ITS INTEGRITY.
In the testimony of K'ung Fu, which has been adduced to
prove the authorship of the Chung Yung, it is said that the Work
consisted originally of forty-nine p'ien. From this statement it is
argued by some, that the arrangement of it in thirty-three
chapters, which originated with Chu Hsi, is wrong [2]; but this
does not affect the question of integrity, and the character p'ien
is so vague and indefinite, that we cannot affirm that K'ung Fu
meant to tell us by it that Tsze-sze himself divided his Treatise
into so many paragraphs or chapters.
It is on the entry in Liu Hsin's Catalogue, quoted section i,--
'Two p'ien of Observations on the Chung Yung,' that the integrity
of the present Work is called in question. Yen Sze-ku, of the Tang
dynasty, has a note on that entry to the effect:-- 'There is now
the Chung Yung in the Li Chi in one p'ien. But that is not the
original Treatise here mentioned, but only a branch from it [3]'
Wang Wei, a writer of the Ming dynasty, says:-- 'Anciently, the
Chung Yung consisted of two p'ien, as appears from the History of
Literature of the Han dynasty, but in the Li Chi we have only one
p'ien, which Chu Hsi, when he made his "Chapters and Sentences,"
divided into thirty-three chapters. The old Work in two p'ien is
not to be met with now [4].'
These views are based on a misinterpretation of the entry
in the
1 述聖子思子.
2 See the 四書拓餘說, art. 中庸.
3 顏師古曰,今禮記有中庸一篇,奕非本禮經,蓋此之流.
4 王氏緯曰,中庸古有二篇,見漢藝文志,而在禮記中者,一篇而已,朱子為章句,因
其一篇者,分為三十三章,而古所謂而篇者不可見矣.
Catalogue. It does not speak of two p'ien of the Chung Yung, but of
two p'ien of Observations thereon. The Great Learning carries on
its front the evidence of being incomplete, but the student will
not easily believe that the Doctrine of the Mean is so. I see no
reason for calling its integrity in question, and no necessity
therefore to recur to the ingenious device employed in the edition
of the five ching published by the imperial authority of K'ang Hsi,
to get over the difficulty which Wang Wei supposes. It there
appears in two p'ien, of which we have the following account
from the author of 'Supplemental Remarks upon the Four Books:'--
'The proper course now is to consider the first twenty chapters in
Chu Hsi's arrangement as making up the first p'ien, and the
remaining thirteen as forming the second. In this way we retain
the old form of the Treatise, and do not come into collision with
the views of Chu. For this suggestion we are indebted to Lu Wang-
chai' (an author of the Sung dynasty ) [1].