{"collection":"ich","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/ich/icintr01.htm","path":"ich/icintr01.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/ich/icintr01.htm","text":"1. Confucius is reported to have said on one occasion, 'If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Y\u00ee, and might then escape falling into great errors 1:1.'\n| There was a Y\u00ee in the time of Confucius | \nto discourse with his disciples were those of History, Poetry, and Rites and Ceremonies 2:1; but ere he passed away from among them, his attention was much occupied also by the Y\u00ee as a monument of antiquity, which in the prime of his days he had too much neglected.\n2. Khien says that Confucius wrote various appendixes to the Y\u00ee, specifying all but two of the treatises, which go\n| The Y\u00ee is now made up of the Text which Confucius saw and the Appendixes ascribed to him | \n3. The Y\u00ee happily escaped the fires of \u017dhin, which proved so disastrous to most of the ancient literature of China in\n| The Y\u00ee escaped the fires of \u017dhin | \nIn the catalogue of works in the imperial library, prepared by Li\u00fb Hin about the beginning of our era, there is an enumeration of those on the Y\u00ee and its Appendixes,--the books of thirteen different authors or schools, comprehended in 294 portions of larger or smaller dimensions 2:3. I need not follow the history and study of the Y\u00ee into the line of the centuries since the time of Li\u00fb Hin. The imperial Khang-hs\u00ee edition of it, which appeared in 1715, contains quotations from the commentaries of 218 scholars, covering, more or less closely, the time from the second century B. C. to our seventeenth century. I may venture to say that\nthose 218 are hardly a tenth of the men who have tried to interpret the remarkable book, and solve the many problems to which it gives rise.\n4. It may be assumed then that the Y\u00ee King, properly\n| The Y\u00ee before Confucius, and when it was made | \n(i) The earliest mention of the classic is found in the\n| The Y\u00ee mentioned in the Official Book of K\u00e2u | \nwas existing, among the archives of the kingdom, under the charge of a high officer, 'the Y\u00ee of K\u00e2u,'--what constitutes the Text of the present Y\u00ee; the Text, that is, as distinguished from the Appendixes. There were two other Y\u00ee, known as the Lien-shan and the Kwei-\u017ehang. It would be a waste of time to try to discover the meaning of these designations. They are found in this and another passage of the Official Book; and nowhere else. Not a single trace of what they denoted remains, while we possess 'the Y\u00ee of K\u00e2u' complete 4:1.\n(ii) In the Supplement of \u017do Khi\u00fb-ming to 'the Spring and Autumn,'\n| The Y\u00ee mentioned in the \u017do Khwan | \naccounts of divination by the Y\u00ee interspersed over the long intervening period. For centuries before Confucius appeared on the stage of his country, the Y\u00ee was well known among the various feudal states, which then constituted the Middle Kingdom 5:1.\n(iii) We may now look into one of the Appendixes for its testimony to the age and authorship of the Text. The third Appendix is the longest, and the most important 5:2. In the 49th paragraph of the second Section of it it is said:--\n'Was it not in the middle period of antiquity that the Y\u00ee began to flourish? Was not he who made it (or were not they who made it) familiar with anxiety and calamity?'\nThe highest antiquity commences, according to Chinese writers, with F\u00fb-hs\u00ee, B.C. 3322; and the lowest with Confucius in the middle of the sixth century B.C. Between these is the period of middle antiquity, extending a comparatively short time, from the rise of the K\u00e2u dynasty, towards the close of the twelfth century B.C., to the Confucian era. According to this paragraph it was in this period that our Y\u00ee was made.\nThe 69th paragraph is still more definite in its testimony:--\n'Was it not in the last age of the Yin (dynasty), when the virtue of K\u00e2u had reached its highest point, and during the troubles between king W\u0103n and (the tyrant) K\u00e2u, that (the study of) the Y\u00ee began to flourish? On this account the explanations (in the book) express (a feeling of) anxious apprehension, (and teach) how peril may be turned into security, and easy carelessness is sure to meet with overthrow.'