THE Lî Kî
OR
COLLECTION OF TREATISES ON THE RULES OF PROPRIETY OR CEREMONIAL
USAGES.
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER I.*
THREE DIFFERENT LÎ KING, OR RITUAL BOOKS,
ACKNOWLEDGED IN CHINA. THE RECOVERY OF THE FIRST TWO, AND FORMATION
OF THE THIRD, UNDER THE HAN DYNASTY.
How Confucius spoke of the Lî.
1. Confucius said, 'It is by the Odes that the mind is aroused;
by the Rules of Propriety that the character is established; from
Music that the finish is received1.' On another occasion he said,
'Without the Rules of Propriety, respectfulness becomes laborious
bustle; carefulness, timidity; boldness, insubordination; and
straightforwardness, rudeness.'
These are two specimens of the manner in which Confucius expressed
himself about the Lî, the Rules of Propriety or Ceremonial
Usages, recognised in his time. It is a natural inference from
his language that there were Collections of such Rules which could
be read and studied; but he does not expressly say so.
How Mencius spoke of them.
The language of Mencius was more definite. In at least two passages
of his works we find the usual form of quotation Lî Yüeh,
'The Lî says2,' which, according to the analogy of Shih
Yüeh, 'The Shih King, or Book of Poetry, says,' might be
rendered,
1. Confucian Analects, Book VIII, 8 and 2.
2. Works of Mencius, II, Part ii, 2. 5; III, Part ii, 3. 3.
'The Lî. King says.' In another passage, he says to a Mr.
King Khun, 'Have you not read the Lî?' It does not appear
that Mencius was always referring to one and the same collection
of Lî; but it is clear that in his time there were one or
more such collections current and well known among his countrymen.
Now there are three Lî King, or three Rituals.
There are now three Chinese classics into which the name Lî
enters:--the Î Lî, the Kâu Lî, and the
Lî Kî, frequently styled, both by the Chinese themselves
and by sinologists, 'The Three Rituals2.' The first two are books
of the Kâu dynasty (B.C. 1122-225). The third, of which
a complete translation is given in the present work, may contain
passages of an earlier date than either of the others; but as
a collection in its present form, it does not go higher than the
Han dynasty, and was not completed till our second century. It
has, however, taken a higher position than those others, and is
ranked with the Shû, the Shih, the Yî, and the Khun
Khiû, forming one of 'The Five King,' which are acknowledged
as the books of greatest authority in China. Other considerations
besides antiquity have given, we shall see, its eminence to the
Lî Kî.
State of the Lî books at the rise of the Han an dynasty.
2. The monuments of the ancient literature, with the exception,
perhaps, of the Yi King, were in a condition of disorder and incompleteness
at the rise of the Han dynasty. (B.C. 206). This was the case
especially with the Î Lî and Kâu Lî. They
had suffered, with the other books, from the fires and proscription
of the short-lived dynasty of Khin, the founder of which was bent
especially on their destruction3; and during the closing centuries
of Kâu, in all the period of 'The Warring Kingdoms,' they
had been variously mutilated by the contending princess4.
1. Works of Mencius, III, ii, 2. 2.
2. See Wylie's Notes on Chinese Literature, p.4, and Mayers'
Chinese Reader's Manual, p. 300.
3. Sze-mâ Khien's Biographies, Book 61 (), p. 5b. Other
testimonies to the fact could be adduced.
4. Mencius V, ii, 2. 2. See also the note of Liû Hsin,
appended to his catalogue of Lî works, in the Imperial library
of Han.
Work of the ancient emperors of Han in recovering the books.
The sovereigns of Han undertook the task of gathering up and
arranging the fragments of the ancient books, and executed it
well.. In B.C. 213 Shih Hwang Tî of Khin had promulgated
his edict forbidding any one to hide and keep in his possession
the old writings. This was repealed in B.C. 191 by the emperor
Hui, so that it had been in existence only twenty-two years, during
most of which, we may presume, it had been inoperative. Arrangements
were also made to receive and preserve old tablets which might
be presented1, and to take down in writing what scholars might
be able to repeat. In B.C. 164, the emperor Wan ordered 'the Great
Scholars' of his court to compile 'the Royal Ordinances,' the
fifth of the Books in our Lî Kî2.
