Book of Documents - Textual History

Textual History

Later tradition has ascribed the compilation of the Book of Documents to Confucius (551–479 BC), but its early history is obscure. Beginning with Confucius, writers increasingly drew on the work to illustrate general principles, though it seems that several different versions were in use. Six citations of unnamed "Shu" appear in the Analects, and increasing numbers of citations, some with titles, appear in 4th century BC works such as the Mencius, Mozi and Commentary of Zuo. These authors favoured documents relating to the Xia dynasty and pre-dynastic emperors Yao and Shun, chapters now believed to have been written during the Spring and Autumn 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 world-view. Fewer than half the passages quoted by these authors are present in the received text.

Many copies of the work were destroyed in the Burning of Books during the Qin dynasty. Fú Shēng (zh:伏生) 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. His version was known as the "New Text" (今文 jīn wén lit. "modern script") because it was written in the clerical script. It originally consisted of 29 chapters, but the "Great Speech" chapter was lost shortly afterwards and replaced by a new version. The remaining 28 chapters were later expanded to 33 when Du Lin divided some chapters during the 1st century.

Another version was said to have been recovered from a wall of the home of Confucius in 186 BC by his descendent Kǒng Ānguó (孔安國). This version was written in the pre-Qin seal script, and known as the "Old Text" (古文 gǔ wén lit. "ancient script"). It contained some 16 additional chapters and was part of the Old Text Classics later championed by the scholar Liu Xin at the beginning of 1st century AD. A list of 100 chapter titles was also in circulation, many mentioned in the Records of the Grand Historian, but without quoting the text of the other chapters.

The work was designated one of the Five Classics when Confucian works made official by Emperor Wu of Han, and Jing ("classic") was added to its name. The term Shangshu ("esteemed documents") was also used in the Eastern Han. Most Han dynasty scholars ignored the Old Text, and it disappeared by the end of the dynasty.

A version of the Old Text was allegedly rediscovered by the scholar Méi Zé (zh:梅賾) during the 4th century, and presented to the imperial court of the Eastern Jin. His version consisted of the 33 chapters of the New Text with an additional 25 chapters, with a preface and commentary purportedly written by Kong Anguo. The oldest extant copy of the text, included in the Kaicheng Stone Classics (833–837), contains all of these chapters.

Since the Song Dynasty, starting from Wú Yù (吳棫), many doubts had been expressed concerning the provenance of the allegedly rediscovered Old Text chapters of the book. In the 16th century, Méi Zhuó (梅鷟) published a detailed argument that these chapters, as well as the preface and commentary, were forged in the 3rd century AD. 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 Ruoju's unpublished but widely distributed manuscript entitled Evidential analysis of the Old Text Documents convinced most scholars that the rediscovered Old Text chapters were forged in the 3rd or 4th centuries.

New light has been shed on the Documents by the recovery between 1993 and 2008 of caches of 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 the New Text chapter "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 are versions of the Old Text chapters "Common Possession of Pure Virtue" and "Charge to Yue", confirming that the "rediscovered" versions are forgeries.