1. The Hsiâo King suffered, like all the other Confucian books except the Yî, from the fires of Khin. Its subsequent recovery was very like that of the Shû, described on pp. 7, 8. We have in each case a shorter and a longer copy, a modern text and an ancient text.
In the Catalogue of the Imperial Library, prepared by Liû Hin immediately before the commencement of our Christian era, there are two copies of the Hsiâo:--'the old text of the Khung family,' which was in twenty-two chapters, according to a note by Pan Kû (died A.D. 92), the compiler of the documents in the records of the western Han; and another copy, which was, according to the same authority, in eighteen chapters, and was subsequently styled 'the modern text.' Immediately following the entry of these two copies, we find 'Expositions of the Hsiâo by four scholars,'--whose surnames were .Kang-sun, Kiang, Yî, and Hâu. 'They all,' says Pan Kû, 'had laboured on the shorter text.'
The copy in eighteen chapters therefore, we must presume, had been the first recovered; but of how this came about we have no account till we come to the records of the Sui dynasty. There it is said that, when the Khin edict for the destruction of the books was issued, his copy of the Hsiâo was hidden by a scholar called Yen Kih, a member, doubtless, of the Yen family to which Confucius' favourite disciple Yen Hui had belonged When the edict was abrogated in a few years, Kăn, a son of Kih, brought the copy from its hiding place. This must have been in the second century B. C., and the copy, transcribed, probably by Kăn, in the form of the characters then used, would pass into the charge of the board of great scholars' appointed to preserve the The copy in the ancient text was derived from the tablets found in the wall of the Confucian house in the time of the emperor Wû (B.C. 140-87), and is commonly said to have been deciphered, as in the case of the tablets of the Shû, by Khung An-kwo. An-kwo wrote a commentary himself on the Hsiâo, which does not appear in Hin's Catalogue, just as no mention is made there of his commentary on the Shû. We find it entered, however, among the books in the Sui Library with the following note:--'The work of An-kwo disappeared during the troubles of the Liang dynasty (A.D. 502-556), and continued unknown till the time of Sui, when a copy was found in the capital, and came into the possession of a scholar called Liû Hsüan.' Hsüan made his treasure public, and ere long it was acknowledged by the court, while many scholars contended that it was a forgery of his own, and ascribed by him to An-kwo. Whatever opinion we may form on this matter, the discovery of the old text, and the production of a commentary on it by Khung An-kwo, can hardly be called in question.
It might be argued, indeed, that another copy in the old text was found in the first century B. C. In a memorial addressed about the Shwo Wăn dictionary to the emperor An, in A.D. 121, by Hsü Kung, a son of the author, he says that the Hsiâo King which his father used was a copy of that presented, by 'a very old man of Lû,' to The emperor Kâo (B.C. 86-74) 1 Many Chinese critics, and especially Wang Ying-lin
Certainly, in the first century B. C. there were two copies of the Hsiâo King in the Imperial Library of Han. If those copies, catalogued by Liû Hin, were the actual text, presented by Yen Kăn, 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 the evidence for the recovery of the Hsiâo, as it had existed during the Kâu dynasty, was as satisfactory as we could desire; but there 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, Liû Hsiang (B.C. 80-9), the father of Hin, was charged by the emperor (Khăng, 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 Kăn's copy into chapters. What Hsiang did in the case of the old text we are not told. A note by Yen Sze-kû 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 Hsüan Ȝung; and yet the Sui account says that that chapter was in the Hsiâo of .Kang-sun, one of the four early commentators on the modern text. The 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 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 Hsüan Ȝung of the Thang dynasty. Kû Î-tsun, of the Khien-lung period (1736-1795), in his work on the classics and the writings on them, has adduced the titles of eighty-six different works on our classic, that appeared between Khung An-kwo and Hsüan ZȜung. 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 Hsüan says, in his preface, that in the making of his commentary he had freely used the commentaries of six earlier writers, whom he names. They were, Wei Kâo, Wang Sû, Yü Fan, and Liû Shâo, all of our second and third centuries; Liû Hsüan, 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 Lû Khang, rather earlier than Liû, who dealt critically with the commentary attributed to Kăng Khang-khăng. '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
It is hardly necessary to say more on the preservation of the Hsiâo King. In A.D. 996 the second emperor of the Sung dynasty gave orders for an annotated edition of it to be prepared. This was finally completed in 1001, under the superintendence of Hsing Ping (932-1010), with a large critical apparatus, and a lengthened exposition, both of the text and of Hsüan Ȝung's explanation. This work has ever since been current in China. 453:1 The language of the memorial is:--The Hsiâo King' (used by my father in the composition of his dictionary) 'was what San lâo of Lû presented in the time of the emperor Kâo.' The San lâo most readily suggests to the reader the idea of 'three old men;' but the characters may also mean, in harmony with Chinese idiom, 'the three classes of old men,' or 'an individual from those three classes.' The classical passage to explain the phrase is par. 18 in the first section of the sixth Book in the Lî Kî, where it is said that king Wăn feasted the San lâo and Wû kang, 'the three classes of old men and five classes of men of experience,' in his royal college, The three classes of old men were such as were over 80, 90, and 100 years respectively. It was from a man of one of these classes that the emperor received the Hsiâo in the old This account makes the meaning of the phrase 'the San lâo of Lû 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 Ȝze-hui presented the tablets given. No doubt, however, this emperor was Kâo, with whom Ho Kwang was a favourite. If the preface were genuine, of course An-kwo was alive after Ȝze-hui went to court with the tablets. Now, the tablets were discovered in the period Thien-han, B.C. 100-97, and Kâo 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 Shăn Kung, whose death can hardly be placed later than in B.C. 135. If An-kwo were born. 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 Kâo. I cannot believe, therefore, that the preface in the Japanese Hsiâo was written by him; and if we reject the preface, we must also reject the commentary before which it stands. The text of the Hsiâo in the work is nearly identical with that of Sze-mâ 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. 457:1 These tablets are commonly said to contain the thirteen classics (Shih-san King). They contained, however, only twelve different works,--the Yî, the Shû, the Shih, the Kâu Lî, the Î Lî, the Lî Kî, and the amplifications of the Khun Khîu,--by Ȝo Khiû-ming, by Kung-yang, and by Kû-liang. These form 'the nine King.' In addition to these there were the Lun Yü, the Hsiâo King, and the R Yâ. According to Kû Yen-wû (1613-1682), the characters on the tablets were in all 650,252. Mr. T. W. Rhys Davids (Buddhism, p.19) estimates that our English Bible contains between 800,000 and 950,000 words. The first Psalm, in what is called the Delegates' version, very good and concise, contains 100 Chinese characters, and in our English version 130 words. The classics of the Thang tablets, if the translator were a master of both languages, might be rendered in English so as to form a volume not quite so large as our Bible.THE RECOVERY OF THE HSIÂO KING UNDER THE HAN DYNASTY, AND ITS PRESERVATION DOWN TO THE PUBLICATION OF THE COMMENTARY OF THE THANG EMPEROR HSÜAN ZUNG.
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