Book of Documents
尚書 / 書經 (Shangshu / Shujing)
Good rule is legible in the recorded speeches and edicts of the sage kings, so a ruler who wants to govern well should study exactly what Yao, Shun, Yu, and the Zhou founders said and did, not merely what later tradition says about them.
- the Mandate of Heaven as a condition on rulership
- speeches and edicts as the record of sage-kingship
- the New Text/Old Text authenticity problem
- foundational text of Chinese political rhetoric
A collection of speeches, edicts, and pronouncements attributed to rulers and ministers from the legendary Yao and Shun through the early Western Zhou, one of the Five Classics and the foundational text of Chinese political rhetoric. Its transmission is unusually tangled: the Qin book-burning destroyed most copies, the scholar Fu Sheng reconstructed 29 'New Text' chapters from memory early in the Han, and a longer 'Old Text' version that resurfaced in the 3rd-4th century AD was later proven by Qing philologists to be a forgery padded with genuine fragments and invented material. Despite this, its genuine core preserves the earliest Chinese political theory, including the claim that Heaven grants and withdraws its mandate to rule based on a ruler's virtue.
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