Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/23



The sovereigns of Han undertook the task of gathering up and arranging the fragments of the ancient books, and executed it well. In B.C. 213 Shih Hwang Ti of Khin had promulgated his edict forbidding any one to hide and keep in his possession the old writings. This was repealed in B.C. 191 by the emperor Hui, so that it had been in existence only twenty- two years, during most of which, we may presume, it had been inoperative. Arrangements were also made to receive and preserve old tablets which might be presented, and to take down in writing what scholars might be able to repeat. In B.C. 164, the emperor Wăn ordered "the Great Scholars" of his court to compile "the Royal Ordinances," the fifth of the Books in our Lî Kî.

i. Internal evidence shows that when this treatise was made, the Î Lî or portions of it at least, had been recovered; and with this agrees the testimony of Sze-mâ Khien, who was born perhaps in that very year, and lived to between B.C. 90 and 80. In the 61st Book of his Biographies, referred to in a note above, Khien says, "Many of the scholars repeated (parts of) the Lî; but no other of them so much as Kâo Thang of Lû; and now we have only the Shih Lî, which he was able to recite." In harmony with this statement of the great historian, is the first entry in Liû Hsin's Catalogue of Lî books in the Imperial library of Han:—"56 küan or sections of Lî in the old text, and 17 phien in the (current) text (of the time);" forming, as is universally believed, the present Î Lî, for which the Shih Lî of Khien is merely another name.

That Kâo Thang should have been able to dictate so much of the work will not be thought wonderful by those who