Note 198 — XXXII. HSIANG-JU’S MISFORTUNES.

In the Book of Rites (I. Pt. i. v. 10), which dates, in its present form, only from the first century B.C., occurs this passage, “With the slayer of his father, a man may not live under the same heaven;” and in the Family Sayings (Bk. X. ab init.), a work which professes, though on quite insufficient authority, to record a number of the conversations and apophthegms of Confucius not given in the Lun-yü, or Confucian Gospels, we find the following course laid down for a man whose father has been murdered:—“He must sleep upon a grass mat, with his shield for his pillow; he must decline to take office; he must not live under the same heaven (with the murderer). When he meets him in the court or in the market-place, he must not return for a weapon, but engage him there and then;” being always careful, as the commentator observes, to carry a weapon about with him. Sir John Davis and Dr. Legge agree in stigmatizing this as “one of the objectionable principles of Confucius.” It must, however, be admitted that (1) a patched-up work which appeared as we have it now from two to three centuries after Confucius’s death, and (2) a confessedly apocryphal work such as the Family Sayings, are hardly sufficient grounds for affixing to the fair fame of China’s great Sage the positive inculcation of a dangerous principle of blood-vengeance like that I have just quoted. return to text