The Liji as it survives took shape during the Han dynasty, compiled and edited from older ritual materials, some of which likely predate Confucius himself, into the form scholars generally credit to Dai Sheng in the first century BCE, whose recension of forty nine chapters became the version transmitted and studied ever after, distinct from a larger, differently organized recension attributed to his relative Dai De that survives only partially. Because it is explicitly a compilation of earlier material rather than a text with one author or one moment of composition, questions of dating apply chapter by chapter rather than to the work as a whole, and different sections are understood to reflect different periods of pre-Han and early Han ritual thought and practice brought together under one heading.
Its place in the Confucian tradition sits between the earlier grouping of Five Classics, texts Confucius himself was traditionally said to have edited or transmitted, the Classic of Poetry, History, Changes and the Spring and Autumn Annals alongside the Liji, and the later Four Books grouping that became the actual basis of imperial civil service examinations from the Song dynasty forward, drawing the Analects, Mencius, and the Liji's own Da Xue and Zhong Yong chapters together into a more compact core curriculum. The Liji itself remained canonical throughout that later shift, so the text functions doubly: read whole, as one of the original Five Classics, and read in fragments, as the unacknowledged source of two of the Four Books that eventually eclipsed it in everyday educational use.