Classic of Poetry
The "Classic of Poetry" historically has a major place in the Four Books and Five Classics, the canonical works associated with Confucianism. Some pre-Qin dynasty texts, such as the "Analects" and a recently excavated manuscript from 300 BC entitled "Confucius' Discussion of the "Odes"", mention Confucius' involvement with the "Classic of Poetry" but Han dynasty historian Sima Qian's "Records of the Grand Historian" was the first work to directly attribute the work to Confucius. Subsequent Confucian tradition held that the "Shijing" collection was edited by Confucius from a larger 3,000-piece collection to its traditional 305-piece form. This claim is believed to reflect an early Chinese tendency to relate all of the Five Classics in some way or another to Confucius, who by the 1st century BC had become the model of sages and was believed to have maintained a cultural connection to the early Zhou dynasty. This view is now generally discredited, as the "Zuo zhuan" records that the "Classic of Poetry" already existed in a definitive form when Confucius was just a young child.