454
THE HSIÂO KING.
(better known as Wang Po-hâu, A.D. 1223–1296), say that this is a different account of the recovery of the old text from that with which the name of Khung An-kwo is connected. It is difficult to reconcile the two statements, as will be seen on a reference to the note below[1]; and yet it
- ↑ The Catalogue Raisonné of the Imperial Libraries commences its account of the copies of the Hsiâo with a description of 'the Old Text of the Hsiâo with the Commentary of Khung An-kwo,' obtained from Japan; but the editors give good reasons for doubting its genuineness. There is a copy of this work in the Chinese portion of the British Museum, an edition printed in Japan in 1732, which I have carefully examined, with the help of Professor R. K. Douglas and Mr. A. Wylie. It contains not only the commentary of Khung An-kwo, but what purports to be the original preface of that scholar. There it is said that the bamboo tablets of the copy in 'tadpole characters,' found in the wall of Confucius' old 'lecture hall, in a stone case,' were presented to the emperor by Khung Zze-hui, 'a very old man of Lû.' The emperor, it is added, caused two copies to be made in the current characters of the time by 'the great scholars,' one of which was given to Zze-hui, and the other to General Ho Kwang, a minister of war and favourite, who greatly valued it, and placed it among the archives of the empire, where it was jealously guarded.This account makes the meaning of the phrase 'the San lâo of Lû quite clear; but there are difficulties in the way of our believing that it proceeded from Khung An-kwo. No mention is made of him in it, whereas, according to the current narrations, the tablets with the tadpole characters were first deciphered by him; nor is the name of the emperor to whom Khung Zze-hui presented the tablets given. No doubt, however, this emperor was Kâo, with whom Ho Kwang was a favourite. If the preface were genuine, of course An-kwo was alive after Zze-hui went to court with the tablets. Now, the tablets were discovered in the period Thien-han, B.C. 100–97, and Kâo reigned from B.C. 86 to 74. An-kwo died at the age of sixty, but in what year we are not told. He had studied the Shih under Shăn Kung, whose death can hardly be placed later than in B.C. 135. If An-kwo were born in B.C. 150, he would have been more than sixty years old—the age assigned to him at his death—at the accession of Kâo. I cannot believe, therefore, that the preface in the Japanese Hsiâo was written by him; and if we reject the preface, we must also reject the commentary before which it stands.The text of the Hsiâo in the work is nearly identical with that of Sze-mâ Kwang, mentioned below on p. 458; but to the chapters there are prefixed the headings (which Kwang did not adopt), that cannot be traced farther back than the Thang dynasty. This might be got over, but the commentary throws no new light on the text. 'It is shallow and poor,' say the editors of the Catalogue Raisonné, 'and not in the style of the Han scholars.' I must think with them that Khung An-Kwo's commentary, purporting to have been preserved in Japan is a forgery.
text. According to the account given in the next note this man was Khung Zze-hui; and in the Books of Sui that is given as the name of the individual of the Khung family, who had hidden the tablets on the appearance of the Khin edict for the destruction of all the old books.
