Table of the Twelve Feudal Lords, Second

The Grand Historian, reading the calendrical tables and records of the Spring and Autumn Annals, came to the reign of King Li of Zhou and never once failed to put down the book and sigh. He said: Alas, Master Zhi had already foreseen this! When King Zhou made ivory chopsticks, Ji Zi lamented over it. When the Way of the Zhou declined, the poets traced the root to matters of the bedchamber and composed "Guan Ju." As benevolence and righteousness gradually decayed, the poem "Lu Ming" satirized this. By the time of King Li, because he hated hearing of his own faults, the high ministers and officials, fearing execution, brought about chaos, and King Li fled to Zhi. The turmoil began in the capital, and so the Duke of Zhou and the Duke of Shao jointly governed. Thereafter, some feudal lords wielded military power, the strong bullied the weak, and they launched campaigns without seeking the Son of Heaven’s permission. Yet they used the royal house as a pretext, making themselves leaders of alliances under the banner of punitive expeditions. Government decrees issued from the Five Hegemons; the feudal lords ran rampant, indulging in luxury and breaking the laws; usurpers and traitors constantly seized power. Qi, Jin, Qin, and Chu were very weak at the beginning of the Zhou, their territories sometimes a hundred li, sometimes fifty li. Jin relied on the natural defenses of the Three Rivers, Qi backed onto the Eastern Sea, Chu lay between the Yangzi and Huai Rivers, and Qin depended on the fastness of Yong Province. These four states rose in turn, each becoming hegemon in its time. The great enfeoffed states that King Wen and King Wu had honored all submitted to them out of fear. Therefore, Confucius elucidated the Kingly Way and traveled to persuade over seventy lords, but none would employ him. So he went west to the Zhou royal court to investigate, examined the old records of the historiographers, and compiled the Spring and Autumn Annals based on the rise of Lu, beginning with Duke Yin of Lu and ending with the capture of the unicorn under Duke Ai. He simplified the language, removed redundancies, and thereby established principles and norms, so that the Kingly Way was complete and human affairs were fully covered. Confucius’s seventy or so disciples transmitted his intentions orally, for the text contained words of satire, criticism, praise, concealment, disparagement, and diminishment that could not be written down and circulated. The nobleman of Lu, Zuo Qiuming, feared that the disciples would each hold different views, following their own interpretations and losing the truth, so he based himself on Confucius’s historical records, fully expounded their words, and completed the Zuo’s Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals. Duo Jiao served as Grand Tutor to King Wei of Chu. Because King Wei could not finish reading the Spring and Autumn Annals, Duo Jiao selected examples of success and failure from it, ultimately compiling forty chapters called the Duo’s Digest. During the reign of King Xiaocheng of Zhao, his Prime Minister Yu Qing gathered material upward from the Spring and Autumn Annals and downward from recent events, also writing eight chapters called the Yu’s Spring and Autumn. Lü Buwei, Prime Minister to King Zhuangxiang of Qin, likewise examined upward into high antiquity, excerpted the Spring and Autumn Annals, collected the affairs of the Six States, and compiled the Eight Examinations, Six Discourses, and Twelve Annals, calling his work the Lü’s Spring and Autumn. As for men like Xun Qing, Mengzi, Gongsun Gu, and Han Fei, they too each gathered phrases from the Spring and Autumn Annals to write their books, so numerous that it is impossible to record them all. Prime Minister of Han, Zhang Cang, arranged the calendrical tables of the Five Virtues, and Grand Master Dong Zhongshu deduced the principles of the Spring and Autumn Annals, also producing considerable writings.

The Grand Historian says: Ru scholars excerpt the principles of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and persuaders deploy its rhetoric, but neither group devotes itself to comprehending the full narrative from beginning to end. Calendrists pick out its years and months, numerologists emphasize spiritual cycles, and genealogical records list only generations and posthumous titles, with their language so abbreviated that it is difficult to grasp the essential points comprehensively. Therefore, I have compiled a table of the twelve feudal lords, from the period of the Gonghe regency down to Confucius, setting forth in lists the main themes of rise and decline that the scholars of the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Discourses of the States criticize, and recording them in this chapter as an important abridgment for those who would complete their studies and delve into ancient texts.