SECTION IV.

INTEGRITY, AUTHORSHIP, AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE BOOKS INTO THE CANON

1. We have seen how the works of Mencius were catalogued by Liu Xin original: Lew Hin as consisting of "eleven books," while a century earlier, Sima Qian original: Sze-ma Ts'een referred to them as consisting of only "seven." This discrepancy has greatly puzzled Chinese scholars: was there ever truly a set of four additional books by Mencius that have since been lost?

2. Zhao Qi original: Chaou K'e states in his preface: "There are also four additional books, titled A Discussion of the Goodness of Human Nature, An Explanation of Terms, The Classic of Filial Piety, and The Practice of Government. But their writing lacks both breadth and depth. It is not like the style of the seven acknowledged books. One may judge that they are not really the work of Mencius, but were falsely attributed to him by some later imitator."¹ original: 又有外書四篇·性善辯, 文說, 孝經, 爲政, 其文不能宏深, 不與內篇相似, 似非孟子本眞·後世依放而託也· — There are also four outer books... their style is not grand or deep... they seem not to be Mencius's original truth. Since the four books in question are lost, and only a very few quotations attributed to Mencius (which are not found in the works we have) can be recovered from other ancient authors, our best course is to accept Zhao Qi’s conclusion. Sima Qian's specific mention of "Seven Books" provides important support for this. We can imagine that in the two centuries before the common era, those four books were written and published under Mencius's name. Liu Xin was simply doing his duty by including them in his catalogue, unless they were already widely recognized as fakes. Zhao Qi, who dedicated himself to studying our author and was satisfied from internal evidence that they were not his, also did his duty in rejecting them. There is no evidence that his decision was questioned by any scholar of the Han dynasty or the dynasties immediately following, a time when we may assume the books were still in existence.

The author of Supplemental Observations on the Four Books² writes on this subject: "'It would be better to have no books at all than to believe everything written in them'³—this is the rule for reading

¹ The original Chinese text provided in the footnote is translated in the body of paragraph 2 above.
² See Vol. I., prolegomena, p. 132.
³ Mencius, Book VII, Part II, Chapter iii.