Book of Rites

A collection of 49 essays on the theory and practice of ritual, ranging from mourning protocol and court ceremony to essays of independent philosophical weight, most famously the Daxue and Zhongyong, later extracted and elevated as two of the Four Books. Compiled in the early Western Han from a larger pool of Warring States ritual writings by the scholar Dai Sheng, whose redaction is accordingly known as the Xiaodai Liji ('Liji of the Younger Dai') to distinguish it from the separate, longer Da Dai Liji compiled by his uncle Dai De, it became one of the Five Classics and the primary source for how Confucians justified ritual as a psychologically and politically necessary technology rather than mere convention, extending the concerns of the Analects into systematic doctrine.