Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/60

 whether the writer was thinking of the particular institution or usage spoken of as fulfilling the purpose of defence against peril from within, or violence from without.

The illustrations are numerous, and they are all given as if they came from the lips of Confucius himself; but we cannot suppose that they were really from him. They are not in his style, and the reasonings are occasionally unworthy of him. Many paragraphs carry on their front a protest against our receiving them as really his. Nevertheless, the Book, though sometimes tedious, is on the whole interesting, and we like the idea of looking on the usages as "dykes." We do not know to whom we are indebted for it. One of the famous brothers Khǎng of the Sung dynasty has said:—'We do not know who wrote the Treatise. Since we find such expressions in it as "The Lun Yü says," it is plainly not to be ascribed to Confucius. Passages in the Han scholars, Kiâ Î and Tung Kung-shû, are to the same effect as what we find here; and perhaps this memoir was their production.'

The Kung Yung would be pronounced, I think, by Chinese scholars to be the most valuable of all the Treatises in the Lî Kî; and from an early time it asserted a position peculiar to itself. Its place in the general collection of Ritual Treatises was acknowledged by Mâ Yung and his disciple Kǎng Hsüan; but in Liû Hsin's Catalogue of the Lî Books, we find an entry of "Observations on the Kung Yung, in two phien;" so early was the work thought to be deserving of special treatment by itself. In the records of the Sui dynasty (A.D. 589-617), in the Catalogue of its Imperial library, there are the names of three other special works upon it, one of them by the emperor Wû (A.D. 502- 549) of the Liang dynasty.

Later on, under the Sung dynasty, the Kung Yung, the Tâ Hsio, or "Great Learning," which is also a portion of the Lî Kî the Confucian Analects, or the Lun Yü, and the works of Mencius, were classed together as "The Four Books,"