Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 3.djvu/31

Rh months. Thus the first entry is:—'In the first month of spring, on such and such days, the Tî is Thâi Hâo, and the ShânShăn [sic] is Kâu-mang.' Now this Kâu-mang was a son of Shâo Hâo, several hundreds of years later than Thâi Hâo, so that the associating them together in this ceremony could only have arisen in later times.

However we explain the ceremony thus curtly described; whether we see in it the growing prevalence of nature-worship, or an illustration of the practice of worshipping ancient heroes and worthies:—Tî appears in the account of it plainly used in the sense of  In each of the five instances, we have a Tî and a Shăn, not an   and a   but a God and a Spirit,—a Spirit standing in the same relation to the God, that Khăn (臣=a subject or minister) stands in to a ruler. Thus it was that, by a process of deification, the title of  came to be given, in the time of the Kâu dynasty, to the great names, fabulous and legendary, of antiquity; and thus it was that it was applied to the heroes Yâo and Shun. It may well be that the title Hwang Tî, used by a Chinese of the present emperor or of any emperor of the past, does not call up to his mind any other idea than that of a human sovereign; but being satisfied as to the proper signification of  as God, and as to the process by which the title came to be applied to the ancient Yâo and Shun, I could no longer render it, when used of them in the Shû, by   and elected to leave it untranslated in the present volume.

To any unimportant changes of translation it is unnecessary to refer. The dates in the introductions and notes are all one year more than in the translations formerly published. They are thus brought into accordance with those of P. Gaubil and the useful Chinese Chronological Tables of the late Mr. Mayers.

The changes in the transliteration of Chinese names are very considerable. As foreigners are now resident in Peking, it seemed proper to adopt the pronunciation of the