A Chronicle That Became a Classic

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.