Zhu Zeng, the most famous neo-Confucian, said that these six articles actually have contents, but the contents gradually disappeared in the process of circulation, that is to say, people did not record the contents and names, but stayed in the Book of Songs. However, there is another saying, that is, when the Book of Songs was published, these six poems only had titles and no content, and people only recorded them according to villages.
Personally, I prefer the second statement. Why do you say that? As we all know, The Book of Songs, also known as Poems 300, consists of 305 poems. We should understand that this truth is poetry, and the main content of these poems is to record the folk culture at that time and describe poems. We can understand that every poem is actually telling a story, and every poem is handed down in the form of singing.
So is it possible? There are six very beautiful songs circulating among the people. People know his name but ignore the lyrics in the recording process. Just like many of our old people will remember the popular songs of their time, but if you ask them to write down the lyrics or let them sing them once, they won't remember them.
This is the same as these six sheng poems. Is there a topic with detailed content? In other words, I only remember one song and forget the lyrics! Again, these poems recorded in The Book of Songs are very realistic. The Book of Songs is not divorced from people's life at that time, nor from the history people experienced, but sometimes we forget something, and we must also record these forgotten things in works of art.