Within the Confucian canon, the Book of Rites stands as the primary articulation of li—ritual, etiquette, and social norms—and is traditionally grouped with the Rites of Zhou and Etiquette and Ceremonial as the “Three Rites.” While the Rites of Zhou focuses on institutional and bureaucratic structures, and Etiquette and Ceremonial on specific ceremonial procedures such as weddings, funerals, and coming-of-age rites, the Book of Rites elaborates the underlying principles, meanings, and moral purposes of these practices. It extends ritual concern into the texture of daily life, describing how an exemplary person walks, speaks, dresses, and interacts with parents, ruler, friends, and subordinates. In this way, it serves as a kind of normative backbone for Confucian social existence, turning abstract ideals into patterned behavior.

In relation to texts such as the Analects and Mencius, which emphasize virtue, moral cultivation, and good government, the Book of Rites supplies the concrete content of ritual propriety that these works so highly praise. Where those texts affirm that ritual is essential to humaneness and orderly society, the Book of Rites specifies the actual norms and patterns through which such humaneness is expressed. Its pages are filled with the details of filial piety, hierarchical yet reciprocal roles, and the subtle ways that ritual channels emotion, prevents excess, and maintains harmony. Thus, it functions as a bridge between inner moral intention and outer social form, ensuring that ethical aspirations are not left in the realm of vague sentiment.

The Book of Rites also stands in a mutually illuminating relationship with the Classic of Poetry and the Classic of Documents. Many poems in the Classic of Poetry presuppose ritual contexts—sacrifices, court gatherings, weddings—and the Book of Rites describes the kinds of ceremonies in which such poems would be performed, revealing how song and ceremony together cultivate proper feeling. The Classic of Documents presents speeches and proclamations of ancient rulers, while the Book of Rites provides the ritual framework and hierarchical order within which such rulership is meant to operate. Through this interplay, political authority, poetic expression, and ritual form are woven into a single moral fabric.

Even the terse chronicle of the Spring and Autumn Annals is illuminated by the standards articulated in the Book of Rites. Confucian tradition reads the Annals as embodying moral judgments about war, succession, diplomacy, and mourning, and what counts as “proper” in these realms is determined by ritual norms. The Book of Rites explains those norms and hierarchies, offering a key to understanding how seemingly bare records of events can carry ethical weight. In the broader configuration of the Five Classics, it thus provides the practical and institutional framework through which history, poetry, and political discourse become vehicles of moral cultivation.

Later Confucian learning further underscores the centrality of this text. Within the configuration of the Five Classics, “Rites” effectively included the materials later organized as the Book of Rites along with other ritual texts, making it a core pillar of classical study. When the Four Books were elevated as a central curriculum, two of them—the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean—were drawn from chapters of the Book of Rites, showing that this work is not merely a manual of ceremonies but also a source of foundational philosophical reflection. Across these interconnections, the Book of Rites emerges as the work that systematizes li and provides the lived, ritualized form through which the moral and political ideals of the Confucian tradition are enacted.