Spring and Autumn

The Spring and Autumn period is the age in which the Zhou king kept his title and lost his power, the great states fought and made alliances without reference to him, and the ritual distinctions that marked rank were used by people not entitled to them. Confucius lived in it, in the state of Lu, and his response was not to propose a new order but to insist on the old one. He described himself as a transmitter and not a maker, and the Analects show him correcting his students on matters that look small, the number of dancers a nobleman may employ, the sacrifice he may perform, the mourning he owes his parents, because he took those things to be where an order either holds or fails. That is the argument of the period compressed into one figure.

If ritual is only decoration, using more dancers than your rank permits is a harmless vanity; if ritual is the substance of the relationships that make a society work, it is the beginning of collapse. Confucius took the second view, and the Chinese tradition that followed him argued about the details for two thousand years without abandoning the premise. The religious content of that position is not belief in gods but the treatment of correct conduct as the point where the human and the cosmic order meet.

The period is named after a book. The Spring and Autumn Annals is the court chronicle of the state of Lu, a terse record of accessions, deaths, treaties, eclipses, floods and military actions, entered year by year with almost no comment. Confucian tradition holds that Confucius edited it, and that his editing embedded judgements in the choice of words, so that a ruler described as having died in one form of words and another in a different form was being praised or condemned. Whole commentarial traditions grew up to extract those judgements, and the three surviving commentaries disagree with each other about what the wording means.

Michael Nylan's study of the five Confucian classics examines how a dry regional chronicle acquired that status, and treats the attribution to Confucius with the caution the evidence requires. The result is one of the odder facts about the Chinese classical canon: a text whose religious authority rests on a claim about the invisible intentions of its editor. The atlas records the attribution as traditional. What the chronicle undoubtedly does provide is a dated framework for the period, including astronomical observations that can be checked, which is why the era carries its name.