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Rh is true and false in the Chuen.’* On this I shall have to give an Opinion in the next section, and only remark now that if we find the statements of the text and the Chuen in regard to matters of history irreconcileable, the most natural course would seem to be to decide in favour of the latter.

2. The K‘ang-he editors defer in general to the authority of Tso; but even they do not scruple to suppress his narratives occasionally, or to elide portions of them. They suppress, for instance, the account of the conference between the marquises of Loo and Ts‘e at Këah-kuh, given under XI. x. 2, considering the part which Confucius is made to play at it to be derogatory to him.

Wang Gan-shih of the Sung dynasty published a treatise under the title of ‘Explanations of the Ch‘un Ts‘ëw,’ in which he undertook to prove from eleven instances that the Chuen was not composed by Tso K‘ëw-ming of the Chow dynasty, but by some one of a later date, under the dynasty, probably, of Ts‘in. “Wang’s treatise is unfortunately lost, and we know not what all the eleven instances were. One of them was the use of the term lah in the Chuen on V. v. 9, to denominate a sacrifice after the winter solstice, which, it is contended, was first appointed under the dynasty of Ts‘in. It may have been another where in IX. xi. 10 and xii. 5 we find mention made of military commanders of Ts‘in with the title of shoo chang, which, again it is contended, was of later date than the Chow dynasty. Ch‘ing E-ch‘uen at any rate adduces these two as cases in the Chuen of purely Ts‘in phraseology.

Apart from any discussion of these instances, I venture to state my own opinion, that interpolations were made in the Chuen after Tso had put his finishing touch to it, and probably during the dynasty of the former Han; and there are two classes of passages which seem to bear on them and in them the evidence of having been so dealt with.

[i] There are the moralizings which conclude many narratives and are interjected in others, generally with the formula—‘The superior man will say,’ and sometimes as if quoted from Confucius. They have often nothing or next to nothing to do with the subject of the narrative to which they are attached, and the manner in which they occasionally bring in quotations from the odes reminds 34]