Book of Songs · Book of Rites · Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon

Author: Beijing Siha Children's Classic Reading Education Center
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-09-01
Features: As Chinese people, how many have read the Four Books and Five Classics? As Americans, how many can recite the Declaration of Independence? Even for a university student majoring in Chinese, how many can memorize the Analects and the Great Learning? And for university students, both Chinese and foreign, majoring in English, how many can recite the works of Shakespeare and Aristotle? Yet all of this can be achieved by a child of about ten years old, and as a result, they become increasingly knowledgeable, kind, intelligent, optimistic, and broad-minded. Do you believe it? The Book of Songs is the first of the Six Classics and the oldest extant collection of poetry. It contains 305 poems from the early Zhou Dynasty (11th century BC) to the mid-Spring and Autumn period (6th century BC), and only a small portion is selected here. The Book of Rites includes five selected chapters. Among them, the Rituals of the Great Unity discusses the ideal of "the great way is for all under heaven to be public" and the utopian vision of "no doors locked at night," as well as the era of "the great way is hidden, and the world becomes a family," with its emphasis on ritual systems and the well-off society. The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, divided into the Basic Questions and the Spiritual Pivot, advocates "the superior physician treats before illness," prioritizing prevention.