The Shih from the Time of Confucius till the General Acknowledgment of the Present Text.
1. Of the attention paid to the study of the Shih from the death of Confucius to the rise of the Khin dynasty, we have abundant evidence in the writings of his From Confucius to the rise of the Khin dynasty. grandson Zze-sze, of Mencius, and of Hsün Khing. One of the acknowledged distinctions of Mencius is his acquaintance with the odes, his quotations from which are very numerous; and Hsün Khing survived the extinction of the Kâu dynasty, and lived on into the times of Khin.
2. The Shih shared in the calamity which all the other classical works, excepting the Yî, suffered, when the tyrant of Khin issued his edict for their destruction. But I have shown, in the Introduction to the Shû, p. 7, that that edict was in force for less than a quarter of a century. The odes were all, or very nearly all[1], recovered; The Shih was all recovered after the fires of Khin. and the reason assigned for this is, that their preservation depended on the memory of scholars more than on their inscription on tablets of bamboo and on silk.
3. Three different texts of the Shih made their appearance early in the Han dynasty, known as the Shih of Lû, of Khî, and of Han; that is, the Book of Three different texts. Poetry was recovered from three different quarters. Liû Hin's Catalogue of the Books in the Imperial Library of Han (B.C. 6 to 1) commences, on the Shih King, with a collection of the three texts, in twenty-eight chapters.
↑All, in fact, unless we except the six pieces of Part II, of which we have only the titles. It is contended by Kû Hsî and others that the text of these had been lost before the time of Confucius. It may have been lost, however, after the sage's death; see note on p. 283.
