Dong Zhongshu’s Thought
2 min readDong Zhongshu（Wade-Giles Tung Chung-shu）（179-104 B.C.）was a Han Dynasty scholar who is traditionally associated with the promotion of Confucianism as official ideology of the Chinese imperial state.
Born in Guangchuan（in modern Hebei），he later entered the imperial service during the reign of the Emperor Jing and rose to high office under the Emperor Wu.
His relationship with the emperor was uneasy，though.At one point he was thrown into prison and nearly executed for writings that were considered seditious，and he may have cosmologically predicted the overthrow of the Han Dynasty and its replacement by a Confucian sage，the first appearance of a theme that would later sweep Wang Mang to the imperial throne.
Dong Zhongshu’s Thought
Dong Zhongshu’s thought integrated Yin Yang cosmology into a Confucian ethical framework.He emphasized the importance of the Spring and Autumn Annals as a source for both political and metaphysical ideas，following the tradition of the Gongyang Commentary in seeking hidden meanings from its text.
The only work that has survived to the present that is attributed to Dong Zhongshu is the Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals in 82 chapters.
However，it bears many marks of multiple authorship.Its authenticity has been called into question by Chinese literati（Zhu Xi，Cheng Yanzuo）and researchers in Japan（Keimatsu Mitsuo，Tanaka Masami），and the West.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 ofunrelated or loosely related chapters and shorter works，most more or less connected to the Gongyang Commentary and its school，written by a number of different persons at different times throughout the Former Han and into the first half of the Later.
