 Late in life, Confucius left service and turned to teaching. In Sima Qian’s time, the sheer number of independently circulating texts centering on dialogues that Confucius had with his disciples led the biographer to include a separate chapter on “The arranged traditions of the disciples of Confucius” (Zhongni dizi liezhuan 仲尼弟子列傳). His account identifies 77 direct disciples, whom Sima Qian says Confucius trained in ritual practice and the Classic of Odes (Shijing 詩經), Classic of Documents (Shujing 書經, also called Documents of the Predecessors or Shangshu 尚書), Records of Ritual (Liji 禮記) and Classic of Music (Yuejing 樂經). Altogether, some 3000 students received some form of this training regimen. Sima Qian’s editorial practice in systematizing dialogues was inclusive, and the fact that he was able to collect so much information some three centuries after the death of Confucius testifies to the latter’s importance in the Han period. Looked at in a different way, the prodigious numbers of direct disciples and students of Confucius, and the inconsistent accounts of the offices in which he served, may also be due to a proliferation of texts associating the increasingly authoritative figure of Confucius with divergent regional or interpretive traditions during those intervening centuries.