Notes

1. THE Great Plan, ordinarily classed among the 'Counsels' or among the 'Instructions' of the Shû, might as well have a place among the 'Canons.' It is a remarkable production, and though it appears among the documents of the Kâu dynasty, there is claimed for the substance of it a much greater antiquity. According to the introductory sentences, king Wû, the founder of Kâu, obtained it from the count of Khî in the same year, the thirteenth of his dignity as Chief of the West, that he took the field against the tyrant of Shang. The count of Khî, it is understood, was the Grand-Master at the court of Shang, who appears in the concluding Book of the last Part. He says there, that, when ruin overtook the House of Shang, he would not be the servant of another dynasty. Accordingly, he refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of king Wû, who had delivered him from the prison in which he had been confined by Kâu-hsin, and fled--or purposed perhaps to flee--to Corea. Wû respected and admired his fidelity to the fallen dynasty, and invested him with that territory. He then, it is said, felt constrained to appear at the court of Kâu, when the king consulted him on the principles of government; and the result was that he communicated to him this Great Plan, with its nine divisions. When we read the Book, we see that it belonged originally to the time of Hsiâ, and that the larger portion of it should be ascribed to the Great Yü, and was as old, indeed, as the reign of Yâo. How it had come into the possession of the count of Khî we cannot tell. Nor does it appear how far the language of it should be ascribed to him. That the larger portion of it had come down from the times of Hsiâ is not improbable. The use of the number nine and other numbers, and the naming of the various divisions of the Plan, are in harmony with Yü's style and practice in his Counsels in the second Part of our Classic, and in the second Part also of the Tribute of Yü. We are told in the introductory sentences, that Heaven or God gave the Plan with its divisions to Yü. To explain the way in which the gift was made, there is a tradition about a mysterious tortoise that appeared in the waters of the Lo, bearing well-defined marks on its back from one to nine, and that thereupon Yü determined the meaning of those marks and of their numbers, and completed the nine divisions of the Plan. Of this legend, however, it is not necessary to speak in connexion with the Shû, which does not mention it; it will come up in connexion with the translation of the Yî King. The Great Plan means the great model for the government of the nation,--the method by which the people may be rendered happy and tranquil, in harmony with their condition, through the perfect character of the king, and his perfect administration of government. P. Gaubil says that the Book is a treatise at once of physics, astrology, divination, morals, politics, and religion, and that it has a sufficiently close resemblance to the work of Ocellus the Lucanian. There is a shadowy resemblance between the Great Plan and the curious specimen of Pythagorean doctrine which we have in the treatise on the Universe; but the dissimilarities are still greater and more numerous. More especially are the differences between the Greek mind, speculative, and the Chinese mind, practical, apparent in the two works. Where the Chinese writer loses himself in the sheerest follies of his imagining, he yet gropes about for a rule to be of use in the conduct of human affairs. The whole of the treatise is divided into three chapters. The first is introductory, and relates how the Great Plan with its nine divisions was at first made known to Yü, and came at this time to be communicated to king Wû; the second contains the names of the nine divisions of the Plan; and in the third we have a description of the several divisions. 'The whole,' says a Chinese writer, 'exhibits the great model for the government of the nation.' The fifth or middle division on royal perfection is the central one of the whole, about which the Book revolves. The four divisions that precede it show how this royal perfection is to be accomplished, and the four that follow show how it is to be maintained.

2. See the commencement of Book i.

3. Khung Ying-tâ of the Thang dynasty says on this:--'The people have been produced by supreme Heaven, and both body and soul are Heaven's gift. Men have thus the material body and the knowing mind, and Heaven further assists them, helping them to harmonize their lives. The right and the wrong of their language, the correctness and errors of their conduct, their enjoyment of clothing and food, the rightness of their various movements;--all these things are to be harmonized by what they are endowed with by Heaven.'

4. Gaubil gives here 'les cinq hing,' without translating the Chinese term. English sinologists have got into the habit of rendering it by 'elements,' but it hardly seems possible to determine what the Chinese mean by it, We intend by 'elements' 'the first principles or ingredients of which all things are composed.' The Pythagoreans, by their four elements of earth, water, air, and fire, did not intend so much the nature or essence of material substances, as the forms under which matter is actually presented to us. The character hsing, meaning 'to move,' 'to be in action,' shows that the original conception of the Chinese is of a different nature; and it is said in the Khang-hsî Dictionary, 'The five hsing move and revolve between heaven and earth, without ever ceasing, and hence they are named.' The editors of the latest imperial edition of the Shû say, 'Distributed through the four seasons, they make "the five dividers of time;" exhibited in prognostications, they give rise to divination by the tortoise-shell and the reeds; having lodgment in the human body, they produce "the five personal matters;" moved by good fortune and bad, they produce "the various verifications; communicated to organisms, they produce the different natures, hard and soft, good and evil; working out their results in the changes of those organisms, they necessitate--here benevolence and there meanness, here longevity and there early death:--all these things are from the operation of the five hsing. But if we speak of them in their simplest and most important character, they are what man's life depends on, what the people cannot do without.' After all this, I should still be sorry to be required to say what the five hsing are.

