________________
THE SHIH KING.
ODES OF THE TEMPLE AND THE
ALTAR.
It was stated in the Introduction, p. 278, that the poems in the
fourth Part of the Shih are the only ones that are professedly religious; and there are some even of them, it will be seen, which have little claim on internal grounds to be so considered. I commence with them my selections from the Shih for the Sacred Books of the Religions of the East. I will give them all, excepting the first two of the Praise Odes of Lū, the reason for omitting which will be found, when I come to that division
of the Part. The Odes of the Temple and the Altar are, most of them, con
nected with the ancestral worship of the sovereigns of the Shang and Kâu dynasties, and of the marquises of Ld. Of the ancestral The ancestral
worship of the common people we have almost no worship of information in the Shih. It was binding, however, the common on all, and two utterances of Confucius may be people.
given in illustration of this. In the eighteenth chapter of the Doctrine of the Mean, telling how the duke of Kâu, the legislator of the dynasty so called, had completed the virtuous course of Wăn and Wa, carrying up the title of king to Wăn's father and grandfather, and sacrificing to the dukes before them with the royal ceremonies,' he adds, 'And this rule he extended to the feudal princes, the great officers, the other officers, and the common people. In the mourning and other duties rendered to a deceased father or mother, he allowed no difference between the noble and the mean.' Again, his summary in the tenth chapter of the Hsiâo King, of the duties
Digitized by Google