section_path: Terminology/Five Classics and the Confucian vision
section_name: Five Classics and the Confucian vision
paragraph_text: Five Classics and the Confucian vision
  
  Traditionally, Confucius was thought to be the author or editor of the Five Classics which were the basic texts of Confucianism, all edited into their received versions around 500 years later by Imperial Librarian Liu Xin. The scholar Yao Xinzhong allows that there are good reasons to believe that Confucian classics took shape in the hands of Confucius, but that "nothing can be taken for granted in the matter of the early versions of the classics". Yao suggests that most modern scholars hold the "pragmatic" view that Confucius and his followers did not intend to create a system of classics, but nonetheless "contributed to their formation".
  
  The scholar Tu Weiming explains these classics as embodying "five visions" which underlie the development of Confucianism: