Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/25

 with their functions, was wanting, and the king offered to pay 1000 pieces of gold to any one who should supply the missing tablets, but in vain. He presented the tablets which he had obtained at the court of his half-brother, the emperor Wû; but the treasure remained uncared for in one of the imperial repositories till the next century; when it came into the chaise of Liû Hsin. Hsin replaced the missing portion from another old work, called Khâo Kung Kî, which Wylie renders by "The Artificers' Record." This has ever since continued to appear as the sixth section of the whole work, for the charge of which Hsin obtained the appointment of a special board of scholars, such as had from the first been entrusted with the care of the Î Lî. The Kâu Lî is a constitutional and not a ritual work. The last entry in Hsin's Catalogue of Lî Books is:—"The Kâu Kwan in six sections; and a treatise on the Kâu Kwan in four sections." That is the proper name for it. It was not called the Kâu Lî till the Thang dynasty.

iii. We come to the formation of the text of the Lî Kî, in which we are more particularly interested. We cannot speak of its recovery, for though parts of it had been in existence during the Kâu dynasty, many of its Books cannot claim a higher antiquity than the period of the Han. All that is known about the authorship of them all will be found in the notices which form the last chapter of this Introduction. After the entry in Liû Hsin's Catalogue about the