is possible that the difficulty would disappear, if the details of the discovery and the subsequent dealing with the tablets had come down to us complete.
Certainly, in the first century B.C. there were two copies of the Hsiâo King in the Imperial Library of Han. If those copies, catalogued by Liû Hin, were the actual text, presented by Yen Kăn, and a faithful transcript in the current Han characters of the ancient text discovered in the wall of Confucius' old lecture hall, we should be able to say that the evidence for the recovery of the Hsiâo, as Can we rely fully on the copies catalogued by Liû Hin? it had existed during the Kâu dynasty, was as satisfactory as we could desire; but there are some considerations that are in the way of our doing so.
According to the records of Sui, after the old text came into the possession of the court, and the differences between it and the text earlier recovered were observed, Liû Hsiang (B.C. 80–9), the father of Hin, was charged by the emperor (Khăng, B.C. 32–7) to compare the two. The result of his examination of them was that 'he removed from the modern text what was excessive and erroneous, and fixed the number of the chapters at eighteen.' It does not appear that previously there was any division of Kăn's copy into chapters. What Hsiang did in the case of the old text we are not told. A note by Yen Sze-kû of the Thang dynasty, appended to Hin's Catalogue, quotes from him that 'one chapter of the modern text was divided into two in the old, another into three, and that the old had one chapter which did not appear in the other.' This missing chapter, it is understood, was the one beginning, 'Inside the smaller doors leading to the inner apartments,' which I have appended, from the current old text, to my translation of the classic as published by Hsüan Zung; and yet the Sui account says that that chapter was in the Hsiâo of Kang-sun, one of the four early commentators on the modern text.
The copies catalogued by Hin were made after the examination and revision of the two texts by his father. There are suspicious resemblances between the style and method of the present classic and those of the original works of
