I'm here with Yu Wen, who's very much involved in this course, both as a

teaching fellow in the online course as well as the head teaching fellow
for our college course.
She's a student of modern Chinese history and we've actually asked her
here to talk about the classics.
The Five Classics.
And you'll see why in a minute when I ask her--
well why don't you tell our audience what is it that you study?
What is your research on?
My dissertation research is about the so-called Guoxue Chinese National
Learning Movement in 20th century China.
This movement happened at the moment when thousands of years of political
system based on classical and Confucian learning was over, or was
the end of the imperial order.
And a group of serious Confucian scholars and other like-minded
scholars started to think how this whole body of Confucian learning
tradition ought to provide important source to the government, to the
scholarship, and intellectual value to modern China.
And so the classics remain part of that from their perspective.
Exactly.
From their perspective, the classics are living traditions.
Let's look start to look at the classics.
But first, I think for many people who are watching this, they're not going
to really have the knowledge of how a Chinese book works.
Now books appear later in Chinese history, but why don't you begin by
explaining how we should--
how they should--
look at a Chinese book.
OK.

So for instance, there is a page the book and then how should we read?
You see columns and characters for each page which should move from the
right side to the left.
Within each column, we should start from the top to the bottom.
The bigger characters are the main text of the classics.
And then the smaller characters next to the bigger ones are commentary
text, or sometimes sub-commentaries on commentaries.
So it's the reader who punctuates it in this case, right?
Yes.
The owner, in this case, of this book, punctuated it.
Yeah.
You can show the traces of a reader trying to understand what the meaning
of the sentences are.
So then as we're going through, we have the American--
or the Western--
back of the book is the front.
And these pages are in fact sewn together.
There's actually one page.
It's one page and folded.
Why this arrangement?
This kind of formality has its historical origins from the use of the
bamboo strips or the wooden strips very early on.
For instance, this is one bamboo strip.
The characters are carved or written on the bamboo strip.
And then let's look at this page again, and you can tell that each page
all those lines.
So like a group of bamboo strips lined up and tied together.
And here we have some images of the silk scroll with written text.
So during Han dynasty paper was invented, and it allowed a much
cheaper distribution of written text.
And until printing was invented in the Song dynasty, and then we have new
technology in book binding, then replaced the paper scroll as the unit,
or media, for knowledge.
And this is printing block, you can tell.
You can see the lines, the columns, and the characters.
What people in Song dynasty would use.
If I look through all these Five Classics, every single one of them is
filled with commentary.
And there's more commentary than there is classic text.
Than the classic text.
Yeah.
And commentaries, in fact, are a very important vehicle in the Chinese
tradition for expressing ideas, for offering new philosophies by going
back, in fact, to the classics and revising them or reinterpreting them
in a new way.
But what are the Classics?
We begin with the Classic of Songs, or Shi Jing, or the Classic of Odes, the
different ways of translating them.
So actually it is anthology of the 305 songs, poems.
By and large, they are categorized in three parts.
Some of them are eulogies, or some of them are hymns.
The main body of those anthologies are actually the so-called Guofeng Airs
from the feudal states of Zhou dynasty.
Scholars have been generally believing that those airs, these Folk Songs from
the common people, they're collected from different feudal states, are a
very, very important medium from which the politics, that the society, or the
morality of the rule would be seen.
Sort of the notion of these spontaneous songs of the people, their
folk songs, shines a light on rule.
Yes.
And the second, Shangshu, we really translate it as the
Classics of the Documents.
The Shangshu is a collection of important records of the political
actions of the government of the sage kings So generally scholars believe
that studying this body of text will allow them to understand the deeper,
or general, political and moral principles underlying the rules of the
sage kings over the centuries.
And this is Liji, the Book of Rites.
It is a very broad collection of essays, generally believed as written
by Confucius and his followers, about self-cultivation, about proper
behaviors, and also about the right government.
And an important point I think we can make based on this book is that the
essays all together sort of tied the personal to the public.
The Book of Changes.

So I think it's a very interesting book.

It's very interesting, and it's still very much used by Chinese people today
in their daily life for many different reasons.
So first, we can see that this is book of images.
It contains 64 different this kind of images, which we
really call a hexagram.
So one hexagram contains stacked lines, some are broken,
and some are solid.

So scholars believe that the 64 hexagrams, of which each hexagram has

a different name, and then they actually came from eight trigrams.
Multiply eight trigrams and you've got 64.
Eight by eight.
So generally, scholars believe that each hexagram is created originally by
the sage kings, who have the ability to observe the natural world and
understand the deeper mechanism and the principle based on which the
cosmos change.
And then generally scholars also believe that this kind of vision of
the sage kings, therefore, are able to offer suggestions or explanations on
human affairs as well.
Many Chinese people still use it for fortune telling.

So how it works.
Well, that's complicated.
It's complicated.
But generally speaking, when we have questions, when we try to understand
our own situations, when we have troubles, when we want to see what are
the solutions that we can find, then people usually play some milfoil
stalks, and then play with them according to
certain divination method.
And then based on the appearance those milfoil stalks, and then you generate,
or you get, certain hexagrams.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
Then you look at those.
You look at those.
And you try to figure out how that's going to answer the question you bring
to the text.
How that will answer my question, because each line actually has
independent meanings.
Yeah, OK.
Good.
One of the things that's unusual about these hexagrams is that you actually
begin at the bottom and count up.
So you begin with the bottom line and interpret that, interpret the overall
hexagram and so on.
But there's one thing I want to add.
So apart from being a book of images, it also has a lot of words.
So another big part of the Book of Change, or Classic of Change, is the
so-called Xici Zhuan, is the appended verbalization, which has its own
significance in the whole Chinese intellectual history.
Because it explained or it philosophized how those hexagrams were
created by the sage kings and why the hexagrams could offer a link between
the natural world and human affairs.
And then so in this sense it offers really important vocabularies and
references to Chinese scholars to understand how the natural world works
and what is the role human agency plays in it.
And our final one, the Spring and Autumn Annals.
Chunqiu.
Ostensibly it is a historical record of the history of the State of Lu.
But it is not generally used as simply a historical book because people
generally believe that it was written by Confucius to pass, or to let people
know about, his judgment.
His judgement of political affairs.
The judgment of political affairs.
So all the scholars know that the point of studying this book isn't just
about learning about historical facts.
But they really want to understand what are the general political or
moral principles that Confucius had.
So the Five Classics with Yu Wen.