呂氏春秋

Lǚshì chūnqiū 呂氏春秋

Mr Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals

by 呂不韋 (Lǚ Bùwéi, d. 235 BCE; chancellor of Qín, who commissioned and gathered the contributors); annotated by 高誘 (Gāo Yòu, fl. c. 205–212; Eastern Hàn philological commentator)

About the work

A monumental late-Warring-States compendium in 26 juan, completed at the court of the Qín statesman Lǚ Bùwéi 呂不韋 around 239 BCE — the Shǐjì preface (序意) dates the work to the eighth year of King Zhèng (the future First Emperor), giving 239 BCE as the terminus — and assembled by the multitudes of scholar-clients (賓客) Lǚ kept under his roof. Its tripartite architecture — twelve jì 紀 (records, one per month, sixty-one chapters), eight lǎn 覽 (overviews, sixty-three chapters), and six lùn 論 (essays, thirty-six chapters), totalling 160 piān — is unique in early Chinese literature and was self-consciously cosmological: each of the twelve seasonal records correlates ritual, music, and statecraft to the agricultural calendar (the famous Yuèlìng 月令 material later partially absorbed into the Lǐjì). Doctrinally the book is the locus classicus of Hàn-era zájiā 雜家 (“Syncretist”) thought — a deliberate gathering of Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, agriculturalist, military, and yīnyáng / Five-Phase teachings into a coherent Qín-state programme. Catalogued in the Sìkù under Záxué zhī shǔ 雜學之屬 of the Zájiā 雜家.

Tiyao

We respectfully submit that Lǚshì chūnqiū in twenty-six juan, the old text titled “composed by Lǚ Bùwéi of Qín,” is to be examined as follows. Investigating the Shǐjì’s Wénxìnhóu lièzhuàn, [we find that] it is in fact the work of his guest-clients (bīnkè zhī suǒ jí). Sīmǎ Qiān’s zìxù 自序 also says: “Bùwéi was banished to Shǔ; in his lifetime he transmitted the Lǚ lǎn.” But examining the Xùyì 序意 chapter, it says “in the eighth year of Qín, when the year was at tūntān 涒灘 [239 BCE]” — at this date Bùwéi had not yet been exiled to Shǔ, and so from Gāo Yòu down everyone has rejected the [Sīmǎ Qiān] later-dating; this is a corruption in the historian’s text. The Hàn shū · Yìwén zhì records Lǚshì chūnqiū in 26 piān; the present text consists of twelve jì, eight lǎn, and six lùn, with sixty-one subchapters (zǐmù) under the jì, sixty-three under the lǎn, and thirty-six under the lùn — 160 chapters in all. The Hàn zhì count is presumably its overall structure (gāng, “the twenty-six bones”).

The twelve jì are nothing other than the Yuèlìng 月令 of the Lǐjì, but cut up across the twelve months and made into twelve chapters; after each chapter four further essays are interpolated. Only the summer ordinances mostly speak of music, the autumn ordinances of warfare — these seem to have a logic; the rest are quite incomprehensible, and earlier scholars have not explained them. Note also that each jì is followed by four supplementary chapters, while the Jìdōng jì alone has five — the last bears the title Xùyì 序意, marking the year and the month. It is the general preface of the twelve jì. Apparently what is called “jì” is the equivalent of the “inner chapters” (內篇), and the lǎn and lùn are the “outer” and “miscellaneous” chapters (外篇·雜篇). When Liú Zhījī 劉知幾 of the Táng compiled his Shǐtōng 史通 in inner and outer chapters, the zìxù 自序 chapter likewise stands at the close of the inner chapters, before the outer — this is exactly the precedent.

Bùwéi was, indeed, a low fellow; yet this book, compared with [other] zhūzǐ writings, is uniquely chaste and orthodox — chiefly Confucian, with Daoist and Mohist ingredients — hence its frequent citation of the Six Classics and of the words of Confucius and Zēngzǐ. As to its other matters: when discussing music it cites the Yuèjì 樂記; when discussing the casting of swords it cites the Kǎogōng jì 考工記 — though the chapter titles are not given, the wording can be checked. Of the Zhuāng / Liè it cites only what is not wild and unbridled; of Mò Dí, only what is not anti-Confucian or pro-ghostly; of the Confucian-vs-Logician disputations, the techniques of the Vertical and Horizontal Alliances and the Legalist xíngmíng 刑名 doctrine, not a word. In its propositions it is by no means careless. Critics have despised it for the sake of the man and so undervalued the book — that is not a judicious view.

