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" :zh:崇文總目 (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.