Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 3.djvu/291

 to future generations. Then he commissioned Khung and LîKhung and Lî are nowhere met with in the previous parts of the Shû, nor in any other reliable documents of history, as officers of Shun. hai Khăn and others would identify them with the Hsî and Ho of the Canon of Yâo, and hold those to have been descended from a Khung and a Lî, supposed to belong to the time of Shâo Hâo in the twenty-sixth century Whoever they were, the duty with which they were charged was remarkable. In the Narratives of the States (a book of the Kâu dynasty), we find a conversation on it, during the lifetime of Confucius, between king Khâo of Khû ( 515–489) and one of his ministers, called Kwan Yî-fû. 'What is meant,' asked the king, 'by what is said in one of the Books of Kâu about Khung and Lî, that they really brought it about that there was no intercourse between heaven and earth? If they had not done so, would people have been able to ascend to heaven?' The minister replied that that was not the meaning at all, and gave his own view of it at great length, to the following effect.—Anciently, the people attended to the discharge of their duties to one another, and left the worship of spiritual beings—the seeking intercourse with them, and invoking and effecting their descent on earth—to the officers who were appointed for that purpose. In this way things proceeded with great regularity. The people minded their own affairs, and the spirits minded theirs. Tranquillity and prosperity were the consequence. But in the time of Shâo Hâo, through the lawlessness of Kiû-lî, a change took place. The people intruded into the functions of the regulators of the spirits and their worship. They abandoned their duties to their fellow men, and tried to bring down spirits from above. The spirits themselves, no longer kept in check and subjected to rule, made their appearance irregularly and disastrously. All was confusion and calamity, when Kwan Hsü ( 2510–2433) took the case in hand. He appointed Khung, the Minister of the South, to the superintendency of heavenly things, to prescribe the laws for the spirits, and Lî, the Minister of Fire, to the superintendency of earthly things, to prescribe the rules for the people. In this way both spirits and people were to make an end of the communications between earth and heaven; and the descents (of spirits) ceased. From the princes down to the

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