Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FOUR BOOKS. INTRODUCTION. These are sometimes called the Four Books of the Four Philosophers. They comprise: ist, the Lun Yu, or Analects, chiefly occupied with the sayings of Confucius; 2d, the Tai Hok, (or Tai He5k) the Great Learning, now commonly attributed to Tsang Sin, a disciple of the sage; 3d, the Chung Yung, or Doctrine of the Mean, ascribed to Kung Keih, the grandson of Confucius; 4th, the works of Mencius. But all these disciples of Confucius delight to honor their master, and credit him largely with the sayings which they have recorded. c A peculiarity of all these teachers is, that thy did not generally lay claim to the honor of originality in the lessons they gave: they profess rather that what they taught were the doctrines of their wise princes and divine emperors of the primitive ages; they enforce their counsels by citing the examples of wisdom and virtue of the earl)- times. Mencius, as the reader will see at the close of his book, tells from whom his doctrines were derived, and through how long a term of years they had descended till they came to him. Confucius, Mencius, and perhaps some of their disciples, were peripatetic philosophers. That system of lectures, or traveling teachers, has been, in some respects, adopted in our country during recent years. Throughout China, at the present time, there are professional readers, who go about from place to place; and wherever an audience can be gathered, they read or chant portions of the ancient histories or of the odes. They are paid by voluntary contributions. Our selections from the Four Books, as stated in the Preface, are from Dr. Legge's translation; and in transferring them we have followed his copy; the rendering, the italics, and the pointing are his. The italics generally, but not quit...