Book XXIV. Âi Kung Wân.
"Questions of Duke Âi" is a translation of the three characters with which the Book commences, and which mean there "Duke Âi asked;" and the title is so far descriptive of the contents of the Book,—two conversations on ceremonies and the practice of government between the marquis Зiang of Lû, posthumously called duke Âi, and Confucius. The sage died in the sixteenth year of Зiang's marquisate. As an old minister of the state, after he had retired from public life, he had a right of entrance to the court, which, we know, he sometimes exercised. He may have conversed with the marquis on the subjects discussed in this Treatise; but whether he held the particular conversations here related can only be determined by the consideration of their style and matter. I am myself disposed to question their genuineness.
There are other recensions of the Treatise. It forms the third of the Books in the current editions of "the Lî of the Greater Tâi," purporting to be the forty-first of those which were in his larger collection; and is the same as in our Lî Kî, with hardly a variation. The second conversation, again, appears as the fourth article in the collection called the "Narratives of the School[1]," but with considerable and important variations, under the title of Tâ Hwǎn, "The Grand Marriage." The first conversation is found also in the same collection, as part of the sixth article, called Wǎn Lî, or "Questions about Ceremonies." There are also variations in it; but the questioner in both articles is duke Âi.
The most remarkable passages of the Book are some paragraphs of the second conversation towards its conclusion. P. Callery translates Thien Tâo, "the Way of Heaven," in paragraph 16, by "La Vérité Céleste," and
- ↑ 家語
