“To believe the Book entirely would be worse than having no Book.” The sentence comes from Mencius, Jin Xin II. Here “the Book” specifically means the Book of Documents. Discussing its Wu Cheng chapter, Mencius accepted only a few sections. He thought its image of blood flowing strongly enough to carry a pestle was inconsistent with a supremely humane ruler defeating a supremely inhumane one.
The point was not to reject the classics, but to hold even a classic answerable to reason and fact. The restrained modern lesson is to respect a text without treating authority as permission to stop judging. Doubt also needs grounds, or blind belief merely becomes blind rejection.
https://ctext.org/mengzi/jin-xin-ii/zh
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