Zou Yan / 邹衍

Zou Yan / 邹衍 appears in 87.过年最适合聊玄学！探讨神仙方术发展史（未完待续） as the [[WarringStatesPeriod|Warring States]] thinker used to anchor the episode’s [[YinYangFivePhasesPoliticalTheory|阴阳五行]] branch. The source presents him as a figure who helped join yin-yang reasoning, five-phase cycles, and dynastic succession into a language that later fangshu and imperial legitimacy could reuse.

The episode’s interest in Zou Yan is structural: once nature, history, and rule can be explained through cyclical correspondences, political change can look like cosmic sequence rather than only human seizure.

Key Claims

• Zou Yan is used to show that five-phase theory was not born as a fully unified system.
• The source treats yin-yang and five-phase reasoning as gradually assembled, then politically amplified.
• Five-virtue dynastic language becomes one bridge between cosmology and legitimacy.
• Later fangshu gains authority when it can borrow this wider explanatory grammar.

Connections

• 87.过年最适合聊玄学！探讨神仙方术发展史（未完待续） - source episode.
• [[WarringStatesPeriod|战国时期]] - intellectual setting.
• Yin-Yang Five-Phases Political Theory / 阴阳五行政治理论 - main source concept.
• Mandate of Heaven Legitimacy / 天命合法性 and Auspicious Omen Politics / 祥瑞政治 - political-legitimacy extensions.
• [[DongZhongshu|董仲舒]] - later Han fusion of Confucian statecraft and cosmic interpretation.
• Fangshu Systematization / 方术系统化 - later organization of older techniques and theories.