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28
THE YÎ KING.
CH. III.
'a Treatise on the Sequence of the Hexagrams,' intended to trace the connexion of meaning between them in the order in which they follow one another in the Text of king Wăn.
My seventh Appendix is the tenth wing,' an exhibition of the meaning of the 64 hexagrams, not taken in succession, but promiscuously and at random, as they approximate to or are opposed to one another in meaning.
3. Such are the Appendixes of the Yi King. We have The author- to enquire next who wrote them, and espeship of the cially whether it be possible to accept the Appendixes.
met dictum that they were all written by confucius. If they have come down to us, bearing unmistakeably the stamp of the mind and pencil of the great sage, we cannot but receive them with deference, not to say with reverence. If, on the contrary, it shall appear that with great part of them he had nothing to do, and that it is not certain that any part of them is from him, we shall feel entirely at liberty to exercise our own judgment on their contents, and weigh them in the balances of our reason.
None of the Appendixes, it is to be observed, bear the
There is no superscription of Confucius. There is not a superscription single sentence in any one of them ascribing of Confucius on any of the it to him. I gave in the first chapter, on
Appendixes. p. 2, the earliest testimony that these treatises were produced by him. It is that of Sze-mâ Khien, whose
Historical Records' must have appeared about the year 100 before our era. He ascribes all the Appendixes, except the last two of them, which he does not mention at all, expressly to Confucius; and this, no doubt, was the common belief in the fourth century after the sage's death.
But when we look for ourselves into the third and fourth Appendixes -- the fifth, sixth, and seventh 'wings'- both
The third of which are specified by Khien, we find and fourth it impossible to receive his statement about Appendixes evidently
S them. What is remarkable in both parts not from of the third is, the frequent occurrence of Confucius.
the formula, 'The Master said,' familiar to all readers of the Confucian Analects. Of course, the
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| SR No. | 007676 |
| Book Title | Text of Confucianism Part 02 |
| 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 |