Four books: The Analects of Confucius, Mencius, University and The Doctrine of the Mean.
Five Classics: The Book of Songs, Shangshu, Book of Rites, Zhouyi and Chunqiu.
Eight-part essay is a style of imperial examination in Ming and Qing Dynasties, also known as Yi, Zuoyi, Modern Times and Eight-part essay.
Eight-part essay refers to the eight parts of the article, and its style has a fixed format: it consists of eight parts: breaking the topic, receiving the topic, opening the lecture, entering the topic, starting the stock, middle stock, rear stock and bundle stock. The topics are all from the original texts in the Four Books and Five Classics. The last four parts each have two parallel dual words, which add up to * * * stereotyped writing. In the old imperial examination, the eight-part essay should be spoken in the tone of Confucius and Mencius, and four pairs should be plain, and the allusion to love affairs should not be used to blaspheme the saint. Each article includes four parts: from stock to stock.
Eight-part essay was originally the recommended format for writing argumentative essays, which was neither good nor bad in itself. However, it was opposed by many intellectuals later, because the imperial examination stipulated that this format must be adopted. Eight-part essay became a scapegoat for the shortcomings of the ancient imperial examination system. At the same time, the topic of the eight-part essay comes from The Analects of Confucius and Mencius, which is not innovative enough, and even has the phenomenon of splitting the original sentence into pieces. What's more, the topic of a question is only punctuation marks, all of which are aimed at stumping most candidates.