CONFUCIAN CLASSICS - ZHANG, Da, and others.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Wujing tu ("Illustrations of the Five Classics"). First edition of this visual and textual guide to the Five Confucian Classics - one of the world's oldest and most enduring textual canons - through the lenses of philosophy, geography, and science. We have traced a single copy at Kyoto University, with none traced at auction.Until the early 20th century, the Five Confucian Classics - the Book of Changes (Yijing), Book of Documents (Shujing), Book of Odes (Shijing), Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu), and Book of Rites (Liji) - were the cornerstone of Chinese understandings of politics, society, and the self. As some texts were long thought to have been written by Confucius himself, the canon formed the basis of all scholarly learning and the imperial examinations system from the second century BCE through to 1905. "Thus the more cultured members of society in premodern China, even those who had failed the examinations or had passed but never held office, enjoyed a familiarity with the Classics that afforded them a common store of knowledge. As successive governments throughout East Asia came under the cultural sway of the Chinese system, the Classics came to influence thought and politics in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, so that the collection as a whole once occupied in East Asia a position roughly analogous to that of the Bible in the West" (Nylan, pp. 1-2).The opacity and sophistication of much of this textual canon spawned a commentarial genre called "tu", in which pictures

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