Zou Yan邹衍

Style & Daoist names

Zou Yan, 'Zou Yan Who Discoursed on the Heavens' (Tan Tian Yan)

Period

Warring States (Qi)

Dates

c. 305 BCE — c. 240 BCE

School

Fangxian Dao (Way of the Fangshi and Immortality-seekers), Huang–Lao Daoism

Role

Yin-Yang SchoolScholar

Birthplace

the state of Qi (present-day Linzi, Shandong)

Life

Zou Yan, a native of Qi during the Warring States period, was a celebrated scholar at the Jixia Academy and the representative figure of the Yin-Yang School. The 'Biography of Mencius and Xun Qing' in the Records of the Grand Historian says that he deeply observed the waxing and waning of yin and yang and composed strange and far-reaching transformations, proposing the theory of the cyclical succession of the Five Powers, which explained dynastic succession through the mutual conquest of the Five Phases — earth, wood, metal, fire, and water — and provided the theoretical framework for arguments of political legitimacy in the Qin and Han. He also proposed the theory of the Great Nine Continents, holding that China (the Divine Continent of the Red Region) was but one part in eighty-one of the world, greatly expanding the geographical imagination of his time. His works, the Zouzi and the Zouzi Zhongshi, have both been lost, and his thought survives only through paraphrase in the Records of the Grand Historian, the Lüshi Chunqiu, the Huainanzi, and other books. Zou Yan himself was not a fangshi, but by integrating yin-yang and the Five Phases into a single deducible cosmological scheme, he was directly absorbed by the fangshi of Yan and Qi who sought immortality by the sea, becoming the theoretical skeleton for Fangxian Dao's pursuit of immortality, alchemy, and divination; the later Daoist concepts of the mutual generation and conquest of the Five Phases, the Five Directions and Five Emperors, and the cyclical succession of kalpas can largely be traced back to him. For this reason, histories of Daoism generally list Zou Yan as an important forerunner of Daoist thought rather than as a Daoist figure himself.

Contributions & Influence

• Created the theory of the cyclical succession of the Five Powers, explaining historical succession through the mutual conquest of the Five Phases
• Proposed the theory of the Great Nine Continents, expanding pre-Qin cosmological and geographical conceptions
• Integrated yin-yang and the Five Phases into a deducible system, becoming the theoretical source for the cosmology of Fangxian Dao and later Daoism
• Influenced the fangshi circles of the Qin and Han and the study of prognostication texts and apocrypha

Works

• Zouzi (lost)
• Zouzi Zhongshi (Zou Yan's Beginning and End, lost)

Legends

The Records of the Grand Historian records that King Zhao of Yan once carried a broom before him to welcome Zou Yan, and there is also the tale that Zou Yan blew on his pitch-pipe and millet grew in the cold valley, the latter drawn from a lost fragment of the Liezi and from citations in the Lunheng — this is legendary material.