It has long been recognized that the establishment of the Office of Music (Yüeh fu) as one of the agencies of state in Han imperial government played an important role in the development of Chinese poetry and nurtured the growth of particular genres of literature; and the precedent that was set at this time was followed at later stages of China's literary development with highly important results. Less attention, however, has been paid to the work of the office in arranging musical performances; or to the circumstances in which the office was established and in which its activities were several times curtailed, prior to its eventual abolition. In addition historians have not always appreciated the connexion that may be traced between the rise and fall of this office and other changes which occurred in the intellectual history of Han China.

The Cherng shianqtext is included as section 25 of the present editions of the Shyun Tzyywhich are all based on the edition established by the Tarng commentator Yang Lianq. In his preface, which is dated A.D. 819, Yang Lianq notes that the editions at his disposal included the Cherng shianq as section eight.

Early forms of michiyuki‘travel sequences’ in works of Japanese literature are to be found in a few of the songs and poems in the eighth-century Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and Man'yōshū. They continued to be used in general literature and, through sung entertainments such as imayō, enkyoku, and kusemai, appeared also in various forms of drama. The best examples are to be found in the medieval military tales and in the puppet plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), where the treatment of the travel sequence reaches its peak by a combination of text, music, and movement. One of the most famous michiyuki texts, however, is this passage from the Taiheiki, a fourteenth-century war tale, which describes the journey from Kyōto , the imperial capital, to Kamakura , the seat of the military government in the eastern part of the country, made by a court noble in 1331 after he was arrested for being implicated in the emperor Go-Daigo's second plot to overthrow the Hōjō military rulers.

In 1962 I published some evidence based on Han and early post-Han transcriptions to show that Chinese still had a sibilant final in certain departing tone rhymes at that period. I can now add some still later examples which bring the date down to the beginning of the sixth century, at least in the south. As will be shown below, the transcription evidence is also supported by contemporaneous rhyming practice, which still allowed contacts between Middle Chinese -j' < -s and -t.

If one examines the vocabulary of almost any Mon-Khmer language, and turns to words with an initial labial semivowel—or those derived from roots with such an initial—one is immediately struck by the number of words with meanings of the order of ‘round, circular’, ‘to go round’, ‘to put round, coil, wrap round’, ‘enclosure’, ‘to turn round, return’, and the like. Thus, consulting three relatively modest lexica, we can cite from (modern) Mon in the Western branch of the family wèn, wèn wòk ‘ to be crooked, deformed’; ω⋯αη ‘compound, enclosure’; ω⋯αη ‘to shun, avoid’; ω⋯η ‘loop, bend; to be bent round, to go round’; wòt ‘to wring out’; wòa ‘whirlpool’; with tsh ‘all around’. The Eastern Mon-Khmer language Sre, spoken around Jiring (Di-linh) 100 miles north-east of Sàigòn, has wac ‘eddy’; wal bong ‘halo round sun or moon’; wang (waang) ‘pound for animals’; war ‘to coil round, wrap round’; waar ‘to bend back’; weet ‘to turn round’; wil ‘circle’; wöl ‘again; to turn’; wör ‘to stir’. In Northern Mon-Khmer, Palaung has υαη ‘compound’; υƏr ‘to stir’; υεh ‘to avoid, shun’; νeη to come back, go back’; υi? ‘to bend’; υir ‘again, to recur’; (υrƏr) ‘to avoid, shun’; υiƏt ‘to give back, return’. (The Palaung voiced fricative υ corresponds functionally in syllable-initial position to the semivowel in the other languages.)

This article is an attempt to establish a relationship between certain syntactical structures in standard Chinese and a context category. The structures are defined in formal terms without any commitment to a general theory of deep and surface structures; nor is the context category used in any way as a criterion to establish the form of the structures as such. It is put forward rather as a way of accounting for the function of the structures in a context of situation.

Despite the admonitions of responsible scholars, writers of books on Buddhism still tend to assume that a reasonably historical account of the life and personal teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha may be extracted from the earliest available canonical accounts. This quest of the historical Buddha began as a Western nineteenth-century interest, imitating both in its pre-suppositions and its methods of inquiry the parallel quest of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The general principle of operation is set forth succinctly by Hermann Oldenberg in his impressive work, Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, Berlin, 1881, 92:

‘Abstrahiren wir nun von den Traditionen der bezeichneten Kategorien, welche sämmtlich unhistorisch oder doch des unhistorischen Characters verdachtig sind, so behalten wir als festen Kern der Erzählungen von Buddha eine Reihe positiver Thatsaohen iibrig, die wir als einen zwar sehr bescheidenen, aber vollkommen gesicherten Besitz für die Geschichte in Anspruch nehmen dürfen’.