The Bhagavad Gita is a short work, one that can be read in an hour or two but which repays many rereadings. I think you will agree with me that it is a work of almost hair-raising power and magnificence. This is a view that has been shared by many people in the West. The Gita was one of the first works of Indian classical literature to be translated into English when the British East нndia Company Consolidated its colonial control of нndia. Emerson [69] admired the Gita; Thoreau [80] had a copy with him at Walden Pond and read it with enthusiasm. Perhaps the most famous Western quotation of the Bhagavad Gita was also the most apt: When Robert Oppenheimer observed the Trinity Test, the workTs first explosion of an atomic device, he quoted the divine Krishna: "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."
There are many English translations of the Bhagavad Gita; the version by the late Barbara Stoler Miller is, in my view, far superior to most others.
J.S.M.
18
SSU-MA CH1EN
145-86 B.C.E.
Records of the Grand Historian
In early China, beginning well before the time of Confucius [4], royal governments included officials known by a title that we translate into English as Grand Historian. This officiaTs duties involved not only preserving offнcial documents and keeping a chronicle of the kings acts, but also responsibility for observing, interpreting, and recording portents and omens, everything from flocks of birds behaving strangely to a comet in the sky. Any of these could be warnings that Heaven was displeased with the rulers stewardship of his realm. The posi- tion required special skills ranging from record-keeping to astrology, and so the office of Grand Historian was often handed down from father to son. In the second century B.c.E. two Grand Historians, Ssu-ma Tan [Sima Tan] and his more famous son Ssu-ma Ch^en [Sima Qian], compiled a work that is one of the greatest histories every written.
China was unified in 221 B.c.E. by the famous First Emperor, Cfrin Shih-Huang-Ti [Qin Shihuangdi], whose tomb guarded by thousands of terra-cotta soldiers is one of the won- ders of the ancient world. In an effort to suppress seditious independent thinking and to bring ali knowledge under his own control, the emperor tried with some success to burn ali privately owned books. When the imperial library was also burned in the rebellion that soon ended the emperors repres- sive regime, China was in danger of losing its literary heritage. Under the succeeding Han Dynasty, teams of scholars were put to work to reconstruct the lost books from memory. As part of the same impulse to recover the past, Grand Historian Ssu-ma Tan was given the task of compiling a complete and systematic history of the world (i.e. China and its environs) from the beginning of time. Upon his death in 110 B.c.E., his son inherited both his office and the principal authorship of the great work that the father had begun, the Shih chi [Shiji]— a title that can be translated either as The Historical Records or Records of the Grand Historian.
The Shih chi is a massive work of 130 substantial chapters; it has never been translated in its entirety into a Western lan- guage. It consists of twelve chapters of narrative history, from the (mythical) Yellow Emperor, founder of Chinese civilization,
up to the second century b.c.e.; ten chapters of dynastic tables and genealogies; eight treatises on such subjects as ritual, music, calendrical astronomy, water resources, and the agricultural economy; thirty chapters on the great royal and aristocratic fam- ilies of the Chou era and the Warring States Period prior to the unification of China; and seventy chapters of biographies (some individual, some collective) of prominent people of ali walks of life, from statesmen and generais to bandits and court jesters.
In its sheer scope the Shih chi is a remarkable work. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is how interesting, even entertain- ing, it is to read today. This is in part because Ssu-ma Ch^en was a superb prose stylist in Classical Chinese (which has encour- aged the literary efforts of his translators), and in part because his attitude toward the writing of history still strikes us as so modern. With Thucydides [9], he was one of the fathers of sci- entific history; he was careful to use only those earlier chronicles and historical documents that he thought were demonstrably accurate. He searched for old archives in the former capitais of defunct warring states; for recent history, he had access to, and quoted frequently from, documents in the Han imperial library.
His efforts to record the past conscientiously have stood the test of time. At the beginning of the twentieth century certain scholars applying modern Western criticai methods proclaimed their "discovery" that the kings of the ancient Shang Dynasty (ca. 1500-1050 b.c.e.) named by Ssu-ma Cfrien had never existed at ali. Within a few years, however, archaeological exca- vations vindicated the ancient historian; the evidence showed that his genealogy of the Shang kings was entirely correct. It is quite amazing that Ssu-ma Ch^en could have written about rulers a thousand years before his own time with such accuracy.
The Shih chi was completed under circumstances of heroic moral fortitude. Ssu-ma Cfrien^ monarch, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, was one of Chinas greatest emperors, vigorous, far-sighted, and martial; he vastly extended the territory under Chinese rule. He was also a tyrant who reacted ferociously to any suggestion of disloyalty, as Ssu-ma Ch'ien learned to his sorrow. A
certain general was punished for suffering a disastrous defeat on the northern frontier; Ssu-ma Ch'ien spoke up in the generaPs defense. For this temerity, he was condemned to be castrated. The expected outcome of this sentence was that he would com- mit suicide to spare himself a humiliating fate, but in a moving letter to a friend, he explained that he was willing to live on as a eunuch in order to bring his great work to completion. History is in his debt, not only for his own work, but because the Shih chi became the model for twenty-four subsequent official dynastic histories—each new dynasty considered it a sacred duty to write a history of its predecessor; so even did the Republic of China, which overthrew the monarchy in 1911. This continuous historical record from the second century b.c.e. to the twentieth century is unmatched by any other culture in the world.
For the modern reader, Burton Watson's Records of the Grand Historian of China is overwhelmingly the best translation of the Shih chi. I recommend that you read, in Volume I of Watson's translation, Shih chi chapters 6 ("Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Chm"), 68 ("Biography of Lord Shang"), and 87 ("Biography of Li Ssu"); and in Volume II, chapters 30 ("Treatise on the Balanced Standard" [i.e., money and taxation]), 110 ("Account of the Hsiung-nu"), 118 ("Biographies of the Kings of Huai-nan and Heng-shan"), 121 ("Biographies of the Confucian Scholars"), 124 ("Biographies of the Wandering Knights"), and 129 ("Biographies of the Money-makers>>). I think that once you start you will want to read this book from cover to cover.