Foreword to "The Complete Works of Han Fei Tzŭ with Collected Commentaries"

The Works of Han Fei Tzŭin the remote past had Yin Chi-chang'sCommentary as mentioned in theRecords of Arts and Letters in theHistory of T`ang. The number of the books was not recorded most probably because theCommentary has been lost long before. During the Yüan Dynasty (a.d. 1279-1367) Ho Huan said that Li Tsan's Commentary had been in existence. Yet Li Tsan's life and work can no longer be traced. The edition which appeared during the Ch`ien-tao period (a.d. 1165-1173) of the Sung Dynasty (a.d. 960-1279) bears no name of the editor. Nobody has as yet disclosed the anonymity. All the quotations and citations from Han Fei Tzŭ's Works as found in theT`ai-p`ing Imperial Library, theLiterary Works on Facts and Varieties, andClassical Selections for Beginners, coincide with the text of the Ch`ien-tao edition. If so, the anonym must have lived before the Sung Dynasty.

As regards these early commentaries, they do not completely cover the whole works of the author, and, moreover, contain mistakes and errors. Nevertheless, these pioneering efforts have proved exceedingly helpful to scholars of recent times. Accordingly, I have juxtaposed the various commentaries and from place to place interposed my own viewpoints among them. In consequence, I have compiled the present work,The Complete Works of Han Fei Tzŭwith Collected Commentaries, in which the author's text is largely based on the Ch`ien-tao edition whose errors are corrected and hiatuses are supplied in accordance with the contents of other editions.

Wang Hsien-shen.

Changsha,

First Winter Month, 1st Year of Kuang-hsü (November, 1895).