The Five Confucian Classics, by Michael Nylan Yale University Press $395
From 136 BC to 1905, all educated Chinese studied the Five Classics of the 'Confucian' canon - the Odes, the Documents, the Rites, the Changes and the Spring And Autumn Annals. These formed at least part of the curriculum studied by prospective entrants to the imperial bureaucracy.
The same set texts had an equally important influence on the thought and politics of Korea, Japan and Vietnam. The books are largely devoted to stories of rulers, good and bad, and their advisers, outspoken or fawning, and they were studied to examine the principles of good governance. Now they are almost entirely forgotten, above all in China. 'To ignore, disdain, or misinterpret those same Classics is to squander their riches,' argues Michael Nylan in a new and brilliant revisionist study.
Nylan, who holds the Caroline H Robbins Chair of History at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, explains that most of the texts had little to do with Confucius.
The texts had been evolving in oral or written form for centuries before being designated as 'Confucian', and therefore they encompass vastly differing ideas. 'The stable entity that later scholars called Confucianism has never really existed,' he writes.
Further, the historical Confucius did not write or edit the texts as he was later claimed to have done by those hoping to become latter-day sages. The talk of 'neo-Confucianist' revival in China or elsewhere is therefore somewhat confusing because it is not clear what it refers to.
