THE SHE KING; OR, THE BOOK OF ANCIENT POETRY

If 1
22 THE PEEFACE TO THE SHE. THE PEEFACE TO THE SHE. 23
text up to Tsze-hea. Yen Sze-koo states it positively in
his note appended to Lew Hin's catalogue of the copies
of the She ; and hence, as the text and the preface came
to Maou together, there arose the view that the latter
was made by that disciple of the sage. It became current,
indeed, under his name, and was published separately
from the odes, so that, in the catalogue of the T'ang
dynasty, we find " The Preface to the She by Puh Shang,
in two Books," as a distinct Work.
But there is another account of the origin of the Pre
face which seems to conflict with this. In par. 4 of the
2nd section of last chapter I have made mention of Wei
Different ac- King-chung or Wei Hwang, one of the great
^f0the eprt Han scholars who adopted the text of Maou.
face- He serves as a connecting link between the
western and eastern dynasties of Han; and in the account
of him in the " Literary Biographies " we are told that
" Hwang became the pupil of Seay Man-k'ing, who was
famous for his knowledge of Maou's She; and he after
wards made the Preface to it, remarkable for the accuracy
with which it gives the meaning of the pieces in the Fung
and the Ya, and which is now current in the world." A
testimony like this cannot be gainsayed. If we allow
that, when Maou first made public his text, there were
prefatory notes accompanying it, yet Hwang must have
made large additions to these, as Maou himself, in the
opinion of Ch'ing K'ang-shing, had previously done.
Since the time of Choo He, many eminent scholars,
such as Yen Ts'an in the Sung dynasty, and Keang Ping-
chang in the present, adopt the first sentence in the
introduction to each ode as what constituted the original
preface, and which they do not feel at liberty to dispute.
They think that so much was prefixed to the odes by the
historiographers of the kingdom or of the States, when
they were first collected, and they would maintain like
wise, I suppose, that it bore the stamp of Tsze-hea.
Keang calls these brief sentences " the Old preface"
and " the Great preface," and the fuller explanation which
is often appended to them, and which he feels at liberty
to question, he calls " the Appended preface," and " the
Little preface."
After long and extensive investigation of the subject,
I have no hesitation in adopting the freer choo^ He.g
views of Choo He, with a condensed account views on the
of which I conclude this chapter: re ace"
" Opinions of scholars are much divided as to the
authorship of the Preface. Some; ascribe it to Confucius;'
some to Tsze-hea; and some to the historiographers of
the States. In the absence of clear testimony it is im
possible to decide the point; but the notice about Wei
Hwang, in the literary Biographies of the Han dynasties, 8
would seem to make it clear that the Preface was his
work. We must take into account, however, on the other
Land, the statement of Ch'ing Heuen, 3 that the Preface
existed as a separate document when Maou appeared with
his text, and that he broke it up, prefixing to each ode
the portion belonging to it. The natural conclusion is
that the Preface had come down from a remote period,
and that Hwang merely added to it and rounded it off.
In accordance with this, scholars generally hold that the
first sentences in the introductory notices formed the
original Preface which Maou distributed, and that the
following portions were subsequently added.
" This view may appear reasonable; but when we ex
amine those first sentences themselves, we find some of
them which do not agree with the obvious meaning of
the odes to which they are prefixed, and give merely the
rash and baseless expositions of the writers. Evidently,
from the first, the Preface was made up of private specu
lations and conjectures as to the subject-matter of the
odes, and constituted a document by itself, separately ap
pended to the text. Then on its first appearance there
were current the explanations of the odes which were
given in connection with the texts of Ts'e, Loo, and Han,
so that readers could know that it was the work of later
1 This is too broadly stated. No one has affirmed that the Preface as
a whole was from the hand of Confucius. Ch'ing E-ch'uen (A.D. 1033
1107) held that the Great preface was made by him. The style, he says,
is like that of the appendixes to the Yih, and the ideas are beyond what
Tsze-hea could have enunciated. Wang Tih-shin (later on in the Sung
dynasty) ascribed to Confucius the first sentence of all the introductory
notices, and called them the Great preface.
2 Adduced above. 3 Also adduced above.