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xxviii
PREFACE.
invariably mentioned as Wăn Wang, 'Wăn the king. To say Wang Wăn would be felt at once by every Chinese scholar to be inadmissible; and not less so is Tî Yao for "the emperor Yao. It was the perception of this violation of usage in Chinese composition, five years ago, that first showed me the error of translating Tî Yâo and Ti Shun by 'the emperor Yão' and 'the emperor Shun.' It is true that in the early books of the Shů, we have Tî used alone, without the adjunct of Yâo or Shun, and referring to those personages. In those cases it does perform the part of a substantive, but its meaning depends on that which belonged to it as an adjective in the phrases Tî Yao and Ti Shun. If it be ascertained that in these it means the Deified,' then when used singly as a noun, it will mean Divus, or the Divine One.
Third, the sovereigns of the Hsià, the Shang, and the Kâu dynasties, it has been seen, were styled Wang and not Tî. Confucius speaks repeatedly in the Analects of Yâo and Shun, but he never calls either of them by the title of Tî. Mencius, however, uses it both of the one and the other, when he is quoting in substance from the accounts of them in the ShĄ. This confirms the view that the early books of the Shù were current after the middle of the Kâu dynasty, very much in the form in which we now have them; and the question arises whether we can show how the application of the title Tî as given in them to Yão and Shun arose. We can.
The fourth Book of the Li Kî is called Yüeh Ling, the Monthly Record of the Proceedings of Government.' In it certain sacrificial observances paid to the five Tîs are distributed through the four seasons. The Tîs are Fu-hsî, Shăn-năng, Ya-hsiung or Hsien-yuan, Kin-thien, and Kaoyang, who are styled Thai Hào (the Greatly Resplendent), Yen Tî (the Blazing Tî), Hwang Tî (the Yellow Tî), Shâo Hào (the Less Resplendent), and Kwan Hsü (the Solely Correct); with each Tî there is associated in the ceremony a personage of inferior rank, who is styled Shăn ( =a Spirit). The language descriptive of the ceremony is the same in all the cases, with the exception of the names and
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