Dong Zhongshu - Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn

LUXURIANT GEMS OF THE

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

EDITORIAL BOARD

Wm. Theodore de Bary, Chair

Paul Anderer

Donald Keene

George A. Saliba

Haruo Shirane

Burton Watson

Wei Shang

LUXURIANT GEMS OF THE

Attributed to Dong Zhongshu

EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY

Sarah A. Queen

& John S. Major

Columbia University Press New York

For Thomas and Benjamin, and for Steve

Contents

W E ARE grateful to the many friends and colleagues who gave us encouragement and good advice during the years it took us to complete this book. Joachim Gentz and Newell Ann van Auken very generously shared perspectives on the Spring and Autumn and its commentaries. Michael Loewe kindly shared information from his book-length study of Dong Zhongshu in advance of its publication in 2011. We are grateful to David Pankenier for generously sharing with us his notes from a reading of the Chunqiu fanlu with the legendary scholar and teacher Aisin-gioro Yu-yun. The anonymous peer reviewers for Columbia University Press made many helpful suggestions for improving the manuscript. Nathan Sivin did us a huge favor by reading a complete but still rough draft of the entire manuscript, providing us with a detailed critique of the work as a whole and suggesting hundreds of specific corrections. We are grateful to Nancy Lewandowski for her management of successive digital and physical copies of the manuscript.

Jennifer Crewe, Jonathan Fiedler, Irene Pavitt, Lisa Hamm, and their colleagues at Columbia University Press worked with consummate professionalism on the editing, design, and production of the book. Anne Holmes worked her customary magic on the books index. Our thanks to all of them.

We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Graham Majorhart for his tenacity and excellent negotiating skills in tracking down and obtaining for us the beautiful image that graces the cover of this book. Thanks also are due to Mr. Chen Xingcan, deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who facilitated Grahams initial contact with the relevant authorities, and especially to Mr. Lin Liugen, director of the Archaeological Research Institute at the Nanjing Museum, who provided the actual image and permission to use it. We are delighted that, through their efforts and goodwill, we are able to use on the cover of this book the image of a cast-bronze dragon that was found in the recently excavated tomb of Liu Fei, king of Jiangdu (r. 153128 B.C.E.). Dong Zhongshu, the putative author of the Chunqiu fanlu (and the actual author of some of it), served as administrator of Jiangdu during the 130s B.C.E., and it is a remarkable privilege to be able to adorn this books cover with an objectthe base of a bell-rackthat Dong may well have seen in use in Liu Feis court.

As always, we owe deepest thanks to our respective families for their encouragement, support, and forbearance.

By the beginning of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.220 C.E.), many intellectuals had come to believe that the Spring and Autumn had been written or edited by Confucius himself, using an esoteric language of praise and blame to indicate approval or disapproval of the recorded historical events. The chronicle therefore was viewed as a canonical source of guidance for rulers and their ministers. In fact, though, the Chunqiu fanlu is a collection of very disparate materials, composed by several people over a period spanning several generations. Some of its content does indeed rely on, or at least refer to, the Spring and Autumn as a fountainhead of prescriptive wisdom, but in some chapters this connection is tangential or absent.

Fate has not been kind to this text. Many of its chapters are fragmentary and garbled, and over the centuries, scholars have questioned the authenticity of the text, or parts of it. The factors conspiring against scholarly acceptance of the Chunqiu fanlu have been numerous and compelling. The texts late appearance on the literary scene, its inclusion of materials that clearly postdate Dongs life, and the poor quality of the collectionwith respect to both its literary style and the condition of the various editions that have survivedhave led some readers to treat it dismissively and have challenged those scholars who have attempted to understand, interpret, and defend it. In turn, the questionable authenticity of the text has cast a long shadow over the figure of Dong Zhongshu himself.

A Brief Biography of Dong Zhongshu

What little we know about Dong Zhongshu comes from two accounts of his life preserved in the Han official histories: the chapter The Biographies of Confucian Scholars in the Shiji and the Biography of Dong Zhongshu in the Han shu. The latter biography draws on its Shiji predecessor but expands on it by including a number of Dongs official communications and other writings. Appendices A and B at the end of this volume contain full translations of these two biographies. By way of background, we briefly summarize here some of the most important events in Dongs life.

and that at an early age he mastered the Spring and Autumn. The circumstances under which he was able to do this and who served as his teacher are not described. In short, the details of Dongs early life remain beyond the historians reach.