From “Teach by Word of Mouth” to “Written on Bamboo and Silk”

Confucian classics are based on the “Six Classics”. The emergence and formation of these classics has gone through a long historical process. The early classics were basically assembled and popularized orally. In the Western Han Dynasty, there was an overall writing transformation, from “teach by word of mouth” to “written on bamboo and silk”, which was a great change in the history of Confucian classics. The emergence of writing has abstracted the spoken language and resulted in promotion and deformation, which goes far beyond the original meaning in terms of complexity of understanding. Because of de contextualization, writing brings more possibilities and ambiguities for subsequent understanding, and also opens up unlimited space for interpretation. For spoken language, writing not only records the specific content, but also expands the history of memory, making the fragmented and incoherent memory become a narrative unity, and a limited specificity is integrated into the universal world relations. The evolution from oral tradition to recorded texts and then to systematic texts has laid the foundation for the hermeneutic framework between writing and reading. In this formal transformation, the classical texts that have been gathered into books become a collection and distribution center for the interactive development of ideas, and an important source for people to observe themselves and draw ideas from historical experiences.