Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 3.djvu/30

 invariably mentioned as Wăn Wang, 'Wăn the king.' To say Wang Wăn would be felt at once by every Chinese scholar to be inadmissible; and not less so is  Yâo for 'the emperor Yâo.' It was the perception of this violation of usage in Chinese composition, five years ago, that first showed me the error of translating Tî Yâo and Tî Shun by 'the emperor Yao' and 'the emperor Shun.' It is true that in the early books of the Shû, we have Tî used alone, without the adjunct of Yâo or Shun, and referring to those personages. In those cases it does perform the part of a substantive, but its meaning depends on that which belonged to it as an adjective in the phrases Tî Yâo and Tî Shun. If it be ascertained that in these it means 'the Deified,' then when used singly as a noun, it will mean  or the Divine One.

Third, the sovereigns of the Hsiâ, the Shang, and the Kâu dynasties, it has been seen, were styled  and not   Confucius speaks repeatedly in the Analects of Yâo and Shun, but he never calls either of them by the title of Tî. Mencius, however, uses it both of the one and the other, when he is quoting in substance from the accounts of them in the Shû. This confirms the view that the early books of the Shû were current after the middle of the Kâu dynasty, very much in the form in which we now have them; and the question arises whether we can show how the application of the title  as given in them to Yâo and Shun arose. We can.

The fourth Book of the Lî Kî is called  'the Monthly Record of the Proceedings of Government.' In it certain sacrificial observances paid to the five Tîs are distributed through the four seasons. The Tîs are Fû-hsî, Shăn-năng, Yû-hsiung or Hsien-yüan, Kin-thien, and Kâo-yang, who are styled Thâi Hâo (the Greatly Resplendent), Yen Tî (the Blazing Tî), Hwang Tî (the Yellow Tî), Shâo Hâo (the Less Resplendent), and Kwan Hsü (the Solely Correct); with each Tî there is associated in the ceremony a personage of inferior rank, who is styled Shăn (神=a Spirit). The language descriptive of the ceremony is the same in all the cases, with the exception of the names and