\nThe dynasty of Yin was superseded by that of K\u00e2u in B. C. 1122. The founder of K\u00e2u was he whom we call king W\u0103n, though he himself never occupied the throne. The\ntroubles between him and the last sovereign of Yin reached their height in B. C. 1143, when the tyrant threw him into prison in a place called Y\u00fb-l\u00ee, identified as having been in the present district of Thang-yin, department of Kang-teh, province of Ho-nan. W\u0103n was not kept long in confinement. His friends succeeded in appeasing the jealousy of his enemy, and securing his liberation in the following year. It follows that the Y\u00ee, so far as we owe it to king W\u0103n, was made in the year B.C. 1143 or 1142, or perhaps that it was begun in the former year and finished in the latter 6:1.\nBut the part which is thus ascribed to king W\u0103n is only a small portion of the Y\u00ee. A larger share is attributed to his son Tan, known as the duke of K\u00e2u, and in it we have allusions to king W\u00fb, who succeeded his father W\u0103n, and was really the first sovereign of the dynasty of K\u00e2u 6:2. There are passages, moreover, which must be understood of events in the early years of the next reign. But the duke of K\u00e2u died in the year B. C. 1105, the 11th of king Kh\u0103ng. A few years then before that time, in the last decade of the twelfth century B. C., the Y\u00ee King, as it has come down to us, was complete 6:3.\n5. We have thus traced the text of the Y\u00ee to its authors, the famous king W\u0103n in the year 1143 B. C., and his\n| The Y\u00ee is not the most ancient of the Chinese books | \nin 1834 by the late Jules Mohl, with a title commencing 'Y-King, antiquissimus Sinarum liber 7:1.' The language of the other European translator of it, the Rev. Canon McClatchie of Shangh\u00e2i, whose work appeared in 1876, is still more decided. The first sentence of his Introduction contains two very serious misstatements, but I have at present to do only with the former of them;--that 'the Y\u00ee King is regarded by the Chinese with peculiar veneration, . . . . as being the most ancient of their classical writings.' The Sh\u00fb is the oldest of the Chinese classics, and contains documents more, than a thousand years earlier than king W\u0103n. Several pieces of the Shih King are also older than anything in the Y\u00ee; to which there can thus he assigned only the third place in point of age among the monuments of Chinese literature. Existing, however, about 3000 years ago, it cannot be called modern. Unless it be the books of the Pentateuch, Joshua, and judges, an equal antiquity cannot be claimed for any portion of our Sacred Scriptures.\nIt will be well to observe here also how much older the\n| The Text much older than the Appendixes | \ncan be received as only partially correct, if indeed it be received at all, the sage could not have entered on their composition earlier than B.C. 483, 660 years later than the portion of the text that came from king W\u0103n, and nearly 630 later than what we owe to the duke of K\u00e2u. But during that long period of between six and seven centuries changes may have arisen in the views taken by thinking men of the method and manner of the Y\u00ee; and I cannot accept the Text and the Appendixes as forming one work in any proper sense of the term. Nothing has prevented the full understanding of both, so far as parts of the latter can be understood, so much as the blending of them together, which originated with P\u00ee Kih of the first Han dynasty. The common editions of the book have five of the Appendixes (as they are ordinarily reckoned) broken up and printed side by side with the Text; and the confusion thence arising has made it difficult, through the intermixture of incongruous ideas, for foreign students to lay hold of the meaning.\n6. Native scholars have of course been well aware of the difference in time between the appearance of the Text and\n| Labours of native scholars on the Y\u00ee | \nAt the same time it is an unfair description of what they\n| An imperfect description of their labours | \nlame conclusion that its full significance is past finding out 9:1.' A multitude of the native commentaries are of the highest value, and have left little to be done for the elucidation of the Text; and if they say that a passage in an Appendix is 'unfathomable' or 'incalculable,' it is because their authors shrink from allowing, even to themselves, that the ancient sages intermeddled, and intermeddled unwisely, with things too high for them.\nWhen the same writer who thus speaks of native scholars goes on to say that 'in the same way a host\n| Erroneous account of the labours of European Chinese scholars | \n1:1:1 Confucian Analects, VII, xvi.\n1:1:2 The Historical Records; Life of Confucius, p. 12.\n2:2:1 Analects, VII, xvii.\n2:2:2 Legge's Chinese Classics, I, prolegomena, pp. 6-9.\n2:2:3 Books of the Earlier Han; History of Literature, pp. 1, 2.