Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/358

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
324
THE Lî Kî.
BK. V.

enforce his refusal. He therefore acted as the principal (mourner), and the visitor came in to condole with him. Khang-𝖟ze stood on the right of the gate with his face to the north. The duke, after the usual bows and courtesies, ascended by the steps on the east with his face towards the west. The visitor ascended by those on the west, and paid his condolences. The duke bowed ceremoniously to him, and then rose up and wailed, while Khang-𝖟ze bowed with his forehead to the ground, in the position where he was. The superintending officers made no attempt to put the thing to rights. The having two now acting as the orphan son arose from the error of Kî Khang-𝖟ze."

24. 𝖅ǎng-𝖟ze asked, "Anciently when an army went on an expedition, was it not first necessary to carry with it the spirit-tablets that had been removed from their shrines[1]?"

Confucius said, "When the son of Heaven went on his tours of Inspection, he took (one of) those tablets along with him, conveying it in the carriage of Reverence, thus intimating how it was felt necessary to

have with him that object of honour[2]. The practice


    duke Ling. He must have been duke Khû. But this error discredits the view of the statement having come from Confucius.

  1. See note 2 and plan of the royal ancestral temple of Kâu on pages 223–225.
  2. This, it is said, was the tablet of the royal ancestor which had been last removed from its shrine, and placed in the shrine-house for all such removed tablets. The carriage of Reverence was the "metal-guilt" carriage of the king, second to that adorned with jade, in which he rode to sacrifice. Zottoli renders:—"Imperator perlustrans custodita, cum translatitii delubri tabella peragrabat, imposita super casti curru, significatum necessariam praesentiam superioris."