of son to Heaven.  Thus in Confucianism the cult of Heaven, the family system, and the state are welded into unity.  The frictionless functioning of this whole system is effected by everyone adhering to the rites, which prescribe every important action.  It is necessary, of course, that in a large family, in which there may be up to a hundred persons living together, there shall be a precisely established ordering of relationships between individuals if there is not to be continual friction.  Since the scholars of Confucius’s type specialized in the knowledge and conduct of ceremonies, Confucius gave ritualism a correspondingly important place both in spiritual and in practical life.

So far as we have described it above, the teaching of Confucius was a further development of the old cult of Heaven.  Through bitter experience, however, Confucius had come to realize that nothing could be done with the ruling house as it existed in his day.  So shadowy a figure 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.

Rendered alert by this experience, we are able to see and to show that most of the other later official works of history follow the example of the Annals of Spring and Autumn in containing things that have been deliberately falsified.  This is especially so in the work called T’ung-chien kang-mu, which was the source of the history of the Chinese empire translated into French by de Mailla.