| Replies in Self-Defense:...: |
I composed the Zheng-wu for the purpose of showing to the incumbents of the prefectures and the district magistrates, what is of paramount importance in the administration, and with a view to induce all people to reform and gratefully acknowledge the kindness of the government. The nine chapters of the Lun-heng on Inventions and the three chapters on Exaggerations are intended to impress upon people that they must strive for truthfulness, and the chapters on Death and Ghosts shall induce them to give their dead a simple burial.
Confucius avoided all pomp, but people were very extravagant in burying the dead and decorating the coffin. Liu Tse Cheng was in favour of simple funerals, but people would put costly things into the graves, and spare no money. Kuang Wu Ti regarded straw carriages and reed horses as sufficiently good objects for the sacrificial worship of the dead. Why do the common books and traditions not mention this? The belief in the talk on death has defiled them.
Now I have written the essays on Death and on the False Reports about the Dead to show that the deceased have no consciousness, and cannot become ghosts, hoping that, as soon as my readers have grasped this, they will restrain the extravagance of the burials, and become more economical. Such would be the advantage derived from the Lun-heng. Provided that my words have this effect, what would it matter, if my work were a creation?
The writing of Tsang Hsieh is universally used to record things, the carriages of Hsi Chung for locomotion, the clothes of Po Yu as a protection against heat and cold, and the tiled houses of Chieh to keep off wind and rain. If, irrespective of their usefulness or obnoxiousness, such things be solely found fault with for being innovations, then men like Tsang Hsieh would have to be condemned, and the fifteen dynasties at the beginning of history all be blameworthy. Provided that a thing be useful, there is no harm, even if it should be an innovation, and if there be no harm, what can be amiss? |
