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Life
He demanded evidence for everything, including Confucius, and found that ancient China had very little of it.
He persuaded the Han emperor to make Confucianism the law of the land, and rewrote the cosmos to prove it was always meant to be that way.
Connection
Dong Zhongshu portents denied Wang Chong — Wang Chong's Lunheng is a sustained attack on the correlative cosmology Dong Zhongshu had made orthodox, the doctrine that heaven answers human conduct with floods, eclipses and omens.
Ideas
Words
“The dead do not become ghosts, have no consciousness, and cannot harm anyone.”
“Heaven takes no purposeful action; its way is spontaneity.”
“Heaven and humankind respond to one another: when government loses the Way, Heaven answers first with warnings, then with prodigies.”
“Let all that is not within the Six Arts and the methods of Confucius be cut off, and not allowed to advance together with them.”
Key Moments
c. 50 CE
Reading the bookstalls of Luoyang
c. 80 CE
Writing the Critical Essays
c. 190 CE
A skeptic rediscovered
c. 179 BCE
Born in Guangchuan
c. 134 BCE
The three memorials to Emperor Wu
c. 124 BCE
Confucianism becomes state doctrine
Works
Critical Essays
Zouzi
Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals