Page:A history of Chinese literature - Giles.djvu/82

 TO CHINESE LITERATURE

"Now when the woodman reached his home, he be came much annoyed at the loss of the deer ; and in the night he actually dreamt where the deer then was, and who had got it. So next morning he proceeded to the place indicated in his dream, and there it was. He then took legal steps to recover possession ; and when the case came on, the magistrate delivered the following judgment : ' The plaintiff began with a real deer and an alleged dream. He now comes forward with a real dream and an alleged deer. The defendant really got the deer which plaintiff said he dreamt, and is now trying to keep it ; while, according to his wife, both the woodman and the deer are but the figments of a dream, so that no one got the deer at all. However, here is a deer, which you had better divide between you.' "

HAN FBI TzO, who died B.C. 233, has left us fifty-five essays of considerable value, partly for the light they throw upon the connection between the genuine sayings of Lao Tzu and the Tao-Te-Ching, and partly for the quaint illustrations he gives of the meaning of the sayings themselves. He was deeply read in law, and obtained favour in the eyes of the First Emperor (see Book II., ch. i.) ; but misrepresentations of rivals brought about his downfall, and he committed suicide in prison. We cannot imagine that he had before him the Tao-Te- Ching. He deals with many of its best sayings, which may well have come originally from an original teacher, such as Lao Tzu is supposed to have been, but quite at random and not as if he took them from an orderly work. And what is more, portions of his own com- mentary have actually slipped into the Tao-Te-Ching as text, showing how this book was pieced together from

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