Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/47

 Lû,—part of the present province of Shan-tung. He was himself, indeed, invested with that fief by his nephew, king Khǎng, though, remaining for reasons of state at the royal court, he never took possession of it in person, but sent his son Po-Khin to do so in his room. Because of his great services in the establishment and consolidation of the new dynasty, however, various privileges were conferred on the rulers of Lû above the lords of other states. These are much exaggerated in the Book; and after the sixth paragraph, we hear no more of the Hall of Distinction. All that follows is occupied with the peculiar privileges said to have been claimed, and antiques reported to have been possessed, by the marquises of Lû. What is said has no historical value, and the whole Book is excluded from the expurgated editions.

The Khien-lung editors say that its author must have been an ignorant and vainglorious scholar of Lû in the end of the Kâu dynasty. Some have imagined that it was handed on, with additions of his own, by Mâ Yung to Kǎng Hsüan; but the latter says nothing about the other in his brief prefatory note.

The Hall of Distinction was a royal structure. Part of it was used as a temple, at the sacrifices in which peculiar honour was done to king Wăn (The Shih, IV, i, 7). It was also used for purposes of audience, as on the occasion referred to in this Book; and governmental regulations were promulgated from it (Mencius, I, ii, 5). To this third use of it would belong the various references to it in Book IV of this collection.

The principal Hall was in the capital; but there were smaller ones with the same name at the four points where the kings halted in their tours of inspection to receive the feudal lords of the different quarters of the kingdom. It was one of these which Mencius had in his mind in the passage referred to above.

In the 67th Book of the Lî of the Greater Tâi there is a description of the building and its various parts; and among the "Books of Kâu" said to have been found in A.D. 279 in the grave of king Hsiang of Wei, the 55th