books. 1 The Catalogue Raisonné of the Imperial Libraries commences its account of the copies of the Hsiéo with a description of ‘the Old Text of the Hsiao with the Commentary of Khung An-kwo,’ obtained from Japan ; but the editors give good reasons for doubting its genuineness. There is a copy of this work in the Chinese portion of the British Museum, an edition printed in Japan in 1732, which I have carefully examined, with the help of Professor R. K. Douglas and Mr. A. Wylie. It contains not only the commentary of Khung An-kwo, but what purports to be the original preface of that scholar. There it is said that the bamboo tablets of the copy in ‘ tadpole characters,’ found in the wall of Confucius’ old ‘ lecture hall, in a stone case,’ were presented to the emperor by Khung 3ze-hui, ‘a very old man of LQ” The emperor, it is added, caused two copies to be made in the current characters of the time by ‘the great scholars,’ one of which was given to 3ze-hui, and the other to General Ho Kwang, a minister of war and faveurite, who greatly valued it, and placed it among the archives of the empire, where it was jealously guarded. This account makes the meaning of the phrase ‘the San ldo of Li’ quite clear; but there are difficulties in the way of our believing that it proceeded from Khung An-kwo. No mention is made of him in it, whereas, according to the current narrations, the tablets with the tadpole characters were first deciphered by him; nor is the name of the emperor to whom Khung 3ze-hui presented the tablets given. No doubt, however, this emperor was KAo, with whom Ho Kwang wasa favourite. “If the preface were genuine, of course Ankwo was alive after 3ze-hui went to court with the tablets. Now, the tablets were discovered in the period Thien-han, 8, c. 100-97, and Kao reigned from B.c. 86 to 74. An-kwo died at the age of sixty, but in what year we are not told. He had studied the Shih under Shin Kung, whose death can hardly be placed later than in s.c. 135. If An-kwo were bom in B.c. 150, he would have been more than sixty years old—the age assigned to him at his death— at the accession of Kao. I cannot believe, therefore, that the preface in the Japanese Hsiao was written by him; and if we reject the preface, we must also reject the commentary before which it stands.
2150, he would have been more than sixty years old—the age assigned to him at his death— at the accession of Kao. I cannot believe, therefore, that the preface in the Japanese Hsiao was written by him; and if we reject the preface, we must also reject the commentary before which it stands. The text of the Hsiao in the work is nearly identical with that of Sze-m& Kwang, mentioned below on p. 458; but to the chapters there are prefixed the headings (which Kwang did not adopt), that cannot be traced farther back than the Thang dynasty. This might be got over, but the commentary throws no new light on the text. ‘It is shallow and poor,’ say the editors of the Catalogue Raisonné, ‘and not in the style of the Han scholars.’ I must think with them that Khung An-Kwo’s commentary, purporting to have been preserved in Japan is a forgery. INTRODUCTION. 455 is possible that the difficulty would disappear, if the details of the discovery and the subsequent dealing with the tablets had come down to us complete. Certainly, in the first century B.C. there were two copies of the Hsiao King in the Imperial Library of Han. If those copies, catalogued by Lid Hin, were the actual text, presented by Yen X4n, and a faithful transcript in the current Han characters of the ancient text discovered in the wall of Confucius’ old lecture hall, we should be able to say that Can we rely the evidence for the recovery of the Hsiao, as fully on the it had existed during the KAu dynasty, was copies cata- : : logued by Lia aS Satisfactory as we could desire; but there Hin? are some considerations that are in the way of our doing so. According to the records of Sui, after the old text came into the possession of the court, and the differences between it and the text earlier recovered were observed, Lid Hsiang (B.C, 80-9), the father of Hin, was charged by the emperor (Khang, B.C. 32-7) to compare the two. The result of his examination of them was that ‘he removed from the modern text what was excessive and erroneous, and fixed the number of the chapters at eighteen.’ It does not appear that previously there was any division of Kn’s copy into chapters. What Hsiang did in the case of the old text we are not told. A note by Yen Sze-k0 of the Thang dynasty, appended to Hin’s Catalogue, quotes from him that ‘ one chapter of the modern text was divided into two in the old, another into three, and that the old had one chapter which did not appear in the other.’ This missing chapter, it is understood, was the one beginning, ‘Inside the smaller doors leading to the inner apartments,’ which I have appended, from the current old text, to my translation of the classic as published by Hsiian 3ung ; and yet the Sui account says that that chapter was in the Hsiao of Kang-sun, one of the four early commentators on the modern text.
3The copies catalogued by Hin were made after the examination and revision of the two texts by his father. There are suspicious resemblances between the style and method of the present classic and those of the original works of 456 | THE HSIAO KING. Hsiang that have come down to us. It is impossible to say, from the want of information, what liberties he took with the documents put into his charge. The differences between the two texts as we now have them are trivial. I believe that the changes made ‘in them by Hsiang were not important; but having them as they came from his revision, we have them at second hand, and this has afforded ground for the dealing with them by Kd Hsi and others in the manner which will be described in the next chapter. 2. I have said above (p. 450) that for the text of the classic.—the modern text, that is,—as we now have it, we are indebted to the labours of the emperor Hsiian 3ung of the Thang dynasty. Kd f-tsun, of the K/ien-lung period (1736-1795), in his work on the classics and the writings From Khung on them, has adduced the titles of eighty-six An-kwoto different works on our classic, that appeared Ae sn Bune. between Khung An-kwo and Hsiian 3ung. Not a single one of all these now survives ; but the enumeration of them shows that the most distinguished scholars during the intervening centuries exercised their powers on the treatise, and would keep a watch on one another in the preservation of the text. Moreover, several of the works continued through the Thang dynasty, and on into that of Sung. The Catalogue of the Sui Library contains the titles of nineteen in its list. The emperor Hsiian says, in his preface, that in the Hsiian 3ung’s Making of his commentary he had freely used work. the commentaries of six earlier writers, whom he names. They were, Wei K4o, Wang Sd, Yii Fan, and Lid Shao, all of our second and third centuries; Lid Hsiian, of our sixth century, who laboured on the commentary of Khung An-kwo, which, as I have already stated, is said to have been discovered in his time and presented to him; and La Khang, rather earlier than Lid, who dealt critically with the commentary attributed to Kang Khang-éAang. ‘ But,’ says the imperial author, ‘if a comment be right in reason, why need we enquire from whom it came? We have therefore taken those six writers, considered wherein INTRODUCTION. 457 they agreed and differed, and decided between their interpretations by reference to the general scope of the five (great) King. In compendious style, but with extensive examination of the subject, we have made the meaning of the classic clear.’
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
No commentary for this page.