The court chronicle of Lu for the years 0722-0481 (or 0479, or 0464). It has lent its name to the larger period between the fall of Jou (0771) and the death of Confucius (0479). It is not a passive record, but a selective final product based on earlier observations, which reflects the Lu court's interests and sensibilities. Its delicacy in recording sensitive matters of protocol has been wrongly interpreted as a coded "praise and blame" treatment of events, usually ascribed to Confucius (for a decisive refutation of this still familiar theory, see now Taeko's paper on the word Ji, from the WSWG 17 Conference at Leiden). For all its limitations, which in their way also reflect the mind of the period (including its portentology fixation), the CC is a uniquely fine-grained and contemporary record of a Spring and Autumn state.
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Description
Title. The original Lu chronicle had no title that we know of, and is not likely to have needed a title while the unique copy was still functioning as an omen and protocol record for the court of Lu. Chun/Chyou "Spring and Autumn" is a metonymy for the four seasonal headings which divide each year's entries; it was probably attached to the text at some time after it became known beyond the Lu court circle, in the 04th century. By the end of the 04th century, the term "chun/chyou" had acquired the general meaning "chronicle" (see Other Chronicles). In a different direction, the text has given its name (Spring and Autumn; SA) to the period which it covers, which is sometimes conventionally extended to the fall of Jou in 0771. "Chun/Chyou" implicitly sees the year as a seasonal round, and it was used in this "almanac" meaning in the title of the Lw-shr Chun/Chyou (which originally consisted only of its first twelve calendrically-based chapters).
Text. The CC now exists only as embedded in three extant commentaries: Dzwo Jwan (DJ), Gungyang Jwan (GYJ), and Gulyang Jwan (GLJ). These parallel CC texts differ slightly in wording and orthography; final decisions on some text variants remain to be made. The prototype text for all three present versions can only have been a Kung family interpolated copy of the Lu palace original. The earliest fully extant CC texts are the parallel versions associated with all three Jwan in the Tang stone classics (833-837). The HY integral concordance text is the most carefully edited modern version.
Size. Eric Henry's Wordcount gives 16,769 characters for the size of the CC, and Legge's apparatus reports a total vocabulary of 952 characters (ratio, 17.61 to 1).
Form. The chronicle is a continuous document, but may be seen as divided into the reigns of twelve Lu princes which it wholly or (in the case of Ai-gung) partly covers, and then into years of that reign, each year being divided into four seasons (even when one of the seasons has no entry). A typical year has 8 entries, and a typical entry has 9 words (see further the Entries page), but no formal constraints other than the maintenance of an established style seem to apply to the text as it continued to be written.
Content. The CC is a wholly Lu-centered document. Its entries cover the doings of the ruler and his family (37%), war (24%), diplomacy (12%), rituals and portents, including eclipses (18%), and the harvest and natural disasters (8%). In some categories, only exceptional rather than normal events seem to be recorded; the typical CC entry is an object of worry rather than a neutral record. There is an evident reluctance to attribute error to the ruler, and military defeats under the ruler's leadership are impersonally stated. The text is generally sensitive on protocol matters, irregularities of procedure, or other tokens of diplomatic disrespect for the Lu ruler. It is interested in the possible omen value of remarkable events, such as eclipses of freaks of nature. Apart from general harvest concerns, and two instances of the transfer of grain from one state to another to relieve famine, there are no CC data bearing even indirectly on economics or trade. Chronologically, in its DJ version, the CC covers the years 0722-0479 (Yin 1 through Ai 16) and ends with a Kung family interpolated entry for the death of Confucius. Gungyang and Gulyang terminate the record at 0481 (Ai 14), the year Confucius allegedly left the court of Lu (see the Reigns page). The DJ version shows a knowledge of events (though it does not directly quote the CC) through the 4th year of Dau-gung (0464), the point at which the decline of Jin becomes obvious; the saga of Jin is one of the great themes of the Dzwo Jwan. The original Lu chronicle (now lost) presumably continued to be kept up until the year 0249, when Lu was extinguished by Chu and ceased to exist as a state.
The Original Text
Type: Accretional; the CC is the prototype accretional text. CC entries sometimes represent a cumulation of several months' observation (see Accretion Process, below). Kennedy has convincingly shown that the CC is a genuine chronicle rather than a coded historiographical tract. There are a very few, perhaps twelve, probable later interpolations. Otherwise the text has come down to us in remarkably good condition.
Authors. Successive court scribes of Lu, who also had responsibility for the recording of eclipses and other portents, and for the adjustment of the calendar by intercalation, though not all of them were equally good at the latter task. Seeming changes in individual scribal style and competence do not routinely coincide with reign changes. If this impression is supported by further study, there are interesting implications for the nature of palace staffing in Lu in the Spring and Autumn period.
