This book tries to place the early Chinese poetic culture in the larger context of religious, political, and philosophical thought and practice. Rather than taking written texts for granted, thinking that they are the most natural and self-evident things in early Chinese culture, I prefer to explore how these texts operate in a world that is completely different from the present: a world not composed of silent copyists and readers, but a world in which both written and oral texts are related to a performance tradition composed of vivid religious and political rituals, political exhortations, teaching and learning, and moral self-cultivation. It is a world where poetic texts do not function purely in the form of written products.