Dong Zhongshu (; 179–104 BC) was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and writer of the Han dynasty. He is traditionally associated with the promotion of Confucianism as the official ideology of the Chinese imperial state, favoring heaven worship over the tradition of cults celebrating the five elements. Enjoying great influence in the court in the last decades of his life, his adversary

Gongsun Hong ultimately

promoted his partial retirement from political life by banishing him to the Chancellery of Weifang, but his teachings were transmitted from there.

Bibliography

thumb|Temple in honor of Dong Zhongshu in [[Yangzhou]]

There are two works that are attributed to Dong Zhongshu, one of which is the Ju Xianliang Duice in three chapters, preserved under the Book of Han. The most significant text attributed to him is the Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals, which is a commentary on the canonical Confucian text Spring and Summer Annals. The Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals bears many marks of multiple authorship. Whether the work was written by Dong himself has been called into question by several scholars including Zhu Xi, Cheng Yanzuo, Dai Junren, Keimatsu Mitsuo, and Tanaka Masami.

Scholars now reject as later additions all the passages that discuss five elements theory, and much of the rest of the work is questionable as well. It seems safest to regard it as a collection of unrelated or loosely related chapters and shorter works, which could be subdivided into five categories. Most are more or less connected to the Gongyang Commentary and its school and written by a number of different persons at different times throughout the Han dynasty.

Other important sources for Dong Zhongshu's life and thought include his fu The Scholar's Frustration, his biography included in the Book of Han, his Yin Yang and stimulus-response theorizing noted at various places in the Book of Han "Treatise on the Five Elements," and the fragments of his legal discussions. Dong Zhongshu's theory of 'original qi' (yuanqi or ), the five elements and on the development of history, were later adopted and modified by the late Qing reformer Kang Youwei in order to justify his theories of progress via political reform. It has been questioned, however, how correctly Kang Youwei understood Dong Zhongshu's thought.

References

Citations

Works cited

  • Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (ed.) (1999) Sources of Chinese Tradition (2nd edition), Columbia University Press, 292–310.
  • David W. Pankenier (1990). "The Scholar's Frustration" Reconsidered: Melancholia or Credo?, Journal of the American Oriental Society 110(3):434-59.
  • Arbuckle, G. (1995). Inevitable treason: Dong Zhongshu's theory of historical cycles and the devalidation of the Han mandate, Journal of the American Oriental Society 115(4).
  • Sarah A. Queen (1996). From Chronicle to Canon: The Hermeneutics of the Spring and Autumn Annals according to Tung Chung-shu, Cambridge University Press.