Proprietors. The CC was presumably kept as a state record in the court of Lu, where it would have been available for consultation as needed by scribes (more precisely, astrologers; the scientists of uncertain events) and perhaps a few other suitably high Lu officials. After a copy became available to some member of the Kung family in the early 04c, that copy will presumably have remained with the Kung family, or with any other later heads of the commentarial project (eventually resulting in the monstrously large Dzwo Jwan) which grew up over time. There is no sign of separate proprietorship of the Chun/Chyou after it first became public as intertwined with the Dzwo Jwan, in c0312.
Date. The impulse to begin keeping a chronicle may have been that of Yin-gung; if so, he most probably gave that order shortly after his accession in 0722 (this would explain why the CC contains no record of that accession). The keeping of such a record, in imitation of whatever permanent records the Jou scribes may have kept, amounts to an implicit declaration of cultural and political independence from Jou, to which Lu owed an indirect-sovereignty allegiance, but which had collapsed as an effective power in 0771. Once begun, the CC continued as a Lu court institution until at least 0464, and quite possibly down to the end of Lu in 0249; if so, that latter portion is now lost.
Related Texts. No relations between the CC and contemporary (that is, other Spring and Autumn) texts are known. Perhaps no contemporary Spring and Autumn texts existed. There is no sign of such a thing as diplomatic correspondence in the period covered by the CC, and we doubt later claims that Other Chronicles existed. The Analects, which begins with the death of Confucius in 0479, may have had the CC as one of its conscious or unconscious models, and the recent scholarly consensus that the Analects was the first privately maintained text seems to us, after all, to be well grounded.
Later History
Transmission. The original court chronicle was presumably destroyed at the time of the Chu conquest of Lu in 0249. What we presently possess derives from a partial copy apparently made by the Kung family in the early 04c. This copy, with its four demonstrably spurious "Kung" eclipses, is textually ancestral to all three early commentaries (DJ, GYJ, GLJ). HS 30 records the CC "classic" (jing) separately from the various commentaries (jwan), in either 12 or 11 sections (in the 11-section versions, we are doubtless to imagine the 2-year reign of Min-gung as merged with one of its neighbors). Consistently, the Han stone classics of 175-183 included a Gungyang Jwan, still without an embedded CC text. Embedded or not, the CC has been continuously visible to scholarship since its first public appearance in the late 04c.
Importance. The CC has been treated in Confucian scholarship as the key text for the esoteric interpretation of history. The dominant version of this interpretation in Han times was that of the Gungyang Jwan. That use of the CC is fundamentally flawed. So is the modern perception that the Dzwo Jwan, not the CC, is the primary source for the Spring and Autumn centuries. The CC is by a long margin the most important single historical document of pre-Imperial date.
Commentaries. Some post-Han DJ commentaries are lost except for scattered quotations. The standard early commentary on the Dzwo Jwan together with the CC is by Du Yw (222-284), who was able to include notes based on the Ji-jung text finds of 279 (transcripts and final report released in 281). Next chronologically comes Kung Ying-da (574-648). A recent work which includes some Du and Kung comments, and also takes account of recent manuscript finds, is that of Yang Bwo-jywn (1981), which comments separately on the CC and DJ entries for each year.
Translation: Legge (1872). Several others exist in manuscript (Dobson) or are said to be in progress, always in association with the Dzwo Jwan. There has never been an integral translation or study of the CC on its own terms.
Citation Convention. There are slight differences of opinion about the numbering of CC entries. For the present, follow the numbering of Yang Bwo-jywn, which is also used in the HK concordance (the HY concordance and the Legge text differ at several points). The citation convention most respectful of the form of the work is to refer to entries by ruler, year of reign, and [Yang] entry number, as Jwang 7:4. More compactly, the ruler may be replaced by his sequence number (as 3/7:4); the concordances use this format. More intelligibly to general historians, both ruler and reign year may be replaced by the generally equivalent Western year (as 0687:4). For both ruler numbers and Western year equivalents, see again the Reigns page. In using this option, beware of Legge's Western year equivalents, which thanks to bad advice are astronomical years, and thus are 1 smaller than standard historical years. (For essentially computational reasons, astronomers regard "1 BC" as "The Year 0").
Analysis [To be supplied].
