Reading assignment: The Spring and Autumn Annals, Sima Qian and Our View of Early China
The Spring and Autumn Annals is one of the strangest books in the Chinese tradition, because it was clearly composed without the slightest intent of being important. Unlike the Yi jing, which it resembles in important ways, the composers of the Annals did not anticipate that their text would be interpreted as bearing any type of wisdom - secret or otherwise. Their text is essentially a bureaucratic log book, written for the files. Yet it came to be regarded by many as the most esoteric of all wisdom books, and that transformation will be the subject of the greater part of Thursday's class.
One person who regarded the Annals in this way was Dong Zhong-shu, and it may well be that he passed along to his student, Sima Qian, the interpretive keys to unlock the secrets of the text - the secrets of history itself. After we examine the nature of the Annals, we will turn, as a closing theme for this course, to Sima Qian himself, and the relation between the historian, his understanding of the goals of history writing, and the account of the past provided by his great work, the Shi-ji, or "Records of the Historian." Alongside Sima Qian's view of the role of the historian, we'll consider the impact of the anguished state in which he completed his book, which he recounted in a poignant letter to his friend Ren An. In that letter, which completes your online readings, Sima Qian explains to his friend, a man facing certain death at Wu-di's hands, how he, Sima Qian, endured the even greater anguish that Wu-di's punishment inflicted on him, out of a devotion to the mission of the historian.