Five Classics

Although the term “Five Classics” (The Odes; Documents; the three Rites classics, counted as one; the Annals, and the Changes) was probably coined in Western Han, for much of Chinese history the Five Classics corpus has been the common cultural coin of the realm, familiar to all educated people, regardless of their religious creeds or ethical persuasions. Although parts of the Five Classics have claimed Confucius, as author, editor, or teacher, others may not have derived from self-identified “followers of Confucius,” of which there were very few in Antiquity. Given the importance of the Five Classics as repositories of ethical and political teachings, numerous debates over the “correct” graphs and meanings assigned to passages in the Five Classics have continued unabated from Western Han times down to today, in China, among the Chinese diaspora, and abroad, perhaps the most famous being the Qing-era “New Text/Old Text” debates. Only recently have Euro-American scholars, in company with some of their East Asian counterparts, begun to acknowledge at least two “general shifts in the textual landscape,” the first of which took place during Song, spurred, perhaps, by the Song ancient prose movement, and the second around the turn of the 20th century, when leading scholars and political reformers began to debate the role of the Five Classics in the education of the wenren文人 (men and women of letters) and the general populace, a debate that is still raging in some quarters, given the Chinese Communist Party’s belated flirtation with Confucian ethics. A few modern scholars, in addition, would emphasize the conceptual ruptures that also accompanied the changeovers from seal script to clerical script, and from regular script to simplified. What has proved equally disruptive in recent years is the insistence by some Chinese authorities that unprovenanced materials bought on the market in Hong Kong or Japan be accorded the same “weight” as scientifically excavated manuscripts or texts transmitted via the received literary tradition. Past experience suggests that patient accumulation and sifting of the evidence is preferable to overly hasty judgements about the reliability of such manuscripts.