Spring and Autumn Annals
春秋 (Chunqiu)
The bare, deliberately terse wording chosen to record an event, which words are used for a death, a meeting, or a war, silently passes moral judgment on it, so reading the chronicle correctly means reading what its laconic phrasing withholds as much as what it states.
- terse wording as encoded moral judgment
- chronicle of the State of Lu, 722-481 BC
- traditional attribution of editing to Confucius
- meaningful chiefly through its commentarial tradition
The dry, year-by-year court chronicle of the small state of Lu from 722 to 481 BC, recording deaths, wars, treaties, eclipses, and rituals in a clipped, formulaic style with almost no narrative elaboration. Tradition holds that Confucius himself edited the entries, choosing each word to encode subtle praise or blame, an interpretive practice called 'Spring and Autumn brush judgments' that later commentators, above all the Zuo Zhuan, expanded into full narrative history. On its own the text is nearly unreadable as history; its influence comes almost entirely from the exegetical tradition built to decode it.
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