In Book 2 of the
论语,
孔子 says that the three hundred poems of the
诗经 can be summed up in one phrase,
思无邪, the passage behind
一言以蔽之 'to sum it up in a word'. He took the words from an ode about horses in the Hymns of Lu, where they may first have meant that the horses never swerved, and gave them a moral sense.
