Four Books and Five Classics

Core texts of Confucianism

The Four Books and Five Classics are authoritative and important books associated with Confucianism, written before 300 BC. They are traditionally believed to have been either written, edited or commented by Confucius or one of his disciples. Starting in the Han dynasty, they became the core of the Chinese classics on which students were tested in the Imperial examination system.

The Four Books are Chinese classic texts illustrating the core value and belief systems in Confucianism. They were selected by intellectual Zhu Xi in the Song dynasty to serve as general introduction to Confucian thought, and they were, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, made the core of the official curriculum for the civil service examinations.

Traditionally, it was thought that Confucius himself had compiled or edited the texts of the Five Classics. The scholar Yao Xinzhong allows that there are good reasons to believe that Confucian classics took shape in the hands of Confucius, but that "nothing can be taken for granted in the matter of the early versions of the classics." From the time of the Western Han dynasty, Yao continues, most Confucian scholars believed that Confucius re collected and edited the prior works, thereby "fixing" the versions of the ancient writings which became the Classics. Confucian tradition believes that the Shijing collection was edited by Confucius from a collection of 3,000 pieces to its traditional form of 305 pieces. In the twentieth century, many Chinese scholars still held to this tradition. The New Confucian scholar, Xiong Shili (1885–1968), for instance, held that the Six Classics were the final versions "fixed up" by Confucius in his old age. Other scholars had and have different views. The Old Text School, for instance, relied on versions found in the Han dynasty which supposedly survived the Qin dynasty burning of the books but many of them held that these works had not been edited by Confucius but survived directly from the Zhou dynasty. For quite different reasons, mainly having to do with modern textual scholarship, a greater number of twentieth century scholars both in China and in other countries hold that Confucius had nothing to do with editing the classics, much less writing them. Yao Xinzhong reports that still other scholars hold the "pragmatic" view that the history of the Classics is a long one and that Confucius and his followers, although they did not intend to create a system of classics, "contributed to their formation." In any case, it is undisputed that for most of the last 2,000 years, Confucius was believed to have either written or edited these classics. The most important events in the textual career of these classics were the adoption of Confucianism as state orthodoxy in the Han dynasty, which led to their preservation, and the "renaissance" of Confucianism in the Song dynasty, which led to their being made the basis of Confucian orthodoxy in the imperial examination system in the following dynasties. The Neo Confucian sage Zhu Xi (1130–1200) fixed the texts of the Four Books and wrote commentaries whose new interpretations became accepted as being those of Confucius himself.

Under the reign of Emperor Wu of Han, the Five Classics and Four Books became the basis of the Imperial examination system.