SECTION I. HISTORY OF THE TEXT, AND THE DIFFERENT ARRANGEMENTS OF IT WHICH HAVE BEEN PROPOSED. 1. It has already been mentioned that 'The Great Learning' frms one of the Books of the Li Chi, or 'Record of Rites,' the formation of the text of which will be treated of in its proper place. I will only say here, that the Records of Rites had suffered much more, after the death of Confucius, than the other ancient Classics which were supposed to have been collected and digested by him. They were in a more dilapidated condition at the time of the revivial of the ancient literature under the Han dynasty, and were then published in three collections, only one of which -- the Record of Rites -- retains its place among the five Ching. The Record of Rites consists, according to the ordinary arrangement, of forty-nine Chapters or Books. Liu Hsiang (see ch. I. sect. II. 2) took the lead in its formation, and was followed by the two famous scholars, Tai Teh [1], and his relative, Tai Shang [2]. The first of these reduced upwards of 200 chapters, collected by Hsiang, to eighty-nine, and Shang reduced these again to forty-six. The three other Books were added in the second century of our era, the Great Learning being one of them, by Ma Yung, mentioned in the last chapter, section III.2. Since his time, the Work has not received any further additions. 2. In his note appended to what he calls the chapter of 'Classical Text,' Chu Hsi says that the tablets of the 'old copies' of the rest of the Great Learning were considerably out of order. By those old copies, he intends the Work of Chang Hsuan, who published his commentary on the Classic, soon after it was completed by the additions of Ma Yung; and t is possible that the tablets were in confusion, and had not been arranged with sufficient care; but such a thing does not appear to have been suspected until the 1 戴德 2 戴聖 Shang was a second cousin of Teh. twelfth century, nor can any evidence from ancient monuments be adduced in its support. I have related how the ancient Classics were cut on slabs of stone by imperial order, A.D. 175, the text being that which the various literati had determined, and which had been adopted by Chang Hsuan. The same work was performed about seventy years later, under the so-called dynasty of Wei, between the years 240 and 248, and the two sets of slabs were set up together. The only difference between them was, that whereas the Classics had been cut in the first instance only in one form, the characters in the slabs of Wei were in three different forms. Amd the changes of dynasties, the slabs both of Han and Wei had perished, or nearly so, before the rise of the T'ang dynasty, A.D. 624; but under one of its emperors, in the year 836, a copy of the Classics was again cut on stone, though only in one form of the character. These slabs we can trace down through the Sung dynasty, when they were known as the tablets of Shen [1].