Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu fanlu)

A collection of eighty-two chapters, three of them lost, traditionally attributed to the Han Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu (c. 179–104 BCE), who helped make Confucianism the official learning of the Han state. Since the Song dynasty scholars have doubted that he wrote most of it, and it is now usually read as a compilation from the Gongyang school of commentary built up over a long period. Its early chapters interpret the Spring and Autumn Annals, the chronicle traditionally linked with Confucius, as a coded guide to judging conduct and government. Later chapters set out a cosmology in which Heaven and humanity respond to each other through yin and yang and the five phases, so that a ruler's virtue or misrule shows in the order or disorder of nature. Others discuss human nature, which needs teaching to become good, the duties of the ruler as intermediary between Heaven and the people, rituals such as rain sacrifices, and the cultivation of life.

It is the main source for the correlative cosmology of Han Confucianism, the synthesis that governed Chinese political thought for centuries and that later Neo-Confucians reacted against.