Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 16.djvu/30

 to discourse with his disciples were those of History, Poetry, and Rites and Ceremonies ; but ere he passed away from among them, his attention was much occupied also by the Yî as a monument of antiquity, which in the prime of his days he had too much neglected.

Khien says that Confucius wrote various appendixes to the Yî, specifying all but two of the treatises, which go by the name of the 'Ten Appendixes,' and are, with hardly a dissentient voice, attributed to the sage. They are published along with the older Text, which is based on still older lineal figures, and are received by most Chinese readers, as well as by foreign Chinese scholars, as an integral portion of the Yî King. The two portions should, however, be carefully distinguished. I will speak of them as the Text and the Appendixes.

The Yî happily escaped the fires of hin, which proved so disastrous to most of the ancient literature of China in  213. In the memorial which the premier Lî Sze addressed to his sovereign, advising that the old books should be consigned to the flames, an exception was made of those which treated of 'medicine, divination, and husbandry .' The Yî was held to be a book of divination, and so was preserved.

In the catalogue of works in the imperial library, prepared by Liû Hin about the beginning of our era, there is an enumeration of those on the Yî and its Appendixes,—the books of thirteen different authors or schools, comprehended in 294 portions of larger or smaller dimensions. I need not follow the history and study of the Yî into the line of the centuries since the time of Liû Hin. The imperial Khang-hsî edition of it, which appeared in 1715, contains quotations from the commentaries of 218 scholars, covering, more or less closely, the time from the second century to our seventeenth century. I may venture to say that