Since the Hàn, the only commentator has been Gāo Yòu — terse and unadorned in glossing, and meticulous in correcting historical-citation errors. For example, the Zhì yuè chapter says that in the time of Tāng grain grew in the courtyard; he refutes this with the Preface to the Documents. It calls Nán Zǐ 南子 “Lady Lí” 釐夫人; he refutes this with the Lúnyǔ and Zuǒ zhuàn. It says Xīmén Bào 西門豹 lived in the time of King Xiāng of Wèi; he refutes this with the Wèi shìjiā and Mèngzǐ. It says Duke Xiāng of Jìn attacked the Lùhún 陸渾, and that King Chéng of Chǔ disrespected Duke Wén of Jìn; he refutes both with the Zuǒ zhuàn. It says Yán Hé 顏闔 spoke with Duke Zhuāng of Lǔ; he refutes this with the Lǔ shìjiā. It says the men of Wèi 衛 expelled Duke Xiàn 獻 and enthroned the prince Qián 黚; he refutes this with the Zuǒ zhuàn and Wèi shìjiā. None of this falls into commentators’ usual vice of forced harmonisation. Yet when the text says that Marquis Wén of Wèi 魏文侯 captured the Marquis of Qí and presented him to the Son of Heaven — a non-event in the Zhuàn — it is unaccountable that Yòu does not flag the slip. As for the report that Méi Bó 梅伯 said that Lord Guǐ’s daughter was beautiful, and that Dájǐ 妲己 thought her not beautiful, and that this is why she was minced; that Bái Yǐbǐng 白乙丙 and Mèngmíng 孟明 were both sons of Jiǎnshū 蹇叔; that Níng Qī 甯戚 knocked his ox-horn and the song he sang was the Shuòshǔ 碩鼠 ode; that Gōngsūn Lóng 公孫龍 was a man of Wèi 魏 — none has its source given, and we do not know on what they rest. Again, the affairs of “Gōng Bó’s attaining (rest) at the Gōngshǒu” 共伯得乎共首 and of Zhāng Yì 張毅 / Dān Bào 單豹 both come from Zhuāngzǐ; yet on the Gōng Bó affair he says “I do not know which book this comes from,” and on the Zhāng / Dān episode he cites instead Bān Gù’s 班固 Yōutōng fù 幽通賦 — never having seen the Qīyuán (i.e. Zhuāngzǐ) text! That too is strange. As to the gloss of “the temple of five generations” 五世之廟 as belonging to a yìshū 逸書, this is because Méi Zé 梅鷟’s pseudo-guwen recension had not yet appeared. The citations of Shī: Shūjiāng nièniè 庶姜孽孽 written 𤫔𤫔, Tuógǔ péng 鼉鼓逢 written 䐨䐨 — these are simply variant readings between schools, and not failures.

(Tiyao drawn from the Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào via the Kyoto Zinbun digital index, since the WYG-recension _000.txt in the local Kanripo holding is the SBCK reprint and contains only Gāo Yòu’s preface, not the Sìkù tíyào. The tíyào would have been concluded with the standard “Respectfully revised and submitted” formula and the names of Jǐ Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅, and Lù Fèichí 陸費墀, as in the parallel Huáinánzǐ tíyào.)

Abstract

Composed at the court of the Qín chancellor Lǚ Bùwéi 呂不韋 (d. 235 BCE) by his three thousand resident bīnkè 賓客 — a salon of scholars assembled from across the late-Warring-States world — the Lǚshì chūnqiū is the most ambitious zǐ-book of the pre-Hàn period and the locus classicus of zájiā (Syncretist) thought. The book’s Xùyì 序意 colophon dates its presentation to the eighth year of King Zhèng of Qín (239 BCE); composition presumably began a few years earlier, and the conventional dating bracket adopted here (notBefore −241, notAfter −239) reflects the latest plausible window for the body of the text. The Shǐjì (Wénxìnhóu lièzhuàn) and Lǚ’s own legend (the famous offer of one thousand jīn of gold to anyone who could improve a single character) testify to the work’s near-immediate canonical reception.