Recovery of the Î Lî.
i. Internal evidence shows that when this treatise was made,
the Î Lî, or portions of it at least, had been recovered;
and with this agrees the testimony of Sze-mâ Khien, who
was born perhaps in that very year3, and lived to between B.C.
90 and 80. In the 61st Book of his Biographies, referred to in
a note above, Khien says, 'Many of the scholars repeated (parts
of) the Lî; but no other of them so much as Kâo Thang
of Lû; and now we have only the Shih Lî, which he
was able to recite.' In harmony with this statement of the great
historian, is the first entry in Liû Hsin's Catalogue of
Lî books in the Imperial library of Han:--'56 küan
or sections of Lî in the old text, and 17 phien in the (current)
text (of the time);' forming, as is universally believed, the
present Î Lî, for which the Shih Lî of Khien
is merely another name.
That Kâo Thang should have been able to dictate so much
of the work will not be thought wonderful by those who
1. Such was the 'Stone-Conduit Gallery,' which Mayers (Manual,
p. 18,5) describes as a building erected by Hsiâo Ho at
Khang-an for the reception of the records of the extinct Khin
dynasty, about B.C. 200, adding that 'in B.C. 51, the emperor
Hsüan appointed a commission of scholars to assemble in this
building, and complete the revision of the classical writings.'
But it had also been' intended from the first as a repository
for those writings as they were recovered.
2. See the General Mirror of History under that year.
3. Mayers puts his birth 'about B.C. 163,' and his death 'about
86.'
are familiar with the power of memory displayed by many Chinese
scholars even at the present day. The sections in the old text
were found in the reign of the emperor Wû (B.C. 140-87),
and came into the possession of his brother, known as king Hsien
of Ho-kien. We do not know how much this mass of tablets added
to the Î Lî, as we now have it, but they confirmed
the genuineness of the portion obtained from Kâo.
King Hsien of Ho-kien, and his recovery of the Kâu Lî.
ii. The recovery of the Kâu Lî came not long after,
and through the agency of the same king Hsien. No one did so much
as he in the restoration of the ancient of literature. By name
Teh, and one of the fourteen sons of the emperor King (B.C. 156-141),
he was appointed by his father, in B.C. 155, king of Ho-kien,
which is still the name of one of the departments of Kih-lî,
and there he continued till his death, in 129, the patron of all
literary men, and unceasingly pursuing his quest for old books
dating from before the Khin dynasty. Multitudes came to him from
all quarters, bringing to him the precious tablets which had been
preserved in their families or found by them elsewhere. The originals
he kept in his own library, and had a copy taken, which he gave
to the donor with a valuable gift. We are indebted to him in this
way for the preservation of the Tâo Teh King, the works
of Mencius, and other precious treasures; but I have only to notice
here his services in connexion with the Lî books1.
Some one 2 brought to him the tablets of the Kâu Lî,
then called Kâu Kwan, 'The Official Book of Kâu,'
and purporting to contain a complete account of the organised
government of the dynasty of Kâu in six sections. The sixth
section, however, which should have supplied a list of the officers
in the department of the minister of Works,
1. See the account of king Hsien in the twenty-third chapter
of the Biographies in the History of the first Han dynasty. Hsien
was the king's posthumous title (), denoting 'The Profound and
Intelligent.'
2 The Catalogue of the Sui Dynasty's (A. D. 589-618) Imperial
library says this was a scholar of the surname Lî (). I
have been unable to trace the authority for the statement farther
back.
with their functions, was wanting, and the king offered to pay
1000 pieces of gold to any one who should supply the missing tablets,
but in vain1. He presented the tablets which he had obtained at
the court of his half-brother, the emperor Wû; but the treasure
remained uncared for in one of the imperial repositories till
the next century; when it came into the charge of Liû Hsin.
Hsin replaced the missing portion from another old work, called
Khâo Kun Kî, which Wylie renders by 'The Artificers'
Record.' This has ever since continued to appear as the sixth
section of the whole work, for the charge of which Hsin obtained
the appointment of a special board of scholars, such as had from
the first been entrusted with the care of the Î Lî.
The Kâu Lî is a constitutional and not a ritual work.
The last entry in Hsin's Catalogue of Lî Books is:--'The
Kâu Kwan in six sections; and a treatise on the Kâu
Kwan in four sections.' That is the proper name for it. It was
not called the Kâu Lî till the Thang dynasty2.
