Four Confucian classics

Four Confucian classics: University, Doctrine of the Mean, Analects of Confucius and Mencius.

The four books and five classics refer to the four books and five classics collectively. The naming of the Four Books began in the Song Dynasty, and the naming of the Five Classics began in Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty.

The Four Books and Five Classics occupy a very important position in many literary works of China traditional culture, and they are the core classics of Confucian scholars' research in past dynasties. The Four Books and Five Classics recorded in detail the political, military, diplomatic, cultural and other historical materials in China's early ideological and cultural development history, as well as the important thoughts of thinkers such as Confucius and Mencius.

The four books refer to the university, the golden mean, the Analects of Confucius and Mencius. The Five Classics refer to The Book of Songs, Shangshu, Book of Rites, Zhouyi and Chunqiu. Spring and Autumn Annals are usually published together with Zuo Zhuan, Gong Yang Zhuan and Gu Liang Zhuan, which explain Spring and Autumn Annals, because their words are too brief.

In July, 2008, Tsinghua University collected a number of bamboo slips of the Warring States Period, which were identified by experts as ancient books, including many classic and historical documents.

Among the bamboo slips published in Tsinghua this time, three biographies of Fu Shuo attract people's attention, and their contents are completely different from the pseudo-ancient prose Shangshu which appeared in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, which proves once again that the pseudo-ancient prose Shangshu handed down from generation to generation was forged by later generations. Besides, Zhou Li was actually written between the Han Dynasty.

Da Xue was originally an article in the Book of Rites, which had never been published separately before the Southern Song Dynasty. It is said that it was written by Zeng Shen, a disciple of Confucius (505-434 BC). From the Tang Dynasty, Han Yu and Li Ao praised The Great Learning (and The Doctrine of the Mean) to maintain orthodoxy, to the Northern Song Dynasty, Cheng Er praised and publicized it in various ways, and even called it "the University, Confucius' suicide note, the door to learning morality".

In the Southern Song Dynasty, Zhu inherited Cheng Zhu's thoughts, and also took Daxue out of The Book of Rites, which became one of Zhu's four books when he wrote The Analects of Confucius, Mencius and The Doctrine of the Mean.

Zhu and Cheng Yi, another famous scholar in Song Dynasty, believed that Da Xue was a suicide note left by Confucius and his disciples, and an introductory reading of Confucianism. Therefore, Zhu listed it as the first of the "four books".