This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Dong Zhongshu's Chunqiu Fanlu, the Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals, reads Confucius's own chronicle of the state of Lu as encoding a hidden system of correspondence between Heaven, the ruler and the natural order, a documented interpretive method distinct from reading the Spring and Autumn Annals as a plain historical record with no coded content beneath its surface. That reading treated Confucius's terse chronicle entries as deliberately loaded signals rather than bare notices of fact, a documented hermeneutic distinct from scholarship that took the text at face value.
Dong Zhongshu held that human nature carries the potential for goodness but is not goodness already achieved, a documented account of moral potential distinct from a nature born already complete and needing nothing further. He taught that this potential requires the ruler's own moral instruction to be brought to completion, a documented dependence distinct from a nature perfected by each person's private effort alone, without any ruler's teaching role in the process.
That the same scholar who read Heaven as answering a ruler's misgovernment with cosmic portents also held that ordinary human goodness itself stays incomplete until a ruler's own instruction brings it to completion, marks Dong Zhongshu's theology as a documented case where his cosmology and his account of human nature both run the same current from the top of the political order downward.