in eleven keuen or Books.’[1] This is followed by a list of the Chuen, or Commentaries, of Tso, Kung-yang, Kuh-lëang, Tsow, and Këah;[2] so that at this early time the text of the Classic was known, and there were writings of five different masters in illustration of it, the greater portion of which, the Chuen namely of Tso, Kung-yang, and Kuh-lëang, remain to the present day. A dozen other Works follow, mostly by Kung-yang and Kuh-lëang or their followers, showing how the Classic and the commentators on it had already engaged the attention of scholars.
2. Were the texts mentioned in the Han catalogue derived from the commentaries of Tso, Kung-yang, and Kuh-lëang, or from some other independent source? In a note to the entry about them, Yen Sze-koo of the T‘ang dynasty The texts in the Han Catalogue.says that they were taken from Kung-yang and Kuh-lëang. Many scholars confine his remark to the second collection, and it gives some countenance to this view that the commentaries of those two masters were then in eleven Books; but it is to be observed on the other hand that with the differences which exist in their texts they could hardly have been formed into one collection.
With regard to the first entry—‘the old text in twelve p‘ëen’—it is the general opinion that this was the text as taken from the Work of Tso. And there can be no doubt that during the Han dynasty the text and the commentary were kept separate in that Work, for Too Yu tells us that in his edition of it, early in the Tsin dynasty, he ‘took the years of the text and arranged them along with the corresponding years of the commentary.'[3] Moreover, in the Han dynasty, Tso’s school and that of Kung-yang were distinguished as the old or ancient and the new or modern.[4] To myself, however, the more natural interpretation of ‘the old text’ in the entry appears to be—the text in the ancient character; and if there were evidence to show that there was an edition of the text in Lëw Hin’s time, independent of that derived from the three commentaries, the result would be satisfactory. Yuen[5] Yuen was the first, so far as I know, to
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