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INTRODUCTION
FOR MUCH OF CHINESE HISTORY, the Former Han Gongyang (characters omitted) master Dong Zhongshu (characters omitted) (c. 195-c. 115 B.C.) has received the lion's share of the credit--or in recent ages, blame--for the supposed establishment of Confucianism as the state ideology during the reign of Emperor Wu (characters omitted). It was he, the story goes, who swept away the competing rabble and raised the teachings of the sages to their true and proper place, restoring the truth in the teeth of fierce opposition, as Mencius had done before him and others were to aspire to do after:
Before, in the Warring States, Yan Zhu and Mozi made confusion worse confounded. Mencius deplored this, and devoted himself to explaining benevolence and rightness. Thus the theories of benevolence and rightness were victorious, and the teachings of Yang Zhu and Mozi were rejected. During the Han dynasty, all the schools of thought flourished together. Master Dong deplored this, and withdrew to study the Confucian school. Thus the Way of the Confucian school became illustrious and the other schools of thought came to an end. This is what results from what I refer to as "practicing what is fundamental in order to overcome it."(1)
As the credit of traditional Confucianism declined, this acclaim turned to condemnation, sometimes for the very success in eliminating other schools which Ouyang Xiu (characters omitted) (1007-72) had praised so heavily in the quotation above, but also because of Dong's alleged role in combining the originally independent cosmological systems of the Yin and Yang and the Five Forces (characters omitted) with Warring States Confucian thought. Liang Qichao (characters omitted), for instance, assigned him a key role in the corruption of Chinese philosophy by "superstition":
Dong
Zhongshu has been acclaimed a "pure Confucian" for two millennia, but about half of his book (the Chunqiu fanlu, or Luxuriant Dew of the Annals) follows the theories of the Yin-Yang School....Zhongshu was a great master of the Confucians, and since he had this attitude, all scholars of the canon immediately conformed to the fashion...and thereupon the Six Canons, which had been both strict and pure, were trampled underfoot by the excess poison from Zou Yan, never to recover....To sum up, no more than twenty or thirty percent of...