XVI PREFACE.
a commentator holding this opinion is surely not the best expositor. It is as a Grammarian rather than as a Philo- sopher that a member of the Ju Chia deals with the Tao Teh King ; he gives the sense of a passage according to the syntactical construction rather than according to the genius of the philosophy itself; and in attempting to ex- plain the text by his own canons, instead of by the canons of Taoism, he mistakes the superficial and apparently obvious meaning for the hidden and esoteric interpretation.'
Mr. Balfour will hardly repeat his charge of imperfect or erroneous interpretation against Julien ; and I believe that it is equally undeserved by most, if not all, of the other trans- lators against whom it is directed. He himself adopted as his guide the ' Explanations of the Tao Teh ATing,' current as the work of Lii Yen (called also Lii 3 U 5 Lii Tung-pin, and Lii .Oiun-yang), a Taoist of the eighth century. Through Mr. Balfour' s kindness I have had an opportunity of ex- amining this edition of Lao's Treatise ; and I am com- pelled to agree with the very unfavourable judgment on it pronounced by Mr. Giles as both ' spurious ' and ' ridiculous.' All that we are told of Lii Yen is very suspicious ; much of it evidently false. The editions of our little book ascribed to him are many. I have feu* more than twenty years possessed one with the title of 'The Meaning of the Tao Teh King Explained by the TRUE Man of AV/un-yang,' being a reprint of 1690, and as different as possible from the work patronised by Mr. Balfour.
Fourth, the Thai Shang H wun Hsiian Tao Teh ^Tan A'ing, a work of the present dynasty, published at Shang- hai, but when produced I do not know. It is certainly of the Lii 3" type, and is worth purchasing as one of the finest specimens of block-printing. It professes to be the production of ' The Immortals of the Eight Grottoes,' each of whom is styled ' a Divine Ruler (Ti Kun).' The eighty- one chapters are equally divided for commentary among them, excepting that 'the Divine Ruler, the Universal Refiner,' has the last eleven assigned to him. The Text is every- where broken up into short clauses, which are explained in
