First, in order to better spread and preserve this book, the author voluntarily gave up his signature and replaced it with a more authoritative name. For example, Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica and Huangdi's Canon of Internal Medicine are collectively called "Three Tombs", which were written by ancient sages Fu, Shennong and Huangdi respectively, because their original authors can no longer be tested. For example, Zhou Li's book, Guan Zi's book, Guan Zhong's book, Family Notes of Confucius forged by Wang Su in the name of Confucius, Zhou Shizhi and Shen Yijing forged in the name of Dong Fangshuo, a scholar of the Western Han Dynasty, and so on. Today, it is often difficult for people to understand this phenomenon. Modern people can be said to be unwilling to give up their land for copyright. Why did the ancients voluntarily give up copyright and try their best to put their works in the name of others? This phenomenon is actually very easy to explain. The purpose of writing books by ancient people and modern people is quite different. In the eyes of the ancients, the article is "a great national cause, an immortal event." The purpose of writing a book, as Sima Qian said in "Letter of Appointment": "I sincerely hide famous mountains with this book, spread it to my people and spread it to the whole city, so I have to pay for the responsibility of humiliation before. Although I was killed, do you have any regrets? " What the ancients can pass down from generation to generation, nothing else can be ignored. Nowadays, people write books with this lofty ideal, but most of them are probably for a "profit". How can we compromise? If it is not your own work, you should do everything possible to sign your name, let alone your own work.
The second is that due to the age, or other irresistible reasons, the original author is no longer testable, and later generations make mistakes when adding. For example, the original author of the Book of Changes is far away, and there are always different opinions. Sima Qian said in A Letter to Ren An: "King Gavin was arrested and played the Book of Changes ..." The author was actually Zhou Wenwang. Another example is the fisherman in Qu Yuan's Nine Songs. Now it is basically recognized that it was not written by Qu Yuan. However, people always think that the author is Qu Yuan.
Similarly, later generations also added their own works when sorting out documents, so that their speeches can be passed on. The biggest case is Mei Guo and his History of Ancient Literature. In the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Mei Ruo presented 58 pieces of "History of Ancient Chinese Literature", which was regarded as a fake by textual research scholars since the Song Dynasty. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, many famous scholars tried to prove their unjust cases, and many scholars in modern times reversed their cases for them, so that "Dao Mei" and "Mei Ting" each occupied a hill and argued endlessly, which became a case-solving case in the history of literature and books.
The third situation is much more vulgar. With the continuous development of book publishing, its profit space is increasingly huge. For commercial purposes, some booksellers use the names of celebrities at that time to write their own books or books to be published soon, so as to take advantage of the "celebrity effect" and maximize their own interests. Some celebrities were therefore "named". For example, the book "The Epilogue of Finding God" is signed by Tao Yuanming. Facts have proved that some things in the book happened after his death, so Tao Yuanming can't be the author of the book, just the name of the original author, using this "five willows"