Within Neo-Confucianism, the Four Books and Five Classics together form a canon that both anchors the tradition in antiquity and channels its later philosophical creativity. The Four Books—Analects, Mencius, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean—were elevated to a position of special prominence, coming to be regarded as the clearest expression of the path of moral self-cultivation and good governance. Through careful commentary, especially by Zhu Xi, these texts were read as revealing the inner structure of reality and human nature, and thus became the primary lens through which key Neo-Confucian notions such as principle, material force, and the work of self-cultivation were articulated. Because they were adopted as the core curriculum for the civil service examinations, they shaped not only scholarly discourse but also the moral and intellectual formation of the governing elite.

The Five Classics—Changes, Documents, Odes, Rites, and Spring and Autumn Annals—retained their status as the ancient foundation of the Confucian way, offering ritual norms, political ideals, poetry, history, and cosmological patterns. Neo-Confucian thinkers treated them as authoritative witnesses to the wisdom of the sage-kings, yet read them through the interpretive framework developed from the Four Books. In this light, works such as the Classic of Changes were taken as rich resources for understanding an ordered and dynamic cosmos, while the ritual and historical texts grounded lofty metaphysical reflections in concrete practices of governance and propriety. In this interplay, the Four Books functioned as a focused guide to inner and outer transformation, and the Five Classics provided the broader cultural, historical, and cosmological horizon within which that transformation was to unfold.