The Shih King | Page 4

the sage's time.
3. i. It would not be surprising, if, floating about and current among the people of China in the sixth century before our era, there had been more than 3000 pieces of poetry. The marvel is that such was not the case. But in the Narratives of the States, a work of the Kau dynasty, and ascribed by many to Zo Khi?-ming, there occur quotations from thirty-one poems, made by statesmen and others, all anterior to Confucius; and of those poems there are not more than two which are not in the present classic. Even of those two, one is an ode of it quoted under another name. Further, in the Zo Kwan, certainly the work of Khi?-ming, we have quotations from not fewer than 219 poems, of which only thirteen are not found in the classic. Thus of 250 poems current in China before the supposed compilation of the Shih, 236 are found in it, and only fourteen are absent. To use the words of Kao Y?, a scholar of the present dynasty, 'If the poems existing in Confucius' time had been more than 3000, the quotations of poems now lost in these two works should have been ten times as numerous as the quotations from the 305 pieces said to have been preserved by him, whereas they are only between a twenty-first and twenty-second part of the existing pieces. This is sufficient to show that Khien's statement is not worthy of credit.'
ii. Of the existence of the Book of Poetry before Confucius, digested in four Parts, and much in the same order as at present, there may be advanced the following proofs:--
First. There is the passage in the Official Book of Kau, quoted and discussed in the last paragraph of the preceding chapter. We have in it a distinct reference to poems, many centuries before the sage, arranged and classified in the same way as those of the existing Shih. Our Shih, no doubt, was then in the process of formation.
Second. L? the ninth piece of the sixth decade of the Shih,

Part II, an
ode assigned to the time of king Y?, B.C. 78, to 771, we. have the words,
'They sing the Ya and the Nan, Dancing to their flutes without error.'
So early, therefore, as the eighth century B.C. there was a collection of poems, of which some bore the name of the Nan, which there is much reason to suppose were the Kau Nan and the Shao Nan, forming the first two Books of the first Part of the present Shih; and of which others bore the name of the Ya, being, probably, the earlier pieces that now compose a large portion of the second and third Parts.
Third. In the narratives of Zo Khi?-ming, under the twenty-ninth year of duke Hsiang, B.C. 544, when Confucius was only seven or eight years old, we have an account of a visit to the court of L? by an envoy from W?, an eminent statesman of the time, and a man of great learning. We are told that as he wished to hear the music of Kau, which he could do better in L? than in any other state, they sang to him the odes of the Kau Nan and the Shao Nan; those of Phei, Yung, and Wei; of the Royal Domain; of Kang; of Kh?; of Pin; of Khin; of Wei; of Thang; of Khan; of Kwei; and of Zhao. They sang to, him also the odes of the Minor Ya and the Greater Ya; and they sang finally the pieces of the Sung. We have thus, existing in the boyhood of Confucius, what we may call the present Book of Poetry, with its Fang, its Ya, and its Sung. The only difference discernible is slight,-in the order in which the Books of the Fang followed one another.
Fourth. We may appeal in this matter to the words of Confucius himself. Twice in the Analects he speaks of the Shih as a collection consisting of 300 pieces[1]. That work not being made on any principle of chronological order, we cannot positively assign those sayings to any particular years of Confucius' life; but it is, I may say, the unanimous opinion of Chinese critics that they were spoken before the time to which Khien and K? Hs? refer his special labour on the Book of Poetry.
To my own mind the evidence that has been adduced is decisive on the points which I specified. The Shih, arranged very much as we now have it, was current in China before the time of Confucius, and its pieces were in the mouths of statesmen and scholars, constantly quoted by them on festive and other occasions. Poems not included in it there doubtless were, but they were comparatively few. Confucius may have made