Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 39.djvu/32

 8 THE TEXTS OF TAOISM. CH. II. the text of Lao I have spoken, was an uncle of the emperor Wan. To the emperor K'mg (B.C. 156-143), the son of Wan, there is attributed the designation of Lao's treatise as a A" ing, a work of standard authority. At the beginning of his reign, we are told, some one was com- mending to him four works, among which were those of Lao-jze and .fifwang-jze. Deeming that the work of Hwang-jze and Lao-jze was of a deeper character than the others, he ordered that it should be called a A"ing, estab- lished a board for the study of Taoism, and issued an edict that the book should be learned and recited at court, and throughout the country 1. Thenceforth it was so styled. We find Hwang-fu Mi (A.D. 215-282) referring to it as the Tao Teh .fifing. The second place in the Sui catalogue is given to the text and commentary of Wang Pi or Wang Fu-sze, an The work of extraordinary scholar who died in A. D. 249, Wang Pi. a t the early age of twenty-four. This work has always been much prized. It was its text which Lu Teh-ming used in his ' Explanation of the Terms and Phrases of the Classics,' in the seventh century. Among the editions of it which I possess is that printed in 1794 with the imperial moveable metal types. I need not speak of editions or commentaries subsequent to Wang Pi's. They soon begin to be many, and are only not so numerous as those of the Confucian Classics. . All the editions of the book are divided into two Divisions into parts, the former called Tao, and the latter parts, chapters; Xeh. meaning the Qualities or Characteristics and number of,. , characters in the of the Tao, but this distinction of subjects is by no means uniformly adhered to. I referred already to the division of the whole into eighty- one short chapters (37+44), which is by common tradition attributed to Ho-shang Kung, or 'The old man of the Ho-side.' Another very early commentator, called Yen 3un or Yen ^Tiin-phing, made a division into seventy-two chapters (404-32), under the influence, no doubt, of some See 3&o Hung's Wings or Helps, ch. v, p. ir