The Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals is one of the works attributed to Dong Zhongshu that has survived to the present, though its compilation might have continued past his lifetime into the 4th century. It is 82 chapters long and about 72,000 words, although three of the chapters within the present text have been lost, and there is considerable textual confusion in other chapters. In its current form, the book deals with topics such as the five elements and their relation to politics. One of the chapters in this book presents the concept of the "source", which became important to later Neo-Confucianism.
Authorships
The work cannot be considered an authentic work by Dong or even a work mostly written by him. It bears many marks of multiple authorship and is both externally contradictory with other material on Dong's thought, and inconsistent with itself. Different chapters espouse mutually contradictory cosmological schemas, and there even seem to be references to the rise of Wang Mang, which did not happen until a century after the death of Dong. The title Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals is not listed in the Book of Han, and there are no references whatsoever to any book of that name before 4th century mentioned by Ge Hong, 500 years after Dong's death. Whether the work was written by Dong himself has been called into question since the Song dynasty. For the first time the doubt is pronounced in the Chongwen Zongmu :zh:崇文總目. The skeptical position was argumented by scholars including Zhu Xi, Cheng Yanzuo, Dai Junren, Keimatsu Mitsuo, and Tanaka Masami. Scholars now reject as later additions all of 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, written by a number of different persons at different times throughout the Han Dynasty. Indeed, it may be nothing more than the mislabeled remains of a book listed in the Book of Han, the 82-chapter Miscellaneous Records of the Gongyang School. Nevertheless, the Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals should not be cast aside, especially since it seems to be a misattribution rather than an outright forgery. It remains a valuable compendium of early and mid-Han Confucian thought, if properly interpreted and contextualized, and it had an influence on later thinkers.
Content and structure
Several subdivisions have been put forward in the past in an attempt to impose some sort of order on the contents of the Luxuriant Dew of the Annals. One can divide the text into seven main sections, some of which can be further divided into subsections, based on features of both content and structure. These sections are:
Section A, the Annals group, chapters 1-17, is characterized by a concentration on the meaning of Annals texts, or on more general principles extracted from the canon. Section B is the "Huang-Lao" or "Daoist" group. This is one of the better-recognized subdivisions in the text. It is composed of the chapter titles from 18 to 22 and the chapter texts from 19 to 22.. One can underestimate the amount of Confucian thought in these essays, some of it displayed in a very subtle manner, but on the whole the spirit is Huang-lao and the canon and Confucian norms are taken lightly here. Section C concerns political and ethical theory, and once again the chapters can be subdivided into three smaller groupings: Section D, from 38, "Reply on the Five Forces" to 57, "Things of the same kind stimulate each other," discuss the stimulus-response relationship between Heaven and man. Most chapters in the group make extensive use of Yin-Yang and Five Forces concepts, separately or in combination. There is little evident order in the sequence they are presented, and three of the chapters are missing. Section E, which runs from Chapter 58, "The mutual production of the Five Forces," to 64, "The Five Forces and the Five Affairs," also discusses stimulus-response cosmology. However, the overwhelming influence in these chapters is from Five Forces theory: the words "Five Forces" appear in each of the chapter titles, and Yin-Yang is in a very subordinate position when used at all. As Tanaka Masami and Sarah Queen have pointed out, many close parallels to the Huang-lao Daoist work Huai nanzi can be found here. Section F, the twelve chapters from 65, "A discourse on the suburban sacrifice," to 76, "The significance of sacrifices," discusses sacrificial services. Most of the first half of this section is devoted to discussion of the suburban sacrifice, but the texts are in bad shape and the damage seems to be very early. Other topics covered include the four seasonal sacrifices and the starting and stopping of rain. There is also Chapter 73, the "Praise-ode to mountains and rivers," which can be confidently dated to the last few decades of Former Han at the latest. Section G is a mixed bag of sometimes rather dull political texts and documents from the yangsheng "nourishing life" school. Only two of the chapters, 79, "The birthplace of severity and moral power," and 80, "Like the doings of Heaven," have proper titles. Chapters 77, "Following the Way of Heaven," 78, "The actions of Heaven and earth," 81, "Heaven, earth, Yin, and Yang," and 82, "The Way of Heaven acts," all lack their own titles and pass under the first few characters of their text. The "Chapter 18" text, minus its title, also belongs in this group. The chapters in Section G fall into two groups:
