Abstract
It is generally held that Chu Hsi was the originator of the doubt on the authenticity of the "ancient script"portion of the Book of Docume-nts. How-ever, this claim was entrenched as truth as a result of the repetition of an error made by Wu Ch'eng(1249-I333).Wu misinterpreted Chu Hsi's state-ments on the "ancient script" portion out of context and read his own suspi-cion into Chu's sentences. In this paper,l am going to prove that even though Chu did sense some stylistic problems of the Book of Documents as a text,he felt the "modern script" was difficult to read while the "ancient script" was rather easy to follow, but he did not thereby question the authenticity of the "ancient script" portion. Moreover,his uncertainty regarding the Book of Documents was not confined to the "ancient script" portion and was in factexpressed as a concern more for the "modern script" than for the "ancient script"portion because of the particular difficulty of the language used in the "modern script" portion. For this reason,he emphasized the value of the "ancient script" portion and counselled his students to focus on passages with "clear meaning"and to "hold" them "closely in one's self for experien-tial savouring". The two terms,"smooth and easy"(p'ing-i) and "difficult and harsh" (chien-se),are totally irrelevant to forgery detection. Furthermore,l will expound it was impossible for Chu Hsi to doubt the authenticity of theancient script texts under the discourse of Sung studies on the Book of Docu-ments. Chu Hsi's fellow scholars and disciples did not take his perplexity about the stylistic problems to be an indication of Chu Hsi as a doubter ofthe "ancient script"portion of the Book of Documents.