Text of Confucianism Part 02

SR No.: 007676
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: James Legge
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1882
Total Pages: 2405
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 43 MB

Page 423

396
THE APPENDIXES.
SECT. II.
(of the appended explanations), they seem to express the ideas of a decaying age.
47. The Yi exhibits the past, and (teaches us to) discriminate (the issues of) the future; it makes manifest what is minute, and brings to light what is obscure. (Then king Wăn) opened (its symbols), and distinguished things in accordance with its names, so that all his words were correct and his explanations decisive ;-(the book) was now complete.
48. The appellations and names (of the diagrams and lines) are but small matters, but the classes of things comprehended under them are large. Their scope reaches far, and the explanations attached to them are elegant. The words are indirect, but to the point; the matters seem plainly set forth, but there is a secret principle in them. Their object is, in cases that are doubtful, to help the people in their conduct, and to make plain the recompenses of good and evil.
The principal object, it is said, of chapter VI, paragraphs 45-48, is to set forth the views of king Wăn and his son in the explanations which they appended to the diagrams and lines; and in doing this the writer begins in 45, with Fa-hsî's starting, in the formation of his eight trigrams, from the devising of the whole and divided lines, to represent the two primitive forms in nature. The two 'pure' trigrams formed of these lines, unmixed, give rise to all the others, or rather the lines of which they are formed do so; and are thus compared to a gate by which the various diagrams enter to complete the system that is intended to represent the changing phenomena of nature and experience. The next sentence in the above version of paragraph 45 appears in Canon McClatchie's translation of the Yi, as follows:--'Khien is the membrum virile, and Khwăn is the pudendum muliebre (the sakti of Khien).' It is hardly possible, on reading such a version, to suppress the exclamation proh pudor! Can a single passage be adduced in support of it from among all the Chinese critics in the
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