Other Opinions The Dzwo Jwan (as Jau 31:00) explicitly claims that the effect of the CC is to encourage good men and strike fear into evil ones. In the later Mencius (MC 3B9, c0250) this is expanded to a claim of Confucius's authorship of the CC. The standard version of this theory is that Confucius embedded his judgements of persons or events in his choice of terms (such as "kill" vs "assassinate" for the murder of a ruler), or his inclusion or omission of certain facts. The DJ, and in their different ways the later GYJ and GLJ commentaries, are concerned to sustain this view by expounding the esoteric nomenclature of the text. Kennedy Interpretation (1942) has shown, however, not only that the commentaries differ in their explanations, and that no one of the explanations gives a consistent account of the CC facts, but that some seemingly significant omissions and inclusions of CC data in death records of rulers, in particular, are susceptible of rational explanation. Some valuational words do exist, but the values they express can plausibly be referred to the Lu court of the time (Defoort Words; Brooks Distancing).
The Northern Mencians were the first text outside the CC/DJ circle itself to claim a direct role for Confucius in the writing or editing of the Chun/Chyou. This claim comes in MC 3B9, from near the middle of the 03rd century.
Legge in his Prolegoma becomes not only censorious but agitated concerning the evils of the Chun/Chyou, considered as a product of Confucius's pen. He may represent a whole series of commentators who have felt equally convinced of Confucius's authorship, though less incensed as to Confucius's implied character. All this is breath wasted. Confucius had nothing to do with the Chun/Chyou, whether for good or ill.
Robert Gassmann has recently attempted to validate the the praise and blame theory of the CC, but the data on which he relies can be shown to be interpretable in terms of the Realpolitik of the period involved, and the protocol relations that would have stemmed from the power relations at any one time. Much of the material assembled by Gassmann can indeed be used to clarify the Realpolitik of the SA period, and its diplomatic usages, but without reference to the ritual explanation which he prefers.
Jens Petersen has upheld the view, earlier advanced by Maspero and others, that our present CC is not the one originally associated with the DJ text. We believe that the anomalies of order to which he calls attention can be accommodated within the layer model for the DJ which was referred to above.
Implications The chief implication is that scholarship possesses, but has not paid attention to, a direct record of at least some Spring and Autumn events, made at the time and not filtered through later perceptions, and thus invaluable for the historian of the period. The corollary is that the attempt to read Spring and Autumn history from the Dzwo Jwan is a hopeless enterprise, and that the sooner it is abandoned by scholarship, the better for scholarship.
Suggestions Research. It will be seen from the above that the Spring and Autumn period, once it is freed in the mind of the beholder from the intrusions of later orthodox Chinese political theory, becomes in effect an entirely new field of study, and one for which we possess a large and genuine primary document giving considerable detail about the political and military movements of the period. Admittedly, the period is seen in the CC from a Lu vantage point, and is further colored by a recurring sense of Lu indignation at the modest role to which Lu was increasingly reduced in the Sinitic scheme of things. But with due allowance for these limitations, we are still incomparably better placed for a history of Spring and Autumn than we are for the Warring States period. Apart from its value for secular history, the CC is a precious record of omen interpretation and calendrical maneuvering, which should give important results on sufficiently careful analysis. Those results will probably show that the Grand Astrologer of Han, Szma Tan, was in a direct line of intellectual descent from the Lu astrologers of Spring and Autumn, and an estimate of where this art had gone in the intervening centuries would itself be of immense interest, again as a contribution to a subject that scarcely exists at the present time.
A question posed some years ago to the several hundred members of the WSW E-mail list was, Describe the foreign policy of Lu in the Spring and Autumn period. The same question for Austria in the early modern European period would have set pencils to scratching industriously and confidently. The Sinologists of WSW, however, were utterly flabbergasted. They had never in their lives imagined that it was material to ask whether Lu even had a foreign policy, let alone what goals it envisioned, and at whose expense those goals were to be achieved. A short answer to the question is not difficult (at least for the period when Lu was sufficiently outside the reach of Jin power that it is meaningful to speak of its pursuit of its own foreign policy, rather than its attempt to stay clear of Jin foreign policy), and one was in fact given by the list moderator at the time. But it may properly be noted here that the mere asking of the question inaugurates a new epoch in the study of the pre-Chin multi-state situation in its own right, rather than as a awkward lull in Chinese universal sovereignty as seen by the orthodox theorists of Chinese sovereignty. If you take the virtue presumption out of history, what you have left is precisely history.
Again, war or the threat of war is the usual tool of foreign policy, and the actual military tactics of Lu and other states in this era of the elite palace state and its small chariot force, before the advent of the popular bureaucratic state and its huge infantry army, are of great and urgent interest as providing the real background for the new military expertise which we first see codified in the Sundz "Art of War" and its successors in the 04c. This in turn is a necessary part of acquiring an accurate, and technically accountable, sense of the overall military history of pre-Imperial China.
These suggestions might be indefinitely extended; the point is that the whole field is new, and open for "first studies" of almost every imaginable topic of historical interest.
Classical Chinese Texts is Copyright © 1993- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
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