This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Most classics that survive a book burning survive by accident, a hidden copy, a scholar's memory, a wall cavity opened generations later. The Book of Documents survived by all of these routes at once, and that plural survival is exactly what makes it hard to trust evenly across its own chapters. When the Qin destroyed the Confucian classics, an elderly scholar named Fu Sheng is said to have reconstructed twenty-nine chapters from memory in the early Han, becoming the basis of what is called the modern text version. Centuries later a longer version, claiming older provenance, surfaced and was accepted for a long time as genuine.
It took the rigorous philological methods of Qing dynasty scholarship, comparing vocabulary, grammar and historical reference across the chapters with a precision earlier eras did not apply, to demonstrate that the longer version's additional chapters were composed later in deliberate imitation of archaic style, forgeries in the technical sense of claiming an authorship and date they did not have. The chapters recovered from Fu Sheng's memory, by contrast, are generally accepted as containing genuinely ancient material, however much an old man's memory may have shaped their exact wording.
The result is a single classic that scholars now read at two different levels of trust simultaneously, one set of chapters treated as a real if imperfect window onto early Chinese political thought and history, another read as evidence of how later readers imagined that antiquity should have sounded. Few classical texts anywhere wear the seams of their own transmission history so visibly.