The New Chinese Classics
Springs and Autumns: China Before Confucius
A Taeko and E Bruce Brooks
(estimated publication date: 2017)
This is the first integral translation of the Chun/Chyou (the "Spring and Autumn" Chronicle of Lu) which is not compromised (as is that of Legge) by being paralleled with a translation of the later commentary Dzwo Jwan, which historians have universally but wrongly preferred to the CC as an account of the period. In a degree of detail unparalleled in the subsequent Warring States centuries, the chronicle gives us a direct look of the world out of which Confucius came, and some of the events in which he himself probably took part.
1. The Chun/Chyou, long thought to be a moral tract written by Confucius, is actually a priceless primary record kept at the court of Lu and covering the years 0721-0481. Its entries give us details about the concerns of the Lu court, and the range of those details defines for us the limits of the old palace state, which would presently give way to the complex bureaucracy of the Warring States period.
2. In the constant but curiously ineffective battles which it records, the Chun/Chyou shows us the military side of the early state, limited in both range and effectiveness, and implying an ethos of honor which we can see in attenuated form in the teachings of Confucius. Here, untapped or (in its Dzwo Jwan form) misread by previous investigators, is the first well documented stage of Chinese military history.
3. The Chun/Chyou is at bottom an omen record, and was probably kept by the court astrologer (shr; a word that later comes to mean "historian"). It shows a degree of worry about the omens and rejections of Heaven that is comparable to that evidenced by the Shang oracle bones of centuries earlier. It is also echoed by the portent readings and predictions of the Han court astrologers in the early Empire. Here, then, is one of the most durable belief systems of early China, one which on the whole is not taken up in the standard philosophical texts, and which is thus little known to students of Chinese thought. In the Chun/Chyou, we can watch that belief system in action, and note the objects of its chief concern: the crops, the skies, the sacrifices (chiefly when they miscarry), and the movements of the ruler and his family.
4. The last quarter of the period covered by the Chun/Chyou is also the lifetime of Confucius, and in watching the events it records, we are in effect looking out a window at the world of Confucius. These details, these court diary entries, are all that we can now recover of the realities that shaped his worldview.
To understand either Confucius or the China of the early pre-Imperial period, there is no written source that ranges more widely, or records such intimate detail, as the Chun/Chyou. This book, in making that chronicle available in its entirety, transmits as much as we will ever dependably know about the mind of these three Chinese centuries. It may serve as a long prelude to the record of Confucius's teachings which was recovered in The Original Analects. Readers who have wished for a time-travel visit to ancient China will find it, or the nearest available approximation to it, in this book.
17 May 2007 / Contact The Project / Exit to Publications Page