Formation of the Lî Kî.
iii. We come to the formation of the text of the Lî Kî,
in which we are more particularly interested. We cannot speak
of its recovery, for though parts of it had been in existence
during the Kâu dynasty, many of its Books cannot claim a
higher antiquity than the period of the Han. All that is known
about the authorship of them all will be found in the notices
which form the last chapter of this Introduction;
After the entry in Lia Hsin's Catalogue about the recovered
1. This is related in the Catalogue of the Sui dynasty, It could
not be in Khien's sixty-first chapter of Biographies, because
the Kâu Kwan was not known, or, at least, not made public,
in Khien's time. The Sui writers, no doubt, took it from some
biography of the Han, which has escaped me.
2. A complete translation of the Kâu Lî appeared
at Paris in 1851, the work of Edward Biot, who had died himself
before its publication, before his fiftieth year. According to
a note in Callery's 'Memorial des Rites' (p. 191), the labour
of its preparation hastened Biot's death. There are some errors
in the version, but they are few. I have had occasion to refer
to hundreds of passages in it, and always with an increasing admiration
of the author's general resources and knowledge of Chinese. His
early death was the greatest loss which the cause of sinology
has sustained. His labours, chiefly on Chinese subjects, had been
incessant from 1835. The perusal of them has often brought to
my memory the words of Newton, 'If Mr. Cotes had lived, we should
have known something.' Is there no sinologist who will now undertake
a complete translation of the Î Lî?
text of the Î Lî, 'there follows--'131 phien of Kî,'
that is, so many different records or treatises on the subject
of Lî. These had also been collected by king Hsien, and
Kû Hsî's note about them is that they were 'Treatises
composed by the disciples of the seventy disciples,' meaning by
'the seventy disciples' those of Confucius' followers who had
been most in his society and, profited most from his instructions.
These 131 phien contained, no doubt, the germ of our Lî
Kî; but there they remained for about a century in the imperial
repositories, undigested and uncared for, and constantly having
other treatises of a similar nature added to them.
Council of B.C. 511.
At last, in B.C. 51, the emperor Hsüan (B.C. 71-47) convoked
a large assembly of Great Scholars to meet in the Stone-Conduit
Gallery, and discuss the text of the recovered classics1. A prominent
member of this assembly, the president of it I suppose, was Liû
Hsiang, himself a celebrated writer and a scion of the imperial
house, who appears to have had the principal charge of all the
repositories. Among the other members, and in special connexion
with the Lî works, we find the name of Tâi Shang,
who will again come before us2.
B.C. 26.
We do not know what the deliberations of the Great Scholars resulted
in, but twenty-five years later the emperor Khang caused another
search to be made throughout the empire for books that might hitherto
have escaped notice; and, when it was completed, he ordered Hsiang
to examine all the contents of the repositories, and collate the
various copies of the classics. From this came the preparation
of a catalogue; and Hsiang dying at the age of seventy-two, in
B.C. 9, before it was completed, the work was delegated to his
third and youngest son Hsin. His catalogue we happily possess.
It mentions, in addition to the Î Lî and
1. See the Details in the General Mirror of History, under B.C.
51.
2. See the 58th Book of Biographies () in the History of the
first Han, and the Catalogue of the Sui Library.
Kâu Lî, 199 phien of Lî treatises. The résumé
appended to the Lî books in the Catalogue of the Su i Dynasty,
omitting works mentioned by Hsin, and inserting two others, says
that Hsiang had in his hands altogether 214 phien. What was to
be done with this mass of tablets, or the written copies made
from them?
Hâu Zhang and the two Tâis
The most distinguished of the Lî scholars in the time of
the emperors Hsüan and Khang was a Hâu Zhang, the author
of the compilation called in Hsin's Catalogue Khü Tâi
Kî; and two of his disciples, Tâi Teh and Tâi
Shang, cousins1, the name of the latter of whom has already been
mentioned as a member of the council of B.C. 51, were also celebrated
for their ability. Teh, the older of the two, and commonly called
Tâ Tâi, or 'the Greater Tâi,' while Hsiang was
yet alive, digested the mass of phien, and in doing so reduced
their number to 85. The younger, called Hsiâo Tâi,
or 'the Lesser Tâi,' doing the same for his cousin's work,
reduced it to 46 treatises. This second condensation of the Lî
documents met with general acceptance, and was styled the Lî
Kî. Shang himself wrote a work in twelve chapters, called
'A Discussion of the Doubts of Scholars about the Lî Kî,'
which, though now lost, was existing in the time of Sui.
