James Legge

“ Chinese scholars and gentlemen, however, who have got some little acquaintance with western science, are fond of saying that all the truths of electricity, heat, light, and other branches of European physics, are in the eight trigrams. When asked how then they and their countrymen have been and are ignorant of those truths, they say that they have to learn them first from western books, and then, looking into the Yî, they see that they were all known to Confucius more than 2000 years ago. ”

“ It may well be that the title Hwang Tî, used by a Chinese of the present emperor or of any emperor of the past, does not call up to his mind any other idea than that of a human sovereign; but being satisfied as to the proper signification of Tî as God, and as to the process by which the title came to be applied to the ancient Yâo and Shun, I could no longer render it, when used of them in the Shû, by emperor, and elected to leave it untranslated in the present volume. ”

“ In each of the five instances, we have a Tî and a Shăn, not an emperor and a spirit, but a God and a Spirit,—a Spirit standing in the same relation to the God, that Khăn (臣=a subject or minister) stands in to a ruler. Thus it was that, by a process of deification, the title of Tî came to be given, in the time of the Kâu dynasty, to the great names, fabulous and legendary, of antiquity; and thus it was that it was applied to the heroes Yâo and Shun. ”

“ The flood of Yâo was probably an inundation of the Ho, similar to many in subsequent times which have procured for that river the name of 'China's Sorrow,' and Yü distinguished himself in the assuaging of it, and the regulation of its course to the sea. The extent of the country came to be ascertained under the dynasties of Hsiâ and Shang, and its different parts were gradually occupied by the increasing numbers of the people, and contributed their various proportions of revenue to the central government. ”

“ Thus is the book, alongside the explication of Confucius, taught in schools, usually. Thus you here query neither the sublime nor the mysterious, neither the foul nor the vile: I see there keen, perhaps playful moral and political instructions to be elicited, just as are abundantly obvious, plain, and natural in Chinese classics: only, with that book, as the entire text will make readily apparent to the reader, it will be derived for the use of the cleromancer, by whom now man is to obtain the highest benefit of life, arcane communication with the spirits and secret knowledge of future events ”

“ Its most common significations are 'poetry,' 'a poem, or poems,' and 'a collection of poems.' This last is its meaning when we speak of the Shih or the Shih King.
The earliest Chinese utterance that we have on the subject of poetry is that in the Shû by the ancient Shun, when he said to his Minister of Music, 'Poetry is the expression of earnest thought, and singing is the prolonged utterance of that expression.' To the same effect is the language of a Preface to the Shih, sometimes ascribed to Confucius and certainly older than our Christian era:—'Poetry is the product of earnest thought. ”

“ From the other 63 hexagrams lessons are deduced, for the most part equally good and striking. But why, it may be asked, why should they be conveyed to us by such an array of lineal figures, and in such a farrago of emblematic representations? It is not for the foreigner to insist on such a question. The Chinese have not valued them the less because of the antiquated dress in which their lessons are arrayed. Hundreds of their commentators have evolved and developed their meaning with a minuteness of detail and felicity of illustration that leave nothing to be desired. ”

“ During all that time the people had on the whole been increasing in numbers, and the nation growing in territory;—how did it come to pass, that the higher title, if it had previously existed, gave place to an inferior one?
Prior to the dynasty of Hsiâ, with the exception of the period of Yâo and Shun, the accounts which we have of the history of China have been, and ought to be, pronounced 'fabulous' and 'legendary.' The oldest documents that purport to be historical are the books in the Shû about Yâo and Shun, and even they do not profess to be contemporaneous with those personages. ”

“ Small men, of ordinary or less than ordinary character, may be rewarded with riches and certain honours; but land and the welfare of its population should not be given into the hands of any who are not equal to the responsibility of such a trust.
The above is a specimen of what I have called the essays that make up the Yî of Kâu. So would king Wăn and his son have had all military expeditions conducted in their country 3000 years ago. It seems to me that the principles which they lay down might find a suitable application in the modern warfare of our civilised and Christian Europe. ”

“ We also read of Heaven's raising up the great ancient sovereigns and teachers, and variously assisting them to accomplish their undertakings; but all this need not be more than what a religious man of any country might affirm at the present day of direction, help, and guidance given to himself and others from above. But while the old Chinese books do not profess to contain any divine revelation, the references in them to religious views and practices are numerous; and it is from these that the student has to fashion for himself an outline of the early religion of the people. ”

“ And, finally, the middle lines of the trigrams, the second and fifth, that is, of the hexagrams, have a peculiar value and force. If we have a whole line (⚊) in the fifth place, and a divided line (⚋) in the second, or vice versâ, the correlation is complete. Let the subject of the fifth be the sovereign or a commander-in-chief, according to the name and meaning of the hexagram, then the subject of the second will be an able minister or a skilful officer, and the result of their mutual action will be most beneficial and successful. ”

