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THE HSIÂO KING.
fucius?
any of the older and more important classics. For the
preservation of the text as we now have it, we Was the treatise called the Hsião are indebted to Hsuan Zung (A. D. 713-755), King by Con- one of the emperors of the Thang dynasty.
In the preface to his commentary on it there occurs this sentence :— The Master said, “My aim is seen in the Khun Khid; my (rule of) conduct is in the Hsiao King."' The imperial author quotes the saying, as if it were universally acknowledged to have come from the sage. It is found at a much earlier date in the preface of Ho Hsiu (A.D. 129–182) to his commentary on the Khun Khid as transmitted and annotated by Kung-yang. The industry of scholars has traced it still farther back, and in a more extended form, to a work called Hsião King Kü-ming Küch,-a production, probably, of the first century of our era, or of the century before it. It was one of a class of writings on the classical books, full of mysterious and useless speculations, that never took rank among the acknowledged expositions. Most of them soon disappeared, but this subsisted down to the Sui dynasty (A. D. 581-618), for there was a copy of it then in the Imperial Library. It is now lost, but a few passages of it have been collected from quotations in the Han writers. Among them is this :
Confucius said, “If you wish to see my aim in dispensing praise or blame to the feudal lords, it is to be found in the Khun Khill; the courses by which I would exalt the social relations are in the Hsiảo King." The words thus ascribed to Confucius were condensed, it is supposed, into the form in which we have them,-first from Ho Hsiū, and afterwards from the emperor Hsuan Zung. Whether they were really used by the sage or not, they were attributed to him as early as the beginning of our Christian era, and it was then believed that he had given to our classic the honourable name of a King.
3. But the existence of the Hsiao King can be traced several hundred years farther back ;-to within less than a The Hsiko King century after the death of Confucius. Sze-må
existed before Khien, in his history of the House of Wei, the Han dynasty.
Y. one of the three marquisates into which the
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