The Five Classics are five pre-Qin Chinese books that form part of the traditional Confucian canon. Several of the texts were already prominent by the Warring States period. Mencius, the leading Confucian scholar of the time, regarded the Spring and Autumn Annals as being equally important as the semi-legendary chronicles of earlier periods. During the Western Han dynasty, which adopted Confucianism as its official ideology, these texts became part of the state-sponsored curriculum. It was during this period that the texts first began to be considered together as a set collection, and to be called collectively the "Five Classics". The Five Classics are: ;Classic of Poetry ;Book of Documents ;Book of Rites ;I Ching ;Spring and Autumn Annals The Classic of Music is sometimes considered the sixth classic but was lost in the Burning of the Books. Up to the Western Han, authors would typically list the Classics in the order Poems-Documents-Rituals-Changes-Spring and Autumn. However, from the Eastern Han the default order instead became Changes-Documents-Poems-Rituals-Spring and Autumn. Authors and editors of later eras have also appropriated the terms "Book" and "Classic" and applied them ironically to compendia focused on patently low-brow subject matter. Examples include the Classic of Whoring and Zhang Yingyu's A New Book for Foiling Swindles, which is known colloquially as The Book of Swindles or The Classic of Swindles.
Authorship of the Classics
Traditionally, it was thought that Confucius himself had compiled or edited the texts of the Five Classics. The scholar Yao Hsin-chung 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. In the twentieth century, many Chinese scholars still held to this tradition. The New Confucian scholar, Xiong Shili, 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 dynastyburning 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 Hsin-chung 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 fixed the texts of the Four Books and wrote commentaries whose new interpretations became accepted as being those of Confucius himself.