“ King Wăn, the founder of the Kâu dynasty, is invariably mentioned as Wăn Wang, 'Wăn the king.' To say Wang Wăn would be felt at once by every Chinese scholar to be inadmissible; and not less so is Tî Yâo for 'the emperor Yâo.' It was the perception of this violation of usage in Chinese composition, five years ago, that first showed me the error of translating Tî Yâo and Tî Shun by 'the emperor Yao' and 'the emperor Shun.' It is true that in the early books of the Shû, we have Tî used alone, without the adjunct of Yâo or Shun, and referring to those personages. ”

“ A student and translator of the odes has simply to allow them to speak for themselves, and has no more reason to be surprised by references to vice in some of them than by the language of virtue in many others. ”

“ The language makes us think of the retribution of good and evil as taking place in the family, and not in the individual; the judgment is long deferred, but it is inflicted at last, lighting, however, not on the head or heads that most deserved it. Confucianism never falters in its affirmation of the difference between good and evil, and that each shall have its appropriate recompense ”

“ The fifty-ninth hexagram, called Hwân ䷺, is formed by the trigrams Khân ☵, representing water, and Sun ☴, representing wind, and it is said on it:— (The symbol of) water and (that of wind) above it form Hwân. The ancient kings, in accordance with this, presented offerings to God, and established the ancestral temple.' The union of the two trigrams suggested to king Wăn the idea of dissipation in the alienation of men from the Supreme Power, and of the minds of parents from their children; a condition which the wisdom of the ancient kings saw could best be met by the influences of religion. ”

“ Lâo-zze's system often goes with English writers by the name of Rationalism; but if that name be retained, the term must be taken in quite a peculiar sense. His doctrine was that of the Tâo, but it is not easy to determine what English term will best express the meaning of the Chinese character. The only record which we have of Lao-zze's views is the Tâo-teh King, or 'Classic of Tâo and Virtue,' a treatise of no great length. ”

“ Then as to the text of the Shû, there is no controversy about the documents which were recovered in the first place by Fû; but the additional ones found by Khung An-kwo are so much more easily understood, that I do not wonder that the charge of not being genuine has been raised against them. But even they are not easy. They only appear to be so, when we come to one of them, after toiling through some of the more contorted portions common to both texts. And, moreover, the style of the different books differs according to their subjects. The 'Announcements' are the hardest to understand of all. ”

“ I suppose that there are sinologists who will continue, for a time at least, to maintain that it was intended by its author or authors, whoever they were, merely as a book of divination; and of course the oracles of divination were designedly wrapped up in mysterious phraseology. But notwithstanding the account of the origin of the book and its composition by king Wăn and his son, which I have seen reason to adopt, they, its authors, had to write after the manner of diviners. ”

“ But it must not be forgotten that these ritual books do not throw so valuable a light on the ancient religion of China as the older Shû and Shih. They belong to the period of the Kâu dynasty, and do not go back as contemporaneous records to the dynasties beyond it and the still remoter age of Yâo and Shun. The views of Confucius, moreover, as given in them, do not come to us at first hand. ”

“ Tî is the name which has been employed in China for this concept for fully 5000 years. Our word God fits naturally into every passage where the character occurs in the old Chinese Classics, save those to which I referred above on p. xxiii. It never became with the people a proper name like the Zeus of the Greeks. I can no more translate Tî or Shang Tî by any other word but God than I can translate zăn (人) by anything else but man. ”

“ But when Mâo no longer published the Preface as a separate document, but each ode appeared with the introductory notice as a portion of the text, this seemed to give it the authority of the text itself. Then after the other texts disappeared and Mâo's had the field to itself, this means of testing the accuracy of its prefatory notices no longer existed. They appeared as if they were the production of the poets themselves, and the odes seemed to be made from them as so many themes. ”

“ This is the rule which Mencius followed in interpreting the old poems of his country:—'We must try with our thoughts to meet the scope of a sentence, and then we shall apprehend it.' In the study of a Chinese classical book there is not so much an interpretation of the characters employed by the writer as a participation of his thoughts;—there is the seeing of mind to mind. The canon hence derived for a translator is not one of license. ”

“ A wholesome and an important truth it is, that 'the sins of parents are visited on their children;' but do the parents themselves escape the curse? It is to be regretted that this short treatise, the only 'wing' of the Yî professing to set forth its teachings concerning man as man, does not attempt any definite reply to this question. I leave it, merely observing that it has always struck me as the result of an after-thought, and a wish to give to man, as the last of 'the Three Powers,' a suitable place in connexion with the Yî. ”