The Chinese Classics: with a translation, critical and exegetical notes, prolegomena and copious indexes: (Shih ching. English) — Volume 1Legge, James
Religion
The Chinese Classics: with a translation, critical and exegetical notes, prolegomena and copious indexes: (Shih ching. English) — Volume 1
Legge, James
China -- History; Chinese literature; Chinese literature -- Translations into English
In the last section f this chapter will be found a list of the readings in his commentary different from those which are now acknowledged in deference to the authority of Chu Hsi, of the Sung dynasty. They are not many, and their importance is but trifling.
8. On the whole, the above statements will satisfy the reader of the care with which the text of the Lun Yu was fixed during the dynasty of Han.
SECTION II.
AT WHAT TIME, AND BY WHOM, THE ANALECTS WERE WRITTEN; THEIR PLAN; AND AUTHENTICITY.
1. At the commencement of the notes upon the first Book, under the heading, 'The Title of the Work,' I have given the received account of its authorship, which precedes the catalogue
1 張侯論.
2 文獻通考, Bk. clxxxiv. p. 3.
3 鄭玄, 字康成.
4 孝獻皇帝.
of Liu Hsin. According to that, the Analects were compiled by the disciples if Confucius coming together after his death, and digesting the memorials of his discourses and conversations which they had severally preserved. But this cannot be true. We may believe, indeed, that many of the disciples put on record conversations which they had had with their master, and notes about his manners and incidents of his life, and that these have been incorporated with the Work which we have, but that Work must have taken its present form at a period somewhat later.
In Book VIII, chapters iii iv, we have some notices of the last days of Tsang Shan, and are told that he was visited on his death-bed by the officer Mang Ching. Now Ching was the posthumous title of Chung- sun Chieh [1], and we find him alive (Li Chi, II. Pt. ii. 2) after the death of duke Tao of Lu [2], which took place B.C. 431, about fifty years after the death of Confucius.
Again, Book XIX is all occupied with the sayings of the disciples. Confucius personally does not appear in it. Parts of it, as chapters iii, xii, and xviii, carry us down to a time when the disciples had schools and followers of their own, and were accustomed to sustain their teachings by referring to the lessons which they had learned from the sage.
Thirdly, there is the second chapter of Book XI, the second paragraph of which is evidently a note by the compilers of the Work, enumerating ten of the principal disciples, and classifying them according to their distinguishing characteristics. We can hardly suppose it to have been written while any of the ten were alive. But there is among them the name of Tsze-hsia, who lived to the age of about a hundred. We find him, B.C. 407, three-quarters of a century after the death of Confucius, at the court of Wei, to the prince of which he is reported to have presented some of the Classical Books [3].
2. We cannot therefore accept the above account of the origin of the Analects,-- that they were compiled by the disciples of Confucius. Much more likely is the view that we owe the work to their disciples. In the note on I. ii. I, a peculiarity is pointed out in the use of the surnames of Yew Zo and Tsang Shan, which
1 See Chu Hsi's commentary, in loc.
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