5. These five 'matters' are represented as being in the human person what the five hsing are in nature. Demeanour is the human correspondency of water, speech that of fire, & c.

6. Medhurst calls the eight (objects of) government 'the eight regulators,' and Gaubil calls them 'les huit règles du gouvernement.' The phrase means the eight things to be attended to in government,--its objects and departments.

7. 'The five dividers of time' are with Medhurst 'the five arrangers,' and with Gaubil 'les cinq périodes.' This division of the Great Plan is substantially the same as Yâo's instructions to his astronomers.

8. By 'royal perfection' we are to understand the sovereign when he is, or has made himself, all that he ought to be. 'Perfection' is 'the utmost point,' the extreme of excellence, realized in the person of the sovereign, guiding his administrative measures, and serving as an example and attractive influence to all below, both ministers and people.

9. The three virtues' are not personal attributes of the sovereign, but characteristics of his rule, the varied manifestations of the perfection described in the preceding division.

10. The practice of divination for the satisfaction of doubts was thus used in China from the earliest times. In the Counsels of Yü, p. 50, that sage proposes to Shun to submit the question of who should be his successor on the throne to divination, and Shun replies that he had already done so. Gaubil says that according to the Great Plan divination was only used in doubtful cases; but if such was the practice of the sages, diviners and soothsayers must have formed, as they do now, a considerable and influential class in society. The old methods of divination have fallen into disuse, and we do not know how far other methods are employed and sanctioned by the government. Those old methods were by means of the tortoise-shell, and the stalks of the Khî plant. 'The tortoise,' says Kû Hsî, 'after great length of years becomes intelligent; and the Khî plant will yield, when a hundred years old, a hundred stalks from one root, and is also a spiritual and intelligent thing. The two divinations were in reality a questioning of spiritual beings, the plant and the shell being employed, because of their mysterious intelligence, to indicate their intimations. The way of divination by the shell was by the application of fire to scorch it till the indications appeared on it; and that by the stalks of the plant was to manipulate in a prescribed way forty-nine of them, eighteen different times, till the diagrams were formed.' The outer shell of the tortoise was removed, leaving the inner portion on which were the marks of the lines of the muscles of the creature. This was smeared with a black pigment, and, fire being applied beneath, the pigment was examined, and according as it had been variously dried by the heat, presented the indications mentioned in the text. The Khî plant was probably the Achillea millefolium. It is cultivated largely on the mound over the grave of Confucius. I brought from that two bundles of the dried stalks in 1873.

11. P. Gaubil renders by 'les apparences' the characters which I have translated 'the various verifications,' observing that he could not find any word which would cover the whole extent of the meaning. He says, 'In the present case, the character signifies meteors, phenomena, appearances, but in such sort that these have relation to some other things with which they are connected;--the meteor or phenomenon indicates some good or some evil. It is a kind of correspondency which is supposed, it appears, to exist between the ordinary events of the life of men and the constitution of the air, according to the different seasons;--what is here--said supposes--I know not what physical speculation of those times. It is needless to bring to bear on the text the interpretation of the later Chinese, for they are full of false ideas on the subject of physics. It may be also that the count of Khî wanted to play the physicist on points which he did not know.' There seems to underlie the words of the count that feeling of the harmony between the natural and spiritual worlds, which occurs at times to most men, and strongly affects minds under deep religious thought or on the wings of poetic rapture, but the way in which he endeavours to give the subject a practical application can only be characterised as grotesque.

12. Compare with this what is said above on the second division of the Plan, 'the five (personal) matters.' It is observed here by Zhâi Khan, the disciple of Kû Hsî, and whose commentary on the Shû has, of all others, the greatest authority:--'To say that on occasion of such and such a personal matter being realized, there will be the favourable verification corresponding to it, or that, on occasion of the failure of such realization, there will be the corresponding unfavourable verification, would betray a pertinacious obtuseness, and show that the speaker was not a man to be talked with on the mysterious operations of nature. It is not easy to describe the reciprocal meeting of Heaven and men. The hidden springs touched by failure and success, and the minute influences that respond to them:--who can know these but the man that has apprehended all truth?' This is in effect admitting that the statements in the text can be of no practical use. And the same thing is admitted by the latest imperial editors of the Shû on the use which the text goes on to make of the thoughtful use of the verifications by the king and others.

13. It is hardly possible to see how this division enters into the scheme of the Great Plan.

14. 'Wickedness' is, probably, boldness in what is evil, and 'weakness,' feebleness of will in what is good.