Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 3.djvu/179

 a thing is injurious to the clans, and fatal to the states (of the kingdom); smaller affairs are thereby managed in a one-sided and perverse manner, and the people fall into assumptions and excesses.'

'Seventh, of the (means for the) examination of doubts The practice of divination for the satisfaction of doubts was thus used in China from the earliest times. In the Counsels of Yü, p. 50, that sage proposes to Shun to submit the question of who should be his successor on the throne to divination, and Shun replies that he had already done so. Gaubil says that according to the Great Plan divination was only used in doubtful cases; but if such was the practice of the sages, diviners and soothsayers must have formed, as they do now, a considerable and influential class in society. The old methods of divination have fallen into disuse, and we do not know how far other methods are employed and sanctioned by the government. Those old methods were by means of the tortoise-shell, and the stalks of the Khî plant. 'The tortoise,' says Kû Hsî, 'after great length of years becomes intelligent; and the Khî plant will yield, when a hundred years old, a hundred stalks from one root, and is also a spiritual and intelligent thing. The two divinations were in reality a questioning of spiritual beings, the plant and the shell being employed, because of their mysterious intelligence, to indicate their intimations. The way of divination by the shell was by the application of fire to scorch it till the indications appeared on it; and that by the stalks of the plant was to manipulate in a prescribed way forty-nine of them, eighteen different times, till the diagrams were formed.'The outer shell of the tortoise was removed, leaving the inner portion on which were the marks of the lines of the muscles of the creature. This was smeared with a black pigment, and, fire being applied beneath, the pigment was examined, and according as it had been variously dried by the heat, presented the indications mentioned in the text. The Khî plant was probably the Achillea millefolium. It is cultivated largely on the mound over the grave of Confucius. I brought from that two bundles of the dried stalks in 1873. .—Officers having been chosen and appointed for divining by the tortoise-shell and the

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