Five Classics

The Book of Changes is the divination manual and cosmology of the sixty-four hexagrams. The Book of Documents, or Shangshu, collects speeches, harangues and pronouncements attributed to rulers and ministers from the legendary sage kings down through the Zhou; its genuine chapters contain some of the oldest sustained Chinese prose in existence, and they are famously hard to read. The Book of Songs, also called the Odes, holds 305 poems, folk songs about courtship, harvest and grievance alongside court hymns and dynastic praise, and was the shared literary currency of the Zhou elite, quoted in diplomacy to make points obliquely.

The Book of Rites, or Liji, is a Han compilation of material on ceremony, mourning, education and conduct, uneven in date and origin, and important later because two of its chapters were extracted to become the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean. The Spring and Autumn Annals is a bare chronicle of the state of Lu from 722 to 481 BCE, so terse it is almost unreadable alone; tradition held that Confucius edited it and encoded moral verdicts in his choice of words, and it is transmitted with commentaries, above all the Zuozhuan, which supply the narrative the chronicle omits.

A sixth text, the Classic of Music, appears in early lists and then disappears. Whether it was destroyed under the Qin, or never existed as a separate book, or survives in altered form as the Record of Music chapter of the Liji, cannot be settled from the evidence available.

Confucius is traditionally said to have edited all of them. The material is largely older than he is, and the editing claim is a later attribution rather than a documented fact.

In 213 BCE, on the advice of his chancellor Li Si, the First Emperor of Qin ordered the destruction of historical records of the conquered states and of privately held copies of the Songs, the Documents and the writings of the philosophers. Works on medicine, divination and agriculture were exempt, which is why the Book of Changes came through unharmed. The scale of the burning has been debated, since a copy of everything was retained in the imperial library, but that library burned in the fighting at the end of the dynasty, and the effect on transmission was real.

When the Han set about reconstructing the canon, texts came back by two routes, and the difference became a century-long controversy. New Text versions were dictated or written out from memory by aged scholars and recorded in the current Han script; they were the first in the field and their masters held the official academic chairs. Old Text versions were manuscripts said to have been recovered from concealment, most famously from a wall of Confucius's house in Qufu, written in the pre-Qin script. The two often differed in wording, in chapter count, and in interpretation, and the argument was never purely philological: chairs, salaries and the right to define orthodoxy hung on it.

The Book of Documents carries the sharpest result. An Old Text version in fifty-eight chapters was presented at court by Mei Ze in the early fourth century CE and became the standard. Doubts accumulated for centuries, and in the seventeenth century Yan Ruoqu, who died in 1704, demonstrated in a systematic evidential study that twenty-five of its chapters were a later fabrication, assembled from quotations in other works. His conclusion is now generally accepted, and those chapters are read as forgery.

Because texts drifted and factions edited them to suit their readings, the state periodically fixed the classics in stone. Between 175 and 183 CE, under Cai Yong's supervision, some 200,000 characters covering seven texts were carved on forty-six stelae at the imperial academy outside Luoyang, precisely so that no one could alter the wording to support a position. These Xiping Stone Classics survive only in fragments. The Kaicheng Stone Classics, completed in 837 under the Tang, cut twelve classics in over 650,000 characters on 114 double-sided tablets; they still stand, in the Stele Forest at Xi'an.

The canon expanded as commentaries were promoted to classic status. The three commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals were counted separately, the Rites split into three works, and the Analects, the Classic of Filial Piety, the Erya dictionary and the Mencius were added, giving the Thirteen Classics, the list settled by the Song and printed as a set thereafter.

Mastery of this material was the qualification for office. The imperial examinations tested the classics and their approved commentaries from the Sui and Tang onwards, and after 1313 the Four Books with Zhu Xi's readings took the leading place, with the Five Classics as the field a candidate specialised within. Passing meant reproducing the text and the orthodox interpretation of it under examination conditions, which produced an administrative class sharing one body of memorised reference and a set of assumptions carried in the phrasing itself. The system was abolished in 1905, and with it the direct link between these five books and a career, though the texts remain the backbone of the Chinese literary inheritance.