On Sima Qian’s Argument that Kong Qiu Selected the Book of Songs

The idea that Kong Qiu deleted poems was initiated by Sima Qian. This opinion has been doubted by quite a few people since Tang Dynasty, but it is still concluded from a series of textual criticism that some poems in the Book of Songs were deleted by Kong Qiu from the numerous poems which had been composed already in his time. The three accounts by forefathers who denied Sima Qian’s argument do not hold water. Some scholars thought that Kong Qiu began to recruit and teach disciples when he was thirty years old. If the version is credible, it must be in those days that the Book of Songs became a definite and authoritative anthology. It is not true that Sima Qian misread LUN Yu, and the fact is that futurities misread Shi Ji.