Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 3.djvu/321

 name of Hsiâ-hâu Shih-khang, who communicated his acquisitions to Hâu hang, a native of the present Shan-tung province, and author of two of the works in the Han Catalogue. Hâu had three disciples of note, and by them the Shih of Khî was transmitted to others, whose names, with quotations from their writings, are scattered through the Books of Han. Neither text nor commentaries, however, had a better fate than the Shih of Lû. There is no mention of them in the Catalogue of Sui. They are said to have perished even before the rise of the Kin dynasty.

The text of Han was somewhat more fortunate. Hin's Catalogue contains the names of four works, all by Han Ying, whose surname is thus perpetuated in the text of the Shih that emanated from him. He was a native, we are told, of Yen, and a great scholar in the time of the emperor Wăn ( 179 to 155), and on into the reigns of King and Wû. 'He laboured,' it is said, 'to unfold the meaning of the odes, and published an Explanation of the Text, and Illustrations of the Poems, containing several myriads of characters. His text was somewhat different from the texts of Lû and Khî, but substantially of the same meaning.' Of course, Han founded a school; but while almost all the writings of his followers soon perished, both the works just mentioned continued on through the various dynasties to the time of Sung. The Sui Catalogue contains the titles of his Text and two works on it; the Thang, those of his Text and his Illustrations; but when we come to the Catalogue of Sung, published under the Yüan dynasty, we find only the Illustrations, in ten books or chapters; and Âu-yang Hsiû ( 1017 to 1072) tells us that in his time this was all of Han that remained. It continues entire, or nearly so, to the present day.

But while those three different recensions of the Shih all disappeared, with the exception of a single treatise of Han Ying, their unhappy fate was owing not more to the convulsions by which the empire was often rent, and the consequent destruction of literary monuments such as we