Page:A history of Chinese literature - Giles.djvu/201

 CHAPTER II

CLASSICAL AND GENERAL LITERATURE

THE classical scholarship of the Tang dynasty was neither very original nor very profound. It is true that the second Emperor founded a College of Learning, but its members were content to continue the traditions of the Hans, and comparatively little was achieved in the line of independent research. Foremost among the names in the above College stands that of Lu YUAN-LANG (550-625). He had been Imperial Librarian under the preceding dynasty, and later on distinguished himself by his defence of Confucianism against both Buddhist and Taoist attacks. He published a valuable work on the explanations of terms and phrases in the Classics and in Taoist writers.

Scarcely less eminent as a scholar was WEI CHENG (581-643), who also gained great reputation as a military commander. He was appointed President of the Commission for drawing up the history of the previous dynasty, and he was, in addition, a poet of no mean order. At his death the Emperor said, " You may use copper as a mirror for the person ; you may use the past as a mirror for politics ; and you may use man as a mirror to guide one's judgment in ordinary affairs. These three mirrors I have always carefully cherished ;

but now that Wei Cheng is gone, I have lost one of them."

�� �