Research On Dong Zhongshu's Govern Theory

Dong Zhongshu reconstructed the Confucian theory through the path of the comic evolution."Nature Theory"includes two fundamental laws, periodicity and antagonism. Dong also presented a set of thinking pattern to understand the order of changing things. The pattern deals with the interaction between the nature and human and applies the nature law into ethic and political fields."Human is the cosmic mirror"and"the influence among homogeneous things"support his theory. Dong setup a cosmic knowledge system, which merges the knowledge of the influence into a metaphysics system embodying the vale of the Confucian theory, to serve moral and political govern. It enabled the Confucian empiricism to upgrade to the ethic center. On the base of uniting the value and the nature knowledge, Dong Zhongshu made principals of the Confucianism easily understandable to people. It does the result of leading the nature into the humanism.Governors needed the"doctrine"to enforce the legitimacy of their political authority and the stability of the reign. Confucians also wanted to establish their idealistic culture orthodox, and to promote the Confucian theory to national will. Thus, by deterring imperial power using religious authority and suppressing"tendency"using the nature's doctrine, Dong constructed this set of culture and order system. In the system, the doctrine was sublimed to a position as important as the nature, and the legitimacy of"tendency"was safeguarded and sustained respectively by religious authority and govern theory. At the same time,"tendency"was absorbed into the nature.Dong's"letting nature take its own course"thinking contains two layers of meanings, ethic politician and promising servants of emperor. They were inherited and used for reference from the original Confucius and Tao's thinking. To be an ethic example and to discard some prejudgments was more demanding to the emperor's self-cultivation. Moreover, it is needed to maintain the running of the country other than a single emperor. All of these were Dong's practical reconstruction to Confucian.To establish a culture order he presented"doctrine"to suppress"tendency". It was necessary to integrate a whole of bureaucracy with its emperor. For this reason, he put emphasis on Confucian culturing and cultivated person with ability to populate the culturing in cycle. To ensure the predominant position in the bureaucracy, he pointed out long-term cultivation and short-term recommendation to group elites by adopting Confucian criteria. Dong thought that people of his time were drove by infinite desire which lead the society into chaos. The basic way was to set up a new social order, a new ethic order, to control this crisis. The cultivation leaded people to the achieve ethic goal while the new social order constrained people's indulgence. This kind of parallel govern designed to construct an idealistic rule of morals in society is just the kernel of Dong's governance thinking.