The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study PDF
Preview The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study
Tke Annals of Lii Buwei 呂氏春秋 I^[e, therefore, wrote his prolegomena, And, being full of the caprice, inscribed Commingled souvenirs and prophecies. He made a singular collation. W a lla ce S tev en s The Comedian as the Letter C Tke Annals of L ii B uw ei 呂氏春秋 A COMPLETE TRANSLATION AND STUDY BY Jokn KnoLlock and Jeffrey Riegel Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2000 Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Lcland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lii shih ch5un ch5iu. Chinese and English. The annals of Lu Buwci / translated, annotated, and with an introduction by John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel, p. cm. Chinese and English. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8047-3354-6 (alk. paper) I. Lii, Pu-wei, d. 235 B.c. II. Knoblock, John. III. Riegel, Jeffrey. IV. Title. PL2663.L8 E5 2000 l8l’.II2 —dc2i 99-0 斗 22 斗 2 Designed by Sandy Drooker and Typeset by Birdtrack Press Original Printing 2000 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 This Book is Dedicated to Albert E. Dien and David Shepherd Nivison 言而不稱師謂之畔， 敎而不稱師謂之倍 • 倍畔之人，明君不內， 朝士大夫遇諸塗不與言 • —Xunzi^ aDaluew In the last century there have come to light several bronze weapons bearing the name Lii Buwei that were cast during the time he served as Chancellor of Qin. Archaeologists digging in the vicinity of Baoji in western Shaanxi unearthed some of these weapons. Others, such as the dagger-axe shown here, are of uncertain provenance but have long languished in the storerooms of famous museums. One side of the weapon’s short dagger is incised with an inscription that reads: “Manufactured in the fifth year [242 B.c.] by State Chancellor Lü Buwei who officially com missioned Chief of Diagrams Zhi and Artisan Yin.” Two other inscriptions on the reverse side of the dag gers blade (not shown here), one cast and the other incised, identify the weapon as ''Officially Commis- sioned” and the “Property of the State.” Reproduced from Sandaijijin wencun (1936) 20.28.2-29.1. Preface The Lüshi chunqiu is a work of unique importance in Chinese thought. The title literally means the “Spring and Autumn of Mr. Lü.” “Spring and Autumn55 derives from the name of the chronicle of the state of Lu that Confucius was generally thought to have written or compiled to express his judgments of history. The term really meant the activities of the year, and works with the tide "'Spring and Autumn55 were Annals. The Lüshi chunqiu was written under the direction of Lii Buwei, who began life as a merchant and became regent of Qin during the minority of the First Emperor. He envisaged the work as a philosophical manual for the universal rule of the coming dynasty. The work was intended to comprehend every aspect of philosophical thought that bore on the task of government, on the education and role of the ruler, and on the values that the government should practice and teach. He thus sought to show rulers how to govern well, knights and ministers how to act nobly and serve honorably, and everyone how to real ize the endowment that Heaven had given them. Lii represented his work as a new philosophical path, the Dao of Zhuanxu, an ancient god euhemer- izcd, by the third century b.c., into an ancient ruler. Lii was evidentiy proud of his achievement. A probably apocryphal story claims that he offered a thousand measures of gold to anyone who could add even a single word to it. Lii understood that the universe sets absolute conditions within which we must operate and that society and individuals can flourish only when they conform to the pattern of Heaven and Earth. In conceiving the Lüshi chunqiu^ he sought guidance from everyone and everything that had some thing to offer. But he did not promiscuously accept whatever was offered. [vii] viii PREFACE Rather he accepted only those things that would help him meet the test he had set for himself: to write a philosophy for a universal state and society recognized as just and right by everyone. He endeavored to ground his ideas in the most difficult and abstruse speculations—cthe teaching that does not instruct,/the lesson without words’’一 so that， like the ancient lords of the Dao, he might grasp the true nature of fate. While his work is often characterized as an ""encyclopedia55 that collects, and thus preserves, the thought of earlier philosophers, many of whom are otherwise unknown, a close study of the work demonstrates that from begin ning to end there is a unity of conception. The disorganization of the text, which has been wrongly interpreted as evidence of its syncretism， is the result of its incompleteness. Lii finished only the ^Almanacs55 section to which he wrote the Postface. The remainder of the work was hurriedly assembled during his exile, and its writing ended altogether with his suicide and the subsequent dispersal of his retainers. From the fragment that survives, however, the original design can be discerned and the richness of its