What do the four books and five classics mean? What is the first of the four books?

"Four Books" refers to four books: Daxue, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects of Confucius and Mencius.

The Analects of Confucius and Mencius are collections of speeches by Confucius, Mencius and their students respectively, while Daxue and The Doctrine of the Mean are two in the Book of Rites. Zhu, a famous scholar in the Southern Song Dynasty, first linked the two. Zhu annotated the four books respectively. Among them, the annotations of Daxue and the Doctrine of the Mean are called "chapters and sentences", and the annotations of The Analects and Mencius are called "concentrated notes" because they quote many other people's sayings. Because Zhu Zhu's "Four Books" not only combines the theories of predecessors, but also has its own unique views, which are applicable to the world; Due to the rising status of "Zhu Cheng Neo-Confucianism" represented by Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi brothers and Zhu, after Zhu's death, the court approved four books with his annotations as official books, which became popular from then on, and resumed the imperial examination in the Yanyou period of the Yuan Dynasty (13 14- 1320), officially. Due to these factors, the Four Books not only became important classics of Confucianism, but also became a must-read for every reader and became a unified standard primary school textbook until modern times. Therefore, some people compare the four books with the Western Bible and think that they are the Eastern Bible. In fact, whether it is its widespread spread or its profound influence on the character and psychology of China people, this comparison is not an exaggeration.

It is worth noting that the order of Zhu's four books was originally The University, The Analects of Confucius, Mencius and The Doctrine of the Mean, which was arranged in the order of learning from the shallow to the deep. Later generations mentioned The Doctrine of the Mean before The Analects of Confucius because the length of Daxue and The Doctrine of the Mean was short, so it became the order of Daxue, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects of Confucius and Mencius.