Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 3.djvu/118



Portal:Shang dynasty was the name under which the dynasty that superseded Hsiâ (B.C. 1766) held the kingdom for fully 300 years. Yin then began to be used as well as Shang, and the dynasty was called indifferently Shang or Yin, and sometimes Yin-Shang by a combination of the two names. The ruling House traced its origin into the remote times of antiquity, through Hsieh, whose appointment by Shun to be Minister of Instruction is related in the Canon of Shun. For his services Hsieh was invested with the principality of Shang, corresponding to the present small department of the same name in Shen-hsî. From Hsieh to Thang, the founder of the dynasty, there are reckoned fourteen generations, and we find Thang, when he first becomes prominent in history, a long way from the ancestral fief, in 'the southern Po,' corresponding to the present district of Shang-khiû, department Kwei-teh, Ho-nan. The title of the dynasty, however, was derived from the original Shang.

There were in the Shû, when the collection was formed, thirty-one documents of Shang in forty Books, of which only eleven remain in seventeen Books, two of them containing each three parts or sections. The Speech of Thang, that is now the first Book in the Part, was originally only the sixth. Thang was the designation of the hero, whose surname, dating from Hsieh, was ze, and name Lî. Thang may be translated, 'the Glorious One.' His common style in history is as Khăng Thang, 'Thang the Completer,' or 'Thang the Successful.'

He had summoned his people to take the field with him against Kieh, the cruel and doomed sovereign of Hsiâ, and finding them backward to the enterprise, he sets forth in this Book his reasons for attacking the tyrant, argues against their reluctance, using in the end both promises and threats to induce them to obey his orders.