[2] More information of them are as follows: The Five Classics (五經; Wǔjīng) are five pre-Qin Chinese books that form part of the traditional Confucian canon.
Mencius, the leading Confucian scholar of the time, regarded the Spring and Autumn Annals as being equally important as the semi-legendary chronicles of earlier periods.
Authors and editors of later eras have also appropriated the terms "Book" and "Classic" and applied them ironically to compendia focused on patently low-brow subject matter.
Examples include the Classic of Whoring (Piaojing 嫖經) and Zhang Yingyu's A New Book for Foiling Swindles (Dupian Xinshu 杜騙新書, ca.
From the time of the Western Han dynasty, Yao continues, most Confucian scholars believed that Confucius re-collected and edited the prior works, thereby "fixing" the versions of the ancient writings which became the Classics.
For quite different reasons, mainly having to do with modern textual scholarship, a greater number of twentieth century scholars both in China and in other countries hold that Confucius had nothing to do with editing the classics, much less writing them.