Book of Documents

The Book of Documents (Chinese: 書經; pinyin: Shūjīng; Wade–Giles: Shu King) or the Classic of History, is one of the Five Classics of ancient Chinese literature. It is a collection of rhetorical prose attributed to figures of ancient China, and served as the foundation of Chinese political philosophy for over two millennia.

The Book of Documents was the subject of one of China's oldest literary controversies, between proponents of different versions of the text. A version was preserved from Qin Shi Huang's burning of books and burying of scholars by scholar Fu Sheng, in 29 chapters (piān 篇). This group of texts were referred to as "Modern Texts" (or "Current Script"; jīnwén 今文), because they were written with the script in use at the beginning of the Western Han dynasty.

A longer version of the Documents was said to be discovered in the wall of Confucius's family estate in Qufu by his descendant Kong Anguo in the late 2nd century BC. The texts were referred to as "Old Texts" (gǔwén 古文), because they were written in the script that predated the standardization of Chinese script during the Qin. Compared to the Modern Texts, the "Old Texts" material had 16 more chapters. The Old Texts had been lost at the end of the Eastern Han dynasty, while the Modern Texts text enjoyed circulation, in particular in Ouyang Gao's [zh] study, called the Ouyang Shangshu (歐陽尚書). This was the basis of studies by Ma Rong and Zheng Xuan during the Eastern Han.

In 317 AD, Mei Ze presented to the Eastern Jin court a 58-chapter (59 if the preface is counted) Book of Documents as Kong Anguo's version of the text. This version was accepted, despite the doubts of a few scholars, and later was canonized as part of Kong Yingda's project. It was only in the 17th century that Qing dynasty scholar Yan Ruoqu proposed that the "Old Texts" were fabrications "reconstructed" in the 3rd or 4th centuries AD.

In the transmitted edition, texts are grouped into four sections representing different eras: the legendary reign of Yu the Great, and the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties. The Zhou section accounts for over half the text. Some of its modern-script chapters are among the earliest examples of Chinese prose, recording speeches from the early years of the Zhou dynasty in the late 11th century BC. Although the other three sections purport to record earlier material, most scholars believe that even the New Script chapters in these sections were composed later than those in the Zhou section, with chapters relating to the earliest periods being as recent as the 4th or 3rd centuries BC.

The history of the various versions of the Documents is particularly complex, and has been the subject of a long-running literary and philosophical controversy.

According to a later tradition, the Book of Documents was compiled by Confucius (551–479 BC) as a selection from a much larger group of documents, with some of the remainder being included in the Yi Zhou Shu. However, the early history of both texts is obscure. Beginning with Confucius, writers increasingly drew on the Documents to illustrate general principles, though it seems that several different versions were in use.

Six citations to unnamed chapters of the Documents appear in the Analects. While Confucius invoked the pre-dynastic emperors Yao and Shun, as well as figures from the Xia and Shang dynasties, he complained of the lack of documentation prior to the Zhou. The Documents were cited increasingly frequently in works through the 4th century BC, including in the Mencius, Mozi and Zuo Zhuan. These authors favoured documents relating to Yao, Shun and the Xia dynasty, chapters now believed to have been written in the Warring States period. The chapters currently believed to be the oldest—mostly relating to the early Zhou—were little used by Warring States authors, perhaps due to the difficulty of the archaic language or a less familiar worldview. Fewer than half the passages quoted by these authors are present in the received text. Authors such as Mencius and Xunzi, while quoting the Documents, refused to accept it as genuine in its entirety. Their attitude contrasts with the reverence later shown to the text during the Han dynasty, when its compilation was attributed to Confucius.