An Analysis of the Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Yan

An AnalysisAn Analysis of the Spring of the and Spring Autumn and Annals Autumn Annals 423 An Analysis of the Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Yan 3.1.1 Introduction As a result of the many centuries of neglect of the Yanzi chunqiu, there has been little consideration in any language of the thought articulated in this ancient text. In the last century and a half, beginning even before the authen- ticity of this book had been placed beyond doubt by archaeological discoveries, a great deal of research has been conducted on such necessary spade-work as tracking down textual variants, solving problems of corruption and problem- atic readings, checking the wording of different transmitted versions of the same story, and establishing the differences between excavated material and the text of the Yanzi chunqiu as it has been handed down to the present day. Even when scholars have spared some time to consider the meanings of the text, their work has been hampered by problems in ascertaining whether a particular tale represents a genuine reflection of Spring and Autumn period thought, or if it dates to a later stratum of the tradition in the Warring States era. Many of the most interesting and unusual stories which have been com- piled into the Yanzi chunqiu simply cannot be dated: there is nothing in the wording which can point to their era of composition, and there are at present no excavated versions from known contexts to which they can be compared. This has led some scholars to make the decision to completely ignore the issue of the dating of individual stories: their books and articles discuss the ideas articulated within the Yanzi chunqiu without any reference to the historical figure of Yan Ying.1 Alternatively, others have gone to the opposite extreme, studying only such tales which are thought to have been written down first within a generation of Yan Ying’s death and thus may be assumed to reflect late Spring and Autumn period thought.2 The discussion and analysis given below 1 See for example Shao Xianfeng, Guanzi yu Yanzi chunqiu zhiguo sixiang bijiao yanjiu. 2 Yuri Pines has written a number of important studies of Yan Ying’s thought, though he always seems to base his research on those tales which appear in the Zuozhuan, even when an identi- cal version appears in the Yanzi chunqiu; see for example Pines, Foundations of Confucian Thought. Chinese scholars have also noted the importance of the twenty-three stories from the Yanzi chunqiu which have a parallel in the Zuozhuan as a genuine repository of Spring and Autumn period thought; see Zhou Lisheng, Wang Demin 周立升, 王德敏, Chunqiu zhexue 春秋哲學 [Philosophy in the Spring and Autumn Period] (Jinan: Shandong daxue chubanshe, 1989), 141. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309661_013 424 An Analysis Of The Spring And Autumn Annals steers between these two extremes. Rather than consider all the material in the Yanzi chunqiu, which was probably produced over at least a two hundred year timespan, this chapter will focus only on those stories that are believed to belong to the earlier part of the tradition, or which cannot be dated and hence may be extremely ancient. Tales that can be demonstrated by linguistic analysis to be significantly later additions will not be discussed here.3 Any consideration of the political thought of Master Yan must make reference to what his near contemporaries and many later scholars considered to be its most significant aspect: his stress on frugality. In pre-Qin and imperial era scholarship, many accounts of Master Yan begin and end with this single point. Numerous stories preserved within the Yanzi chunqiu make reference to both his own personal austerity, dressing in poor clothing and spending little money upon himself, and to his relentless criticisms of the rulers of Qi for their extravagance. While it is perfectly accurate to say that this is something which is repeatedly mentioned in the Yanzi chunqiu (figuring as a key theme in some twenty-eight stories), and that words such as jie 節 (frugality), jian 儉 (restraint), and so on were frequently spoken by Master Yan, it is unreasonable that this should be remembered as his most important contribution to pre-Qin thought. Master Yan was undoubtedly deeply concerned about issues of social inequality, the gulf between rich and poor, and the sufferings of those who had no means to feed their families while members of the ruling classes wasted the country’s resources upon their own pleasures, but to restrict consideration of his theories of statecraft and administration to this one issue does him a considerable disservice. Master Yan was a highly original thinker, and his revo- lutionary attitudes covered issues of both private and public morality. 3.1.2 Statecraft and Specialist Knowledge The first aspect to be addressed in this consideration of the Yanzi chunqiu is the eclecticism of the text. Yan Ying lived towards the end of the Spring and Autumn period, and hence long before the establishment of an intellectual tradition of allegiance to mutually exclusive schools of thought like Confucianism or Daoism.4 The demand that the thought of a figure like Master 3 For the purposes of this discussion, I have mostly relied upon the extensive analysis of Warring States vocabulary preserved in the Yanzi chunqiu given in Xie Xiangjuan, “Yanzi chunqiu Zhanguo zhonghouqi chengshu shuo buzheng.” 4 This point is stressed in Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Michael Nylan, “Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions through Exemplary Figures in Early China,” TP 89 (2003)..

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