Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/28

 Thang Wei, and the Yo Kî, making their number in all forty-nine, though, according to the arrangement adopted in the present translation, they still amount only to forty- six. From Mâ, again, it passed to his pupil Kăng Hsüan (A.D. 127-200), in whom he was obliged to acknowledge a greater scholar than himself.

Thus the Lî Kî was formed. It is not necessary to pursue its history farther. Kăng was the scholar of his age, and may be compared, in scholarship, with the later Kû Hsî. And he has been fortunate in the preservation of his works. He applied himself to all the three Rituals, and his labours on them all, the Kâu Lî, the Î Lî, and the Lî Kî, remain. His commentaries on them are to be found in the great work of "The Thirteen King" of the Thang dynasty. There they appear, followed by the glosses, illustrations, and paraphrases of Khung Ying-tâ.

In A.D. 175, while Kăng was yet alive, Зhăi Yung, a scholar and officer of many gifts, superintended the work of engraving on stone the text of all the Confucian classics. Only fragments of that great manusculpt remain to the present day, but others of the same nature were subsequently made. We may feel assured that we have the text of the Lî Kî and other old Chinese books, as it was 1800 years ago, more correctly than any existing manuscripts give us that of any works of the West, Semitic, or Greek, or Latin, of anything like equal antiquity.

3. A few sentences on the Lî of the Greater Tăi will fitly close this chapter. He handed down his voluminous compilation to a Hsü Liang of Lang Yeh in the present Shan-tung, and in his family it was transmitted; but if any commentaries on it were published, there is no trace of them in history. As the shorter work of his cousin obtained a wide circulation, his fell into neglect, and, as Kû Î-jun says, was simply put upon the shelf. Still there appears in the Sui Catalogue these two entries:—"The Lî Kî of Tă Tăi, in 13 Sections," and "The Hsiă