The Annals of Lu Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study (review)

In view of the mass re-dating of pre-Han texts now under way—often chapter by chapter—it is impossible to say flatly which is the most interesting and influential book written in the mid-third century. Today one can hardly deny the Lü shi chunqiu a place on the short list. For most of the last century, however, it was more an embarrassment than a resource. Despite a German translation by Richard Wilhelm in 1928 and a fine annotated critical edition by Chen Qiyou in 1984 that incorporates important earlier commentary, it went largely unstudied and little read.¹ Histories of Chinese philosophy in Western languages have tended barely to mention the book, or to concentrate on issues that betray distaste. For instance, Kung-chuan Hsiao mainly argues that the book is based on "the Pre-Ch'in egocentric philosophy of life," and that Lü designed it principally "to ridicule or criticize the First Emperor" in order to replace him on the throne—two points of interpretation that are best forgotten.² Benjamin Schwartz' The World of Thought in Ancient China (1985) consigns the book to the realm of the presumably read but hardly pondered.³

A. C. Graham's Disputers of the Tao (1989) is the first recent history of philosophy to give Lü's book an important place, and is partly responsible for the growth of interest in it. Graham unfortunately agrees with Hsiao that "its organising doctrine . . . is not Taoist but Yangist, that the throne is no more than a means to the protection and fulfillment of personal life for both ruler and subject." The inattention that this reading reflects was no doubt prompted by Graham's view that the book embodied an early stage in the "debasement" of Chinese thought, "when the excesses of correlative system-building have temporarily penetrated to the heart of philosophy" and prompted a retreat from rationality. Whatever he may have meant by rationality, Graham gives a well-informed and valuable analysis of the Annals' schemes of correlation.⁴ But his discussion does no justice to the book's formative role in Han political philosophy and social thought, and once again demonstrates the sterility of isms in analyzing its thrust.

Specialists in the period (mostly graduate students and recent Ph.D.s) have begun to study the Lü shi chunqiu with its social and political as well as intellectual circumstances in mind. They have discovered that its ideas are broad-ranging, novel, and consequential, and its anecdotes trenchant. They have learned that a good deal of what their erudite predecessors asserted was the innovation or influence of the later Huainanzi and Chunqiu fan lu would have been credited to Lü's book had these learned scholars read it.

One would expect a history of political thought such as Xiao's to recognize that the book provided a guide and a lasting ideology for a centralized, bureaucratized empire before the first one came into being. Far from a simple-minded doctrine, the ideology of the Annals secures and justifies imperial authority by strictly separating the ruler's functions from those of his officials. The monarch becomes a priestly ritualist who, by ceaseless self-cultivation, keeps the state in harmony with the order of the cosmos, and thus safe against all threats. At the same time, this doctrine limits his power by isolating him voluntarily from the management of his realm. Once the empire came into being, few rulers, in fact, devoted themselves wholeheartedly to this abstemious discipline, but it became a powerful fixture in the rhetoric of imperial public relations and in the design of court ritual.

Knoblock and Riegel's book is constructed much more tightly than Knoblock's translation of the Xunzi (1988-1994), which took up three volumes and about 1,150 pages despite the similar sizes of the two Chinese works.⁵ The new translation of the Annals...