that, in their eagerness to discredit Tai Chên, they unconsciously waived their normal technique in research, permitting themselves to be deceived by a text which, by a little more critical examination, they could easily have established as a clumsy and malicious forgery.
These gentlemen were equally uncritical in using the Yung-lo text as evidence against Tai. In the first place, it is quite untrue to say that Tai failed to make use of this text in the collation of his own manuscripts. I have compared both of Tai's texts with the Yung-lo copy, and have found that he collated it minutely, and made full use of its variations. One clear proof for this is that some of his most peculiar, and sometimes even erroneous, readings—which have been ridiculed by such modern critics as Yang Shou-ching (see I, p. 484) and Ts'ên Chung-mien 岑仲勉—are in fact attributable to his reliance on the Yung-lo text, sometimes even to a fault.
Wang Kuo-wei cited only one instance in support of his charge against Tai and that instance serves only to sh has he himself was prejudiced and very unfair. This instance has to do with a double page or folio in chüan 18 of the Shui-ching chu, which was missing from the editions printed prior to 1774 but was restored by both Chao and Tai. Chao copied it from a text that had been collated in the years 1667–68 by Sun Ch'ien 孫潛 who in turn obtained it from an early sixteenth century text. Tai copied it from the Yung-lo ta-tien, adding to it his own emendations. The Chao text has 418[1] words to a double page; the Yung-lo ta-tien text has 417; and Tai's text, as emended by him, has 437. Instead of commending Tai for his improvement of the text, Wang Kuo-wei made the following summary judgment: "The double-page restored by Tai corresponds, not to the Yung-lo ta-lien text, but to that of Ch'üan and Chao. This he could not have done without having seen the works of Ch'üan and Chao." Coming from a man noted for his critical researches, this assertion is most unjust because, in the folio under consideration, Tai's text clearly differs from the Chao text, not merely in the number of words, but in at least ten textual variations, in six of which he followed strictly the Yung-lo text, and in the other four of which he supplied his own emendations.
There can be no doubt that Tai made full use of all salient points in the Yung-lo ta-lien. For example, he made transpositions amounting to over 1,000 words in the section on the Ying River in chüan 22—all in accordance with this early Ming text. Chao I-ch'ing made independently almost exactly the same transposition the basis of the Sun Ch'ien text, which, having derived from an early sixteenth century text, was almost as trustworthy as the transcript in the Yung-lo ta-tien. We are thus provided with another instance of independent convergence resulting from the use of similar intellectual tools.
In the second place, it is quite untrue to assert, as these critics do, that Tai attributed all his textual improvements to the merits of the Yung-lo text. He made literally thousands of corrections in his book as a whole without citing any authority or source; he shoulders the full responsibility himself, merely noting in each case that "the current edition erroneously reads so and so". Though this is an entirely legitimate procedure in textual criticism, it has been pointed to by his critics as evidence of his wish to deceive. It was Chang Mu who first gave it this
- ↑ Chao, inadvertently perhaps, stated the number to be 420.
