Book of Documents


The Book of Documents 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. This group of texts were referred to as "Modern Texts", 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", 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 study, called the Ouyang Shangshu. 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 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.

Textual history

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.

Early references

According to a later tradition, the Book of Documents was compiled by Confucius 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.

Han dynasty: Modern and Old Scripts

Many copies of the work were destroyed in the Burning of Books during the Qin dynasty.
Fu Sheng reconstructed part of the work from hidden copies in the late 3rd to early 2nd century BC, at the start of the succeeding Han dynasty. The texts that he transmitted were known as the "Modern Script" because it was written in the clerical script.
It originally consisted of 29 chapters, but the "Great Speech" 太誓 chapter was lost shortly afterwards and replaced by a new version. The remaining 28 chapters were later expanded into 30 when Ouyang Gao divided the "Pangeng" chapter into three sections.
During the reign of Emperor Wu, renovations of the home of Confucius are said to have uncovered several manuscripts hidden within a wall, including a longer version of the Documents.
These texts were referred to as "Old Script" because they were written in the pre-Qin seal script.
They were transcribed into clerical script and interpreted by Confucius' descendant Kong Anguo.
Han dynasty sources give contradictory accounts of the nature of this find. According to the commonly repeated account of the Book of Han, the "Old Script" texts included the chapters preserved by Fu Sheng, another version of the "Great Speech" chapter and some 16 additional ones.
It is unclear what happened to these manuscripts. According to the Book of Han, Liu Xiang collated the Old Script version against the three main "Modern Script" traditions, creating a version of the Documents that included both groups. This was championed by his son Liu Xin,
who requested in a letter to Emperor Ai the establishment of a boshi position for its study. But this did not happen. Most likely, this edition put together by the imperial librarians was lost in the chaos that ended the Western Han dynasty, and the later movement of the capital and imperial library.
A list of 100 chapter titles was also in circulation; many are mentioned in the Records of the Grand Historian, but without quoting the text of the other chapters.
The shu were designated one of the Five Classics when Confucian works made official by Emperor Wu of Han, and was added to its name.
The term 'venerated documents' was also used in the Eastern Han.
The Xiping Stone Classics, set up outside the imperial academy in 175–183 but since destroyed, included a Modern Script version of the Documents.
Most Han dynasty scholars ignored the Old Script version, and it disappeared by the end of the dynasty.

Claimed recovery of Old Script texts

A version of the Documents that included the "Old Script" texts was allegedly rediscovered by the scholar Mei Ze during the 4th century, and presented to the imperial court of the Eastern Jin.
His version consisted of the 31 modern script texts in 33 chapters, and 18 additional old script texts in 25 chapters, with a preface and commentary purportedly written by Kong Anguo. This was presented as Guwen Shangshu 古文尚書, and was widely accepted. It was the basis of the published in 653 and made the official interpretation of the Documents by imperial decree. The oldest extant copy of the text, included in the Kaicheng Stone Classics, contains all of these chapters.
Since the Song dynasty, starting from Wu Yu, many doubts had been expressed concerning the provenance of the allegedly rediscovered "Old Script" texts in Mei Ze's edition. In the 16th century, Mei Zhuo published a detailed argument that these chapters, as well as the preface and commentary, were forged in the 3rd century AD using material from other historical sources such as the Zuo Commentary and the Records of the Grand Historian. Mei identified the sources from which the forger had cut and pasted text, and even suggested Huangfu Mi as a probable culprit. In the 17th century, Yan Ruoqu's unpublished but widely distributed manuscript entitled Evidential analysis of the Old Script Documents convinced most scholars that the rediscovered Old Script texts were fabricated in the 3rd or 4th centuries.

Modern discoveries

New light has been shed on the Book of Documents by the recovery between 1993 and 2008 of caches of texts written on bamboo slips from tombs of the state of Chu in Jingmen, Hubei. These texts are believed to date from the late Warring States period, around 300 BC, and thus predate the burning of the books during the Qin dynasty. The Guodian Chu Slips and the Shanghai Museum corpus include quotations of previously unknown passages of the work. The Tsinghua Bamboo Slips includes a version of the transmitted text "Golden Coffer", with minor textual differences, as well as several documents in the same style that are not included in the received text. The collection also includes two documents that the editors considered to be versions of the Old Script texts "Common Possession of Pure Virtue" and "Command to Fu Yue". Other authors have challenged these straightforward identifications.

Contents

In the orthodox arrangement, the work consists of 58 chapters, each with a brief preface traditionally attributed to Confucius, and also includes a preface and commentary, both purportedly by Kong Anguo.
An alternative organization, first used by Wu Cheng, includes only the Modern Script chapters, with the chapter prefaces collected together, but omitting the Kong preface and commentary.
In addition, several chapters are divided into two or three parts in the orthodox form.

Nature of the chapters

With the exception of a few chapters of late date, the chapters are represented as records of formal speeches by kings or other important figures.
Most of these speeches are of one of five types, indicated by their titles:
  • Consultations between the king and his ministers,
  • Instructions to the king from his ministers,
  • Announcements by the king to his people,
  • Declarations by a ruler on the occasion of a battle, and
  • Commands by the king to a specific vassal.
Classical Chinese tradition lists six types of Shu, beginning with dian 典, Canons.
According to Su Shi, it is possible to single out Eight Announcements of the early Zhou, directed to the Shang people. Their titles only partially correspond to the modern chapters marked as gao.
As pointed out by Chen Mengjia, announcements and commands are similar, but differ in that commands usually include granting of valuable objects, land or servants to their recipients.
Guo Changbao 过常宝 claims that the graph for announcement, known since the Oracle bone script, also appears on two bronze vessels, as well as in the "six genres" 六辞 of the Zhou li
In many cases a speech is introduced with the phrase , which also appears on commemorative bronze inscriptions from the Western Zhou period, but not in other received texts.
Scholars interpret this as meaning that the original documents were prepared scripts of speeches, to be read out by an official on behalf of the king.