Mâ Yung and Kang Hsüan.
Through Khiâo Zan and others, scholars of renown in their
day, the redaction passed on to the well-known Mâ Yung (A.D.
79-166), who added to Shang's books the Yüeh Ling, the Ming
1. Sinologists, without exception I believe, have called Shang
a 'nephew' of Teh, overlooking the way in which the relationship
between them is expressed in Chinese. Shang is always Teh's ,
and not simply. Foreign students have overlooked the force of
the phrase and, more fully, . Teh and Shang's father had the same
grand-father, and were themselves the sons of brothers. They were
therefore what we call first cousins, and Teh and Shang were second
cousins. The point is unimportant, but it is well to be correct
even in small matters. Not unimportant, however, is the error
of Callery (Introduction, p. 6), who says, 'Le neveu, homme dépravé,
beaucoup plus adonné aux plaigirs, qu'à 1'étude,
retrancha encore davantage et fixa le nombre des chapitres à
46.' No such stigma rests on the character of Taî Shang,
and I am sure translators have reason to be grateful to him for
condensing, as he did, the result of his cousin's labours.
Thang Wei, and the Yo Kî making their number in all forty-nine,
though, according to the arrangement adopted in the present translation,
they still amount only to forty-six. From Mâ, again, it
passed to his pupil Kang Hsüan (A.D. 127-200), in whom be
was obliged to acknowledge a greater scholar than himself.
Thus the Lî Kî was formed. It is not necessary to
pursue its history farther. Kang was the scholar of his age, and
may be compared, in scholarship, with the later Kû Hsî.
And he has been fortunate in the preservation of his works. He
applied himself to all the three Rituals, and his labours on them
all, the Kâu Lî, the Î Lî, and the Lî
Kî, remain. His commentaries on them are to be found in
the great work of 'The Thirteen King' of the Thang dynasty. There
they appear, followed by the glosses, illustrations, and paraphrases
of Khung Ying-tâ.
Zhâi Yung and his manusculpt.
In A.D. 175, while Kang was yet alive, Zhâi Yung, a scholar
and officer of many gifts, superintended the work of engraving
on stone the text of all the Confucian classics. Only fragments
of that great manusculpt {sic} remain to the present day, but
others of the same nature were subsequently made. We may feel
assured that we have the text of the Lî Kî and other
old Chinese books, as it was 1800 years ago, more correctly than
any existing Manuscripts give us that of any works of the West,
Semitic, or Greek, or Latin, of anything like equal antiquity.
Lî of the Greater Tâi.
3. A few sentences on the Lî of the Greater Tâi will
fitly close this chapter. He handed down his voluminous compilation
to a Hsü Liang of Lang Yeh in the present Shan-tung1, and
in his family it was transmitted; but if any commentaries on it
were published, there is no trace of them in history. As the shorter
work of his cousin obtained a wide circulation, his fell into
neglect, and, as Kû Î-zun says, was simply put upon
the shelf. Still there appears in the Sui Catalogue these two
entries:--'The Lî Kî of Tâ Tâi, in 13
Sections,' and 'The Hsiâ
1. .
Hsiâo Kang, in 1 Section,' with a note by the editor that
it was compiled by Tâ Tâi. This little tractate may,
or may not, have been also included in one of the 13 Sections.
There are entries also about Tâ Tâi's work in the
catalogues of the Thang and Sung dynasties, which have given rise
to many discussions. Some of the Sung scholars even regarded it
as a 14th King. In the large collection of 'Books of Han and Wei,'
a portion of the Lî of Tâ Tâi is still current,
39 Book in 10 Sections, including the fragment of the Hsiâ
dynasty, of which a version, along with the text, was published
in 1882 by Professor Douglas of King's College, under the title
of 'The Calendar of the Hsiâ Dynasty.' I have gone over
all the portion in the Han and Wei Collection, and must pronounce
it very inferior to the compilation of the Hsiâo or Lesser
Tâi. This inferiority, and not the bulk, merely, was the
reason why from the first it has been comparatively little attended
to.
*From The Sacred Books of China translated by James Legge, 1885.
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