philo- sophical thought amply demonstrates that the belongs in the first rank of classical Chinese philosophy. In the introductory chapters we provide a biography of Lii Buwei and a summary of the major features of the text. We aim here to provide a complete translation in a convenient form that will serve the needs of the general reader while providing the scholar with the information necessary to understand the decisions we have made in translating the text. The ritual calendar, which is presupposed in the^4/- manacs^ is described in Appendix C. To assist the reader in dealing with the many people mentioned in the text, we have provided a glossary that identi fies every individual and have supplied additional notes that provide detailed information on certain passages, where this seemed advisable. We have also translated the portion of Gao You5s Preface that describes his work on the text and the fragments of the Lüshi chunqiu that Jiang Wciqiao collected in the final section of his Liishi chunqiu huijiao. As navigational tools for the further study of the text, a list intended to aid the reader in locating indi vidual chapters and an appendix on textual parallels are included. While we reject the idea that the Lüshi chunqiu is a syncretic text compiled largely or entirely from preexisting texts belonging to identifiable pre-Qin schcx>ls, we have outlined the views of Chen Qiyou regarding the schools with which individual chapters are affiliated so that the reader can form an independent judgment. PREFACE ix In order to minimize the annotations, we provide a complete Chinese text of the original with annotations on the readings that we follow. The Chinese text is based on the critical edition of Chen Qiyou, who not only studied the work of virtually all previous scholars but contributed many original insights. We have generally adopted his text, but in every case of emendation we indicate the authority we have followed, and the exact refer ence can always be found in the notes in Chen5s edition. We have therefore not repeated Chen’s argument, on the assumption that scholars who wish to pursue the matter will naturally prefer to consult the original. The editorial conventions for textual emendation are adapted from those used by John Knoblock in his Xunzi volumes and are summarized in the list of abbrevi ations on p. xxi. We encourage readers interested in locating technical terms and other items in the text to avail themselves of the electronic database compiled by the AcadermaSinic^ in Taiwan (http://www.sinic^.edu.tw/fbiis-bin/f^ At the Academia Sinica site, readers can search the entire text of the Chen Qiyou edition of the Lüshi chunqiu we have adopted as the base text for our translation. Since we use Chen Qiyou5s book, chapter, and paragraph divi sions, search results can easily be identified with passages in our translation. Translating a work the size of the Lüshi chunqiu—some 120,000 charac- ters， twice the size of the X«似之 four times that of the ATwa•财 ， and ten times that of the Lunyu—posed a difficult challenge. Without the help and guidance of friends, colleagues, and librarians, this study could never have been undertaken, much less completed. Our basic research was carried out at the East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley, and we arc grateful to the library staff for their unfailing assistance. Much of the final production of the manuscript was done at the Dwindle Computer Research Facility of the University of California, Berkeley, and we are grateful to the director and technical staff for the use of their equipment and for providing us with technical assistance. Our research assistants—Xie Zaixin 謝在欣， Yan Luguan 嚴路觀， Daniel Garcia， and Imre Galambos—helped in the gathering of the secondary materials, the preparation of the Chinese text, and the compilation of the Bibliography. Other students who generously helped in the preparation of the manuscript are Attilio Andrcini of the University of Venice and Eric Critser of the University of California, Berkeley. Wc arc extremely grateful to Professor Francesca Bray of the University of California, Santa Barbara, for her valuable suggestions on the correct ren dering of the many difficult passages in 26/5 and 26/6. To Professor Jane X PREFACE Connolly of the University of Miami we owe special thanks for having pains takingly read and corrected the draft of the manuscript. We wish to thank Professor Sarah Queen, the Stanford reader, for many perceptive comments. We are also very much indebted to Deborah Rudolph for her careful copy- editing of the entire manuscript. The University of Miami awarded John Knoblcxrk two Orovitz Summer Fellowships, a sabbatical leave, travel grants, and research support grants. Jeffrey Riegel received from the University of California, Berkeley, a sab batical leave and travel grants. The Universités Center for Chinese Studies awarded him annual research grants during the several years required to complete this project. We are grateful to both institutions for their support. J.K. & J.R. Berkeley
The list of books you might like
