十二諸侯年表

When the Grand Historian reads the Spring and Autumn Annals and the chronological registers, upon reaching King Li of Zhou he never fails to put down the text and sigh. He says: Alas, Music Master Zhi saw it coming! When King Zhou of Shang had ivory chopsticks made, Jizi wept. When the Way of Zhou faltered, the poets traced the trouble to the bedchamber, and the poem Guanju was composed. As humanity and duty declined, the Deer Cry satirized the times. By the reign of King Li, who detested hearing of his faults, the high ministers feared execution, and catastrophe struck. King Li fled to Zhi, disorder began in the capital itself, and the Gonghe Regency governed in his place. After that, some states used force to dominate, the strong trampled the weak, and armies were raised without the Son of Heaven's sanction. Yet they exploited the moral authority of the royal house, using punitive campaigns to become leaders of interstate covenants. Power passed through the Five Hegemons; the feudal lords acted as they pleased, indulging in excess and lawlessness, and treacherous ministers and usurping sons multiplied. Qi, Jin, Qin, and Chu had been utterly insignificant during the Cheng Zhou period, enfeoffed with no more than a hundred or fifty li. But Jin commanded the barrier of the Three Rivers, Qi had the Eastern Sea at its back, Chu straddled the Yangzi and Huai, and Qin held the strongholds of Yong province. These four rose in succession, each becoming hegemon in turn, and the great domains that Kings Wen and Wu had grandly enfeoffed all submitted to their power. For this reason Confucius sought to make clear the kingly Way and visited more than seventy rulers, but none would employ him. So he went west to examine the Zhou royal archives, studied the historical records and ancient traditions, and, working from Lu, compiled the Spring and Autumn Annals, recording from Duke Yin above down to Duke Ai's capture of the unicorn below. He condensed the language, cut away redundancy, and through it established principles of meaning and method: the kingly Way complete, human affairs fully accounted for. The seventy disciples received his interpretive guidance orally, for the text contained criticisms, praises, concealments, and suppressions that could not be expressed in writing. The gentleman of Lu, Zuo Qiuming, feared that each disciple would follow his own interpretation, each settling on his own meaning and losing the truth. So he drew on Confucius's historical records and set out the commentary in full, producing the Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn. Duo Jiao served as tutor to King Wei of Chu. Because the king could not read through the entire Spring and Autumn Annals, Duo selected cases of success and failure, making forty chapters as the Duo's Subtleties. In the time of King Xiaocheng of Zhao, his chancellor Yu Qing drew on the Spring and Autumn above and observed recent trends below, producing eight chapters as Yu's Spring and Autumn. Lu Buwei, chancellor to King Zhuangxiang of Qin, likewise looked up to high antiquity, selected and gathered from the Spring and Autumn tradition, and compiled the affairs of the Six States period into the Eight Surveys, Six Discussions, and Twelve Annals, as the Spring and Autumn of Master Lu. As for scholars like Xunzi, Mencius, Gongsun Gu, and Han Feizi, each frequently gleaned from the Spring and Autumn texts in writing their own works — too many to count. The Han chancellor Zhang Cang compiled chronological tables of the Five Powers cycle, and the Senior Grand Master Dong Zhongshu expounded the meaning of the Spring and Autumn, producing notable writings.

The Grand Historian says: The Confucians interpret the moral principles; the traveling persuaders display their rhetoric, but neither bothers to trace events from beginning to end. The calendar specialists extract the year and month; the numerologists elaborate on the divine cycles; the genealogists record only generational names and posthumous titles — their language is sparse, and to survey the essentials at a glance is difficult. I have therefore compiled a table of the Twelve Feudal Lords from the Gonghe Regency down to Confucius, displaying the main themes of rise and decline that scholars of the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Discourses of the States have criticized and analyzed, setting them forth in this chapter as an essential digest for those who study and work with the ancient texts.