The Hàn shū · Yìwén zhì lists Lǚshì chūnqiū in 26 juan under the zájiā 雜家 division. The text’s tripartite structure — twelve seasonal jì 紀 (61 chapters), eight lǎn 覽 (63 chapters), and six lùn 論 (36 chapters) for 160 piān — was unprecedented and is plausibly read by the Sìkù editors and by modern scholars (Knoblock-Riegel, Sellmann) as a deliberate cosmological architecture: the twelve jì echo the Twelve Months, the eight lǎn the Eight Trigrams or eight directions, and the six lùn the Six Pitch-pipes or six expedients — the whole is presented as a zhī tiānxià 治天下 manual. The opening chapters of each jì are proto-versions of what later became the Yuèlìng 月令 of the Lǐjì (Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §29.5; the cross-relationship to the Huáinánzǐ Shízé xùn is well-mapped in Major 1993). The text incorporates substantial material from now-lost Pre-Qín zhūzǐ (Mèngzǐ school, Zhuāngzǐ inner chapters, Mòzǐ school, YīnYáng / Five-Phases school, the Agriculturalists 農家 — to which the Shàngnóng, Rèndì, Biàntǔ, Shěnshí chapters of the Shìróng lùn are our principal witness) and is an indispensable source for the intellectual history of late-Zhōu / pre-Hàn China.

The standard transmitted recension carries the commentary of Gāo Yòu 高誘 of the late Eastern Hàn (preface dated Jiàn’ān 10, 205 CE), which the Sìkù editors praise for its lexical sobriety and its readiness to flag the text’s many historical and chronological slips while frankly admitting other points where Gāo Yòu’s reach is uneven. The Suí shū · Jīngjí zhì and the standard later catalogues all preserve the work in 26 juan; the present recension is essentially complete. A parallel Daoist recension is preserved in the Daozang as DZ 1184 (cf. KR5f0018 for Huáinán under the same Daoist filiation).

Translations and research

This is one of the best-served pre-Qín / pre-Hàn texts in modern scholarship.

• John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study (Stanford University Press, 2000). The standard complete English translation, with extensive philological apparatus and a substantial introduction. Reviewed by Paul Goldin in Early Medieval China 7 (2001).
• Richard Wilhelm, Frühling und Herbst des Lü Bu We (Diederichs, 1928 — repeatedly reprinted). The pioneering complete European translation, into German.
• Ivan P. Kamenarović, Printemps et automnes de Lü Buwei (Cerf, 1998). Complete French translation.
• James D. Sellmann, Timing and Rulership in Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals (SUNY Press, 2002). The principal English-language monograph on the text’s cosmological structure and political theory.
• Carson and Loewe, in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (ed. Michael Loewe, 1993), 324–30. Standard handbook entry on transmission and textual problems.
• Zhāng Shuāngdì 張雙棣 et al., eds., Lǚshì chūnqiū cídiǎn 呂氏春秋詞典 (Shānwù, rev. ed. 2009).
• Chén Qíyóu 陳奇猷, Lǚshì chūnqiū jiàoshì 呂氏春秋校釋 (Xuélín, 1984; rev. 2002). The indispensable modern Chinese critical edition with comprehensive collation and commentary.
• Xǔ Wéiyù 許維遹, Lǚshì chūnqiū jíshì 呂氏春秋集釋 (Zhōnghuá, 2009 — earlier ed. 1935). The standard pre-modern Republican collation, still useful.
• Institute of Chinese Studies Concordance to the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋逐字索引 (ICS Ancient Chinese Texts Concordance Series, no. 23; Hong Kong: Commercial Press).

Other points of interest

The Lǚshì chūnqiū is the earliest Chinese book that we possess which was demonstrably conceived from the start as a single, architecturally-planned work — Wilkinson (§59.6.5) notes that earlier “books” were essentially editorial gatherings of school sayings, while the Lǚshì chūnqiū is structured to a programme. The Yīn chū 音初 chapter is the earliest extant Chinese discussion of the regional origins of music (its four-quadrant scheme — the nányīn, běiyīn, dōngyīn, xīyīn — recurs in the Liúzǐ Biànyuè chapter, which is part of the Sìkù’s argument against attributing Liúzǐ to Liú Xié). The Bénwèi 本味 chapter, framed as a dialogue between Tāng and Yī Yǐn 伊尹, is the earliest substantial Chinese treatise on cookery and culinary geography. The famous Chájīn 察今 maxim of the boat and the sword (刻舟求劍) and the Cháchuán 察傳 anecdote of jǐhài 己亥 vs. sānshǐ 三豕 (the prototype for the proverb 魯魚亥豕 on textual corruption — see Wilkinson §3.1.6) both originate here.

Links

• Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào 四庫全書總目提要, Zǐbù · Zájiā lèi, Lǚshì chūnqiū entry (via Kyoto Zinbun digital index, page 0245801).
• Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (6th ed.), §59.6.5.
• Wikipedia: Lüshi Chunqiu. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Syncretism in the Lüshi chunqiu” (Sarah A. Queen).
• Wikidata: Q852380 (Lüshi Chunqiu).
• Parallel commentary tradition: Gāo Yòu also annotated the Huáinánzǐ (KR3j0010) and the Zhànguó cè (KR2e0003).