\n4:4:1 See the K\u00e2u Kwan (or L\u00ee), Book XXIV, parr. 3, 4, and 27. Biot (Le Tcheou L\u00ee, vol. ii, pp. 70, 71) translates the former two paragraphs thus: 'Il (Le Grand Augure) est pr\u00e9pos\u00e9 aux trois methodes pour les changements (des lignes divinatoires). La premi\u00e8re est appel\u00e9e Liaison des montagnes (Lien-shan); la seconde, Retour et Conservation (Kwei-\u017ehang); la troisi\u00e8me, Changements des K\u00e2u. Pour toutes il y a huit lignes symboliques sacr\u00e9es, et soixante-quatre combinaisons de ces lignes.'\nSome tell us that by Lien-shan was intended F\u00fb-hs\u00ee, and by Kwei-\u017ehang Hwang T\u00ee; others, that the former was the Y\u00ee of the Hsi\u00e2 dynasty, and the latter that of Shang or Yin. A third set will have it that Lien-shan was a designation of Sh\u0103n N\u0103ng, between F\u00fb-hs\u00ee and Hwang T\u00ee. I should say myself, as many Chinese critics do say, that Lien-shan was an arrangement of the lineal symbols in which the first figure was the present 52nd hexagram, K\u0103n consisting of the trigram representing mountains doubled; and that Kwei-\u017ehang was an arrangement where the first figure was the present 2nd hexagram, Khw\u0103n consisting of the trigram representing the earth doubled,--with reference to the disappearance and safe keeping of plants in the bosom of the earth in winter. All this, however, is only conjecture.\n5:5:1 See in the \u017do Khwan, under the 22nd year of duke Kwang (B.C. 672); the 1st year of Min (1661); and in his 2nd year (660); twice in the 15th year of Hs\u00ee (645); his 25th year (635); the 12th year of Hs\u00fcan, (597); the 16th year of Kh\u0103ng (575); the 9th year of Hsiang (564); his 25th year (548); the 5th year of Kh\u00e2o (537); his 7th year (535); his 12th year (530); and the 9th year of \u00c2i (486).\n5:5:2 That is, the third as it appears farther on in this volume in two Sections. With the Chinese critics it forms the fifth and sixth Appendixes, or, 'Wings,' as they are termed.\n6:6:1 Sze-m\u00e2 Khien (History of the K\u00e2u Dynasty, p. 3) relates that, 'when he was confined in Y\u00fb-l\u00ee, W\u0103n increased the 8 trigrams to 64 hexagrams.'\n6:6:2 E.g., hexagrams XVII, 1. 6; XLVI, 1. 4. Tan's authorship of the symbolism is recognised in the \u017do Khwan, B. C. 540.\n6:6:3 P. Regis (vol. ii, P. 379) says: 'Vel nihil vel parum errabit qui dicet opus Y\u00ee King fuisse perfectum anno quinto Kh\u0103ng Wang, seu anno 1109 aut non ultra annum 1108, ante aerae Christianae initium; quod satis in rebus non omnino certis.' But the fifth year of king Kh\u0103ng was B. C. 1111.\n7:7:1 It has been suggested that 'Antiquissimus Sinarum liber' may mean only 'A very ancient book of the Chinese,' but the first sentence of the Preface to the work commences:--'Inter onmes constat librorum Sinicorum, quos classicos vocant, primum et antiquissimum esse Y-King.'\nAt the end of M. De Guignes' edition of P. Gaubil's translation of the Sh\u00fb, there is a notice of the Y\u00ee King sent in 1738 to the Cardinals of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide by M. Claude Visdelou, Bishop of Claudiopolis. M. De Guignes says himself, 'L' Y-King est le premier des Livres Canoniques des Chinois.' But P. Visdelou writes more guardedly and correctly:--'Pour son anciennet\u00e9, s'il en faut croire les Annales des Chinois, il a \u00e9t\u00e9 commenc\u00e9 quarante-six si\u00e8cles avant celui-ci. Si cela est vrai, comme toute la nation l'avoue unanimement, ou peut \u00e0 juste titre l'appeler le plus ancien des livres.' But he adds, 'Ce n'\u00e9toit pas proprement un livre, ni quelque chose d'approchant; c'\u00e9toit une \u00e9nigme tr\u00e8s obscure, et plus difficile cent fois \u00e0 expliquer que celle du sphinx.'\nP. Couplet expresses himself much to the same effect in the prolegomena (p. xviii) to the work called 'Confucius Sinarum Philosophus,' published at Paris in 1687 by himself and three other fathers of the Society of Jesus (Intorcetta, Herdritch, and Rougemont). Both they and P. Visdelou give an example of a portion of the text and its interpretation, having singularly selected the same hexagram,--the 15th, on Humility.\n9:9:1 See a communication on certain new views about the Y\u00ee in the 'Times' of April 20, 1880; reprinted in Tr\u00fcbner's American, European, and Oriental Literary Record, New Series, vol. i, pp. 125-127.\n9:9:2 Regis' coadjutors in the work were the Fathers Joseph de Mailla, who turned the Chinese into Latin word for word, and compared the result with the Mank\u00e2u version of the Y\u00ee; and Peter du Tartre, whose principal business was to supply the historical illustrations. Regis himself revised all their work and enlarged it, adding his own dissertations and notes. See Prospectus Operis, immediately after M. Mohl's Preface.","title":"The I Ching, Legge tr.: Introduction: Chapter I: The Y&ic...","type":"page"}