Vol. VII, No. 6.} Elucidation of certain passages in I-tsing. 311 
[N.S.] 
intended to convey. The classical meaning of mén as ‘ school’ 
or ‘system’ can be illustrated by the following references :— 
(1) Speaking of the martial music composed by the famous 
Hy Yu, Confucius asked his disciples: 5 y= vis iin 
i FA ‘ what has it to do with my system?’ THE ANALECTS, 
Bk. xi, Chap. 14, 1. 
(2) In the prefatory paragraph of the HA je THE 
DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN, FL iat Khung mén means the 
‘ Confucian School,’ Legge, Classics (1893), Vol. I, p. 384. 
(3) ind | Ax mén jén, which would literally mean ‘the men 
of the gate, ’ is used for ‘the followers of the system,’ ‘the 
Sacto THE ANALECTS, Bk. iv, ch. 15, 2; vii, 28; ix, 
th: 21,10; xiv, 2; xix, 3. en jén suggests the history of the 
meaning of mén as ‘system,’ as the disciples went to the mas- 
ter’s ‘gate,’ every day, they became ‘the men of the gate’ ; 
and from different ‘ gate-men’ their different MN mén’s, ‘ sys- 
tems,’ would have been distinguished. 
The second character EZ su, interchanges with 2% so, 
‘to search,’ ‘to study,’ inthe Classics. Chu, the celebrated 
commentator, writing on the Chapter xi, i, THE DOCTRINE OF 
THE MEAN, takes the character EA su to read and mean as “ 
so (according to Legge, Asi, but according to Giles, so'), 
study’ (vide Legge, Classics, 1897, Vol. I, p. 391, ”. 11). It 
is easy to see that the two words being alike in origin, form 
and sound, as in several well-known similar cases, interchanged 
with each other. The character, both in Ltsing’ s text and 
the classical passage referred to above, yields a perfectly 
sensible = Seto only when we adopt its reading as given by 
Chu, who, it must be remembered, is not a mean authority. 
Further justification in accepting EA su as denoting ‘ study,’ 
‘ research,’ is found in the author’s characteristic fondness for 
the classics, as no My borne out by references in his Records 
of the Buddhist Pract 
: Giles’s Dictionary, p. 1011, No. 10183. 
2 See also C. Goodric i's Dictionary, pp. 177, 178; and Williams’s 
Syllabic Dictionary, pp. 815 and 816, where so a4 is written as su 
and the meaning given is ‘ to search into.’ 
Zin 
