The Chinese Classics | Page 8

by Chinese critics and historians to discredit the record of these events, though some have questioned the extent of the injury inflicted by them on the monuments of their ancient literature [3]. It is important to observe that the edict against the Books did not extend to the Yi-ching, which was
1 ????2??‰?????è???”?, è???”???3????‘????.
2 è?aé?¤??ˉ?|者, ???????…-é¤??oo, ???é???1??’?é??. The meaning of this passage as a whole is sufficiently plain, but I am unable to make out the force of the phrase è?a é?¤.
3 See the remarks of Chamg Chia-tsi (?¤?é??é?-?°), of the Sung dynasty, on the subject, in the ?–???é€?è€?, Bk. clxxiv. p. 5.
exempted as being a work on divination, nor did it extend to the other classics which were in charge of the Board of Great Scholars. There ought to have been no difficulty in finding copies when the Han dynasty superseded that of the Ch'in, and probably there would have been none but for the sack of the capital in B.C. 206 by Hsiang Yu, the formidable opponent of the founder of the House of Han. Then, we are told, the fires blazed for three months among the palaces and public buildings, and must have proved as destructive to the copies of the Great Scholars as the edict of the tyrant had been to the copies among the people.
It is to be noted also that the life of Shih Hwang Ti lasted only three years after the promulgation of his edict. He died in B.C. 210, and the reign of his second son who succeeded him lasted only other three years. A brief period of disorder and struggling for the supreme authority between different chiefs ensured; but the reign of the founder of the Han dynasty dates from B.C. 202. Thus, eleven years were all which intervened between the order for the burning of the Books and rise of that family, which signaled itself by the care which it bestowed for their recovery; and from the edict of the tyrant of Ch'in against private individuals having copies in their keeping, to its express abrogation by the emperor Hsiao Hui, there were only twenty-two years. We may believe, indeed, that vigorous efforts to carry the edict into effect would not be continued longer than the life of its author,-- that is, not for more than about three years. The calamity inflicted upon the ancient Books of China by the House of Ch'in could not have approached to anything like a complete destruction of them. There would be no occasion for the scholars of the Han dynasty, in regard to the bulk of their ancient literature, to undertake more than the work of recension and editing.
9. The idea of forgery by them on a large scale is out of the question. The catalogues of Liang Hsin enumerated more than 13,000 volumes of a larger or smaller size, the productions of nearly 600 different writers, and arranged in thirty-eight subdivisions of subjects [1]. In the third catalogue, the first subdivision contained the orthodox writers [2], to the number of fifty-three, with 836 Works or portions of their Works. Between Mencius and
1 ???????…-??￥, ??‰??…??¨?, ?o”????1??…-???, è???‰???o?????…-?1?·.
2 ??’???者?μ.
K'ung Chi, the grandson of Confucius, eight different authors have place. The second subdivision contained the Works of the Taoist school [1], amounting to 993 collections, from thirty-seven different authors. The sixth subdivision contained the Mohist writers [2], to the number of six, with their productions in 86 collections. I specify these two subdivisions, because they embrace the Works of schools or sects antagonistic to that of Confucius, and some of them still hold a place in Chinese literature, and contain many references to the five Classics, and to Confucius and his disciples.
10. The inquiry pursued in the above paragraphs conducts us to the conclusion that the materials from which the classics, as they have come down to us, were compiled and edited in the two centuries preceding our Christian era, were genuine remains, going back to a still more remote period. The injury which they sustained from the dynasty of Ch'in was, I believe, the same in character as that to which they were exposed during all the time of 'the Warring States.' It may have been more intense in degree, but the constant warfare which prevailed for some centuries among the different states which composed the kingdom was eminently unfavourable to the cultivation of literature. Mencius tells us how the princes had made away with many of the records of antiquity, from which their own usurpations and innovations might have been condemned [3]. Still the times were not unfruitful, either in scholars or statesmen, to whom the ways and monuments of antiquity were dear, and the space from the rise of the Ch'in dynasty to the death of Confucius was not very great. It only amounted