8 THE TEXTS OF TAOISM. CH. II. the text of Lao I have spoken, was an uncle of the emperor Wan. To the emperor K'mg (B.C. 156-143), the son of Wan, there is attributed the designation of Lao's treatise as a A" ing, a work of standard authority. At the beginning of his reign, we are told, some one was com- mending to him four works, among which were those of Lao-jze and .fifwang-jze. Deeming that the work of Hwang-jze and Lao-jze was of a deeper character than the others, he ordered that it should be called a A"ing, estab- lished a board for the study of Taoism, and issued an edict that the book should be learned and recited at court, and throughout the country 1 . Thenceforth it was so styled. We find Hwang-fu Mi (A.D. 215-282) referring to it as the Tao Teh .fifing. The second place in the Sui catalogue is given to the text and commentary of Wang Pi or Wang Fu-sze, an The work of extraordinary scholar who died in A. D. 249, Wang Pi. a t the early age of twenty-four. This work has always been much prized. It was its text which Lu Teh-ming used in his ' Explanation of the Terms and Phrases of the Classics,' in the seventh century. Among the editions of it which I possess is that printed in 1794 with the imperial moveable metal types. I need not speak of editions or commentaries subsequent to Wang Pi's. They soon begin to be many, and are only not so numerous as those of the Confucian Classics. . All the editions of the book are divided into two Divisions into parts, the former called Tao, and the latter parts, chapters; Xeh. meaning the Qualities or Characteristics and number of , . , characters in the of the Tao, but this distinction of subjects is by no means uniformly adhered to. I referred already to the division of the whole into eighty- one short chapters (37+44), which is by common tradition attributed to Ho-shang Kung, or 'The old man of the Ho-side.' Another very early commentator, called Yen 3un or Yen ^Tiin-phing, made a division into seventy-two chapters (404-32), under the influence, no doubt, of some
See 3&o Hung's Wings or Helps, ch. v, p. ir
