as the Chou ruler of that time could not fulfil what Confucius required
of the "Son of Heaven". But the opinions of students of Confucius's
actual ideas differ. Some say that in the only book in which he
personally had a hand, the so-called _Annals of Spring and Autumn_, he
intended to set out his conception of the character of a true emperor;
others say that in that book he showed how he would himself have acted
as emperor, and that he was only awaiting an opportunity to make himself
emperor. He was called indeed, at a later time, the "uncrowned ruler".
In any case, the _Annals of Spring and Autumn_ seem to be simply a dry
work of annals, giving the history of his native state of Lu on the
basis of the older documents available to him. In his text, however,
Confucius made small changes by means of which he expressed criticism or
recognition; in this way he indirectly made known how in his view a
ruler should act or should not act. He did not shrink from falsifying
history, as can today be demonstrated. Thus on one occasion a ruler had
to flee from a feudal prince, which in Confucius's view was impossible
behaviour for the ruler; accordingly he wrote instead that the ruler
went on a hunting expedition. Elsewhere he tells of an eclipse of the
sun on a certain day, on which in fact there was no eclipse. By writing
of an eclipse he meant to criticize the way a ruler had acted, for the
sun symbolized the ruler, and the eclipse meant that the ruler had not
been guided by divine illumination. The demonstration that the _Annals
of Spring and Autumn_ can only be explained in this way was the
achievement some thirty-five years ago of Otto Franke, and through this
discovery Confucius's work, which the old sinologists used to describe
as a dry and inadequate book, has become of special value to us. The
book ends with the year 481 B.C., and in spite of its distortions it is
the principal source for the two-and-a-half centuries with which it
deals.