Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/48

 chapter has the title of Ming Thang, but it is little more than a rifacimento of the first four paragraphs of this Book of the Lî Kî.

In Morrison's Chinese Dictionary, vol. i, p. 51 a, there is a ground-plan of the Hall according to a common representation of it by Chinese authorities.

This "Record of Smaller Points in connexion with the Dress of Mourning," is the first of the many treatises in our collection, devoted expressly to the subject of the mourning rites, and especially of the dress worn by the mourners, according to the degree of their relationship. The expurgated editions do not give any part of it; and it is difficult—I may say impossible—to trace any general plan on which the compiler, who is unknown, put the different portions of it together. Occasionally two or three paragraphs follow one another on the same subject, and I have kept them together after the example of Khung Ying-tâ; but the different notices are put down as if at random, just as they occurred to the writer.

Kû Hsî says that Зze-hsiâ made a supplementary treatise to the nth Book of the Î Lî, and that we have here an explanation of many points in that Book. It is so; and yet we may not be justified in concluding that this is a remnant of the production of Зze-hsiâ.

This Book, "the Great Treatise," has been compared to the Hsî Зhze, the longest and most important of the Appendixes to the Yî King, which is also styled Tâ Kwan.

It is short, however, as compared with that other; nor is it easy to understand, the subjects with which it deals being so different in the conceptions of Chinese and western minds. "It treats," said Khǎn Hsiang-tâo (early in the Sung dynasty), "of the greatest sacrifice,—that