Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals

The Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chinese: 春秋繁露; pinyin: Chūnqiū Fánlù; Wade–Giles: Ch'unch'iu Fanlou) 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" (元), which became important to later Neo-Confucianism.

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 (1034). 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.

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