The Five Classics

五
經
wǔ
jīng
The Confucian Canon

Before there were Four Books, there were Five Classics. The Wǔjīng are the oldest stratum of the Ru canon — poetry, court documents, divination, ritual, and chronicle — material reaching back before Confucius, which tradition credits him with editing and transmitting rather than composing; only the Annals is held to be his own work. 述而不作 — “I transmit, I do not innovate.”

In 136 BCE Emperor Wu of Han established Erudites of the Five Classics (五經博士), and in 124 BCE the Imperial Academy to teach them — making these texts the official curriculum of the state. From then until the abolition of the civil-service examinations in 1905, mastery of the Five Classics was the measure of an educated person.

五 禮 記

Book of Rites

Lǐjì · 1st c. BCE

Ritual norms, social ethics, and political philosophy. Contains the Dàxué and Zhōngyōng.

What Each Classic Teaches

The earliest summary of the canon's division of labor appears in the “Tiānxià” chapter of the Zhuāngzǐ — and it counts six:

詩 The Poetry speaks of aims and intent (志)
書 The Documents speaks of events and government
禮 The Rites speaks of conduct
樂 The Music speaks of harmony — lost in antiquity
易 The Changes speaks of yin and yang
春秋 The Annals speaks of names and duties

The Fate of the Canon

The canon began as six. The Classic of Music (樂經 Yuèjīng) did not survive antiquity — by tradition it perished in the Qin burning of the books in 213 BCE — and the Six Classics of the pre-Qin Ru became the Five Classics of the Han.

From there the canon grew rather than shrank. Tang scholars counted nine classics by splitting the ritual and Annals traditions into their constituent texts; by the Song dynasty the list had settled at the Thirteen Classics (十三經), which absorbed the Analects, the Mencius, the Classic of Filial Piety, and the Ěryǎ dictionary.

Yet the Five Classics lost their place at the front of the curriculum. In the 12th century Zhu Xi reorganized Confucian education around the Four Books — shorter, more philosophical, centered on self-cultivation — and from 1313 the civil-service examinations followed him. The Five Classics remained the deeper stratum: what one read after the Four Books had done their work.

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