Dong Zhongshu

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Dong Zhongshu (Chinese: 董仲舒; pinyin: Dŏng Zhòngshū; Wade-Giles: Tung Chung-shu; ca. 195 BCE–ca. 115 BCE) 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), probably around 195 BCE, he 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 integrated Yin Yang cosmology into a Confucian ethical framework. He emphasised 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 premodern Chinese literati (Zhu Xi, Cheng Yanzuo) and researchers in Taiwan (Dai Junren), 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 of unrelated 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 Han.

Other important sources for his life and thought include his poem "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.

[edit] References

• 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.