Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 3.djvu/319



Of the attention paid to the study of the Shih from the death of Confucius to the rise of the Khin dynasty, we have abundant evidence in the writings of his grandson ze-sze, of Mencius, and of Hsün Khing. One of the acknowledged distinctions of Mencius is his acquaintance with the odes, his quotations from which are very numerous; and Hsün Khing survived the extinction of the Kâu dynasty, and lived on into the times of Khin.

The Shih shared in the calamity which all the other classical works, excepting the Yî, suffered, when the tyrant of Khin issued his edict for their destruction. But I have shown, in the Introduction to the Shû, p. 7, that that edict was in force for less than a quarter of a century. The odes were all, or very nearly all, recovered; and the reason assigned for this is, that their preservation depended on the memory of scholars more than on their inscription on tablets of bamboo and on silk.

Three different texts of the Shih made their appearance early in the Han dynasty, known as the Shih of Lû, of Khî, and of Han; that is, the Book of Poetry was recovered from three different quarters. Liû Hin's Catalogue of the Books in the Imperial Library of Han ( 6 to 1) commences, on the Shih King, with a collection of the three texts, in twenty-eight chapters.