The bibliographic treatise of the Book of Han lists Zouzi in forty-nine chapters and Zou Yan's Beginnings and Ends in fifty-six. Neither has been seen for many centuries.
Sima Qian, writing in the Records of the Grand Historian, gives the fullest account we have. Zou Yan, he says, examined small things and extended them to the great, until he reached what was beyond examination. He began from the present and worked back to the age before heaven and earth, through cycles too vast to trace to their beginning.
He held that the five powers — water, fire, wood, metal, earth — succeed one another in a fixed order, each conquering the last, and that dynasties rise and fall according to the same sequence. A ruler could therefore be told which power his house governed by, and which would end it.
Sima Qian records that the lords of his day received Zou Yan with extraordinary honour, and that his teaching was vast and beyond the ordinary. He also notes, drily, that it did not amount to anything one could put into practice.
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