Everyone below the platform accepted Liu's explanation, unaware that a fact long forgotten was quietly surfacing: the so-called Old-Text Book of Documents was not nearly as ancient as they imagined. Mei Ze had presented it in the early Eastern Jin, less than two hundred years before their own time.
Wang Yang intended to use this question to remind them that, although both bore the name Old-Text Book of Documents, the version circulating today was not the Old-Text Book of Documents known during the Western and Eastern Han. Rather, a man named Mei Ze had suddenly appeared and declared that his family possessed the Old-Text Book of Documents.
This was the counterfeit Old-Text Book of Documents!
Seeing that he had achieved his aim, Wang Yang continued:
"A fine answer, Lord Liu. Then let me ask another question. Ancient historical works that recorded speeches did not, as a rule, specify the four seasons. Take the New-Text Book of Documents: the Announcement to Kang says, 'In the third month, when the moon began to wane'; Many Regions says, 'On the dinghai day of the fifth month'; the Great Plan says, 'In the thirteenth year'; and the Metal-Bound Coffer says, 'Two years after the conquest of Shang.' They all record years, months, or days, never the four seasons.
"The Book of Documents records speeches, while the Spring and Autumn Annals records events. As a book primarily concerned with spoken words, the Book of Documents pays little attention to dates. Chapters such as the Pastoral Oath do not even specify the month, let alone the season. The Spring and Autumn Annals, by contrast, records historical events, arranging them chronologically, and therefore regularly mentions spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
"The two books employ different historical methods, and their conventions naturally differ as well.
"Yet the Great