This book is, as the author says in her introduction, “a systematic study of Zuo zhuan,” a “vast repertory of narratives and speeches spanning the 255 years from 722 to 468 BCE.” This text, which, in the form known to us, is tentatively dated by most to the fourth century b.c.e., is where Chinese historical writing begins. As the author also notes, this work “has been accorded a truth status that eludes many other early Chinese texts.” I would suggest that this status arises from 1) the great masses of minute and seemingly factual detail that occur throughout its narratives and 2) its freedom from the obvious anachronisms and absurdities that afflict all other early Chinese historical works, including the all-but-universally venerated Shi ji, or Records of the Historian.
This is an admirably detailed and level-headed study that disposes of many commonly held but unsustainable ideas concerning the nature of the text, and includes the opinions and reactions of a wide range of Chinese Zuo zhuan readers throughout China's two-thousand-year imperial era.
I shall here enumerate a few of the “received ideas” concerning Zuo zhuan that are disposed of in this book. Zuo zhuan is commonly said to be written from a “Confucian” or at least “traditionalist” point of view. But instead, what we have here is “an astounding mix of cynical practicality and idealistic moral rhetoric, views that look to the past and earlier texts for guidance versus voices that urge changes and laud expediency, arguments for and against greater power for the ruler or the noble lineages, militaristic and strategic interests versus moralized and ritualized perspectives on warfare.” As the author observes, the non-Confucian aspects of Zuo zhuan did not go entirely unnoticed by later Chinese readers; she appositely quotes a late second- to early third-century figure who wrote that Zuo zhuan is “truly a book about mutual hacking.”
It has been supposed by many that Zuo zhuan originally consisted of a continuous narrative, or a collection of such narratives, that was later cut up to fit the format of a year-by-year series of commentaries on the Chunqiu Annals. Particularly well known is the hypothesis of Maspero that Zuo zhuan derived from a “historical romance focussed on the state of Jin.” The author in fact lists (on p. 37) ten different attempts made in traditional and modern times to put Zuo zhuan's narratives back into some presumed original form. But these attempts are not satisfactory. The rearranged narratives “are themselves full of discontinuities and lacunae, strongly reminiscent of a prior chronological frame.”
In pages 52–58, the author examines the hypothesis, which has enjoyed some popularity, that Wu Qi 吳起 (449–381 b.c.e.) was a major shaper of the text. After examining in detail all the points adduced by different figures in support of this hypothesis, she points out that none of these points constitutes proof: “indeed, we have indirect inference, hypothetical conjecture, and purely circumstantial ‘evidence’ at every turn” (p. 57). She concludes that, while the specific hypothesis is unlikely, the kinds of positions “associated with Wu Qi or people of his ilk” might account for “some of the viewpoints articulated in Zuo zhuan.”
Later commentators whose observations are quoted or referred to include, but are not limited to, Dan Zhu 啖助 (Tang; p. 49), Gu Donggao 顧棟高 (Qing; pp. 68–69), Lü Zuqian 呂祖謙 (Song; p. 75), Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (Tang; p. 187), Wang Guowei 王國維 (Republican period; p. 277), and He Xiu 何休 (Han; pp. 414–15).
Among the topics discussed in detail in this book are Zuo zhuan's portrayal of the career of Zheng Zhuanggong 鄭莊公 (pp. 59–82), the various roles played by music in Zuo zhuan narratives (pp. 118–47) the judgments of sung odes, character, and destiny made by Prince Jizha 季札 of Wu 吳 (pp. 136–47), the various conceptual significances of women (pp. 147–60), the narrative use of Yi jing divination (pp. 209–33), the use of dreams as a basis for prognostication (pp. 233–48), the narrative of the exile and subsequent installation of Prince Chong'er 公子重耳 as ruler of Jin (pp. 274–75), the distinctive nature of the stories pertaining to the large southern state of Chu (pp. 298–320), and the narrative use of references to the legendary past (pp. 371–97).
One also encounters in this book many excellently seen and perfectly phrased summations of principles inherent in this text such as “The assumption that clues to a human situation can be interpreted and thereby facilitate efficacious action underlies many narratives in Zuo zhuan” (p. 173), and “Indignities, compromises, and deception, endemic to the creation of a new order, have to be suppressed in the ritual celebration of this order” (p. 275).
In short this book discusses a wide range of core issues in this text with great thoroughness, acute intelligence, and a fine grasp of the Chinese commentorial tradition. It does not mislead, and may provide considerable help to anyone wishing to understand Zuo zhuan.
