Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 16.djvu/34

 troubles between him and the last sovereign of Yin reached their height in 1143, when the tyrant threw him into prison in a place called Yû-lî, identified as having been in the present district of Thang-yin, department of Kang-teh, province of Ho-nan. Wăn was not kept long in confinement. His friends succeeded in appeasing the jealousy of his enemy, and securing his liberation in the following year. It follows that the Yî, so far as we owe it to king Wăn, was made in the year 1143 or 1142, or perhaps that it was begun in the former year and finished in the latter.

But the part which is thus ascribed to king Wăn is only a small portion of the Yî. A larger share is attributed to his son Tan, known as the duke of Kâu, and in it we have allusions to king Wû, who succeeded his father Wăn, and was really the first sovereign of the dynasty of Kâu. There are passages, moreover, which must be understood of events in the early years of the next reign. But the duke of Kâu died in the year 1105, the 11th of king Khăng. A few years then before that time, in the last decade of the twelfth century, the Yî King, as it has come down to us, was complete.

We have thus traced the text of the Yî to its authors, the famous king Wăn in the year 1143, and his equally famous son, the duke of Kâu, in between thirty and forty years later. It can thus boast of a great antiquity; but a general opinion has prevailed that it belonged to a period still more distant. Only two translations of it have been made by European scholars. The first was executed by Regis and other Roman Catholic missionaries in the beginning of last century, though it was given to the public only