Dong Zhongshu, a “Confucian” Heritage and the Chunqiu fanlu by Michael Loewe (review)

As productive as he is learned, the modern era’s preeminent expert in the Han dynasty has published yet another book, to the sure acclaim of other scholars in the field. At a time in life when he could quite justifiably rest on his laurels, Michael Loewe has reached back to a set of questions that has engaged him throughout his career, and here offers his mature, considered thoughts on Han Confucianism and the important, enigmatic figure of Dong Zhongshu. The basic questions are: Did the Han Confucian synthesis exist? If so, what was Dong’s role in it? If not, why is Dong so widely credited with having created it? And why has so problematical a text as the Chunqiu fanlu been accorded such a key role in Han intellectual history?

Loewe begins his exploration of these questions by citing a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century sinologists who described Dong Zhongshu as the architect of a Han Confucian synthesis. The effect is devastating; clearly over the course of several decades, this view had become a kind of conventional wisdom that was accepted and uncritically repeated by scholar after scholar with little reflection. This consensus depended on an acceptance of the Chunqiu fanlu as a unitary text, ignoring the doubts expressed by some traditional Chinese scholars from the Song dynasty onward. Only a handful of modern scholars dissented from the conventional view of Dong’s role, the most outspoken of whom have been (in addition to Loewe himself) Gary Arbuckle and Michael Nylan. Also prominent in the background to Loewe’s approach is the work of Sarah Queen (From Chronicle to Canon [Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996]). As Loewe puts it, “All scholars are indebted” to her “full-scale and highly important study,” and although he finds himself “differing in some fundamental ways with the assumptions in her book,” he is “in agreement with many of her conclusions” (p. 15).

Following this introductory excursus, Loewe briefly reviews the main themes of Western Han intellectual life to provide a context for an evaluation of Dong’s own role. Surely, one might suppose, the architect of a syncretic Confucian doctrine that provided the basic ideological platform for one Chinese dynasty after another across the centuries must have been both an intellectual giant and a highly placed official with the power to win or even compel acceptance for his views. Chapter 2, “Dong Zhongshu’s Life and Reputation,” shows clearly, however, that such was not the case. Dong was a respected scholar and an expert on the Spring and Autumn as seen through the lens of the “Gongyang Commentary,” but he never rose above the upper-middle ranks of the imperial bureaucracy, and he had no particular influence at the courts of the emperors whom he served. As Loewe shows in this chapter, contemporary accounts of Dong’s life and career yield no evidence that he had either the intellectual breadth or the political clout to devise and impose a major reformulation of imperial ideology.

This biographical chapter is, of course, based primarily on the accounts in the Shiji and the Hanshu, supplemented by other sources—Loewe has been meticulous in tracking down everything that can be learned about Dong’s life and career. The Shiji and Hanshu biographies are extensively paraphrased in these pages. This gives a good enough account of their content, but the author’s decision to present these sources in paraphrase rather than translation strikes me as odd. A translation would have been authoritative and quotable, whereas the paraphrase is limited in its utility to the didactic purposes of this chapter alone. That aside, Loewe portrays Dong for what he was—a dedicated teacher and scholar with a modest and not terribly influential official career.

Chapter 3 deals with writings (not all of which have survived) attributed in Han sources to Dong...