Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 2.pdf/377

 I have compared all existing texts of Chao I ch'ing's work, including the transcription in the Ssŭ-k'u ch'üan-shu, and find that all of them not only agree in the correct reading, "Nan-yang Lu-yang hsien", but also contain a note which clearly refutes both the old reading and that of the Yüan-ho chün-hsien chih. It is plain that Wang Tzŭ-ts'ai extracted this reading from Chao and Tai, attributed it to Ch'üan, and then told a deliberate falsehood about Chao having made a wrong reading—all done in order to prove the superiority of his own forged text. Forty years later Tung Pei told another deliberate faisehood about Chao's "original manuscript copy" in order to support the untruth first put into circulation by Wang and thera perpetuated by Chang Mu.

Such is the nature of this newly unearthed monumental evidence which was supposed to have settled, once and for all, the verdict that Tai Chên was guilty of plagiarism!

In 1924 Mr. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (see II, ) and I sponsored in China a bicentennial celebration of Tai Chên's birth, at which time a number of papers expounding Tai's philosophical ideas (see II, –) were published. This revival of interest in and appreciation of his philosophy seems, however, to have given impulse to a renewal of the attack on Tai by a number of well-known scholars. This time, a new weapon was found in the recovery in recent years of the original volumes of the Yung-lo da-tien (chüan 11,127–11,141) which contain the Shui-ching chu—books which it was supposed had been destroyed in the burning of the Hanlin Academy in 1900. The works were found to be in the custody of two private collectors, and when brought together made the complete text which was reproduced photolithographically in 1935 by the Commercial Press.

Mr. Wang Kuo-wei, after examining a part of this text, wrote in 1924 an article published in the following year (The Tsing Hua Journal, Vol. II, No. 1) in which he re-affirmed the charge against Tai Chên, rade nearly a century before by Wei Yüan and Chang Mu: namely, that Tai had in fact made no use of the Yung-lo text; that he had adopted instead the results of the researches of Chao and Ch'üan; that in order to avoid giving credit to his two eminent predecessors he had professed to have found in the Yung-lo text all that was really useful in their works. Another usually critical scholar, Professor Mêng Sên (see ), published several articles in 1936–37 in which he makes a great display of temper, resorting indeed to acrimonious language in attacking Tai Chên, and offering numerous "proofs" to show that what Tai was supposed to have attributed to the Yung-lo text was actually not to be found there, and hence must have been purloined from Chao's manuscripts prior to their publication. Because of the high scholastic standing of both Wang and Mêng, their views have been generally accepted without much protest. As late as 1943 I also felt that these two esteemed friends of mine would scarcely have made such serious charges against one of the great minds of all ages without some solid basis in fact. Now, however, I am forced to the conclusion that both of them permitted some unconscious prejudice to influence and perhaps to blind their normally very critical judgment, and that their accusations against Tai Chên were based on a misunderstanding and a biased interpretation of what they took to be the facts. Their hasty acceptance of the forged Ch'üan Tsu-